The Blinding Light of Mental Illness

Longlegs, Horror, and Bipolar

In the dead heat of July, as I was emerging from a cataclysmic mental health crisis, I went to see Longlegs. Set in the 90s as an obvious homage to the great serial killer films of that decade, it tells the story of an autistic-coded FBI agent named Lee Harker who is hunting down the serial killer Longlegs.

Each anticipated horror film starts a cultural pissing contest of “Was it scary?” This always strikes me as pointless. Horror is subjective, and we all have different nightmares. Some have proclaimed Longlegs the scariest movie of the decade. Other viewers are outraged that they wasted the money to see something so boring, cringe, and pretentious.

While solidly directed and written, Longlegs isn’t the best horror movie I’ve ever seen. The dialogue is a bit silly sometimes, and it’s dwarfed by the films it pays homage to. I found myself deliberately suspending disbelief and accepting strange plot points as just part of the film’s dream logic.

Despite all this, Longlegs is my nightmare, and it scared me. I’m an old hand at horror, and Longlegs made me feel things that I had never felt before in a movie theater.

I was enjoying myself for the first half of the film. The creepy atmosphere was cozy and delicious. But something changed halfway through. I got a horrible, cold pit in my stomach. My flight response turned on and I wanted nothing more than to get out of the theater. I felt trapped, forcing myself to watch something that had no shred of pleasure or delight.

I left the movie theater stunned. I felt like I had encountered something truly evil and horrific, that I had watched something forbidden that no one should be allowed to see. I haven’t been this upset by a film since Requiem for a Dream or Schindler's List.

Whenever a horror movie gets its hooks in me, I think back to what Stephen King wrote in the introduction to the 2001 edition of The Shining:

I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives... the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance, it seems to me, and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families. To look directly at such brilliance is to be blinded, and so we create any number of filters. The ghost story, the horror story, the uncanny tale – all of these are such filters.

I have my own every-day fears. Bipolar II is the demon that lurks under the bed in my brain. Longlegs gave me a filter to look the blinding light of mental illness in the face. What follows is not a film review, but rather a disjointed reflection on how Longlegs helped me process certain realities of mental illness.

The rest of this article contains spoilers for Longlegs. If you care about that, stop reading now. This article also contains video clips that might be disturbing for some readers.

“It’s like a long dream, and so dark.”

The point at which the film started to turn from pleasant spooky vibes into my own personal nightmare was when Lee Harker and her partner visited Carrie Anne, a survivor of one of Longleg’s massacred families. Harker asks her if she remembers anything of her coma. She responds:

“It’s like a long dream, and so dark. A world of dark. Like a nowhere between here and there.”

This describes the experience of the film. It is a lonely, sparse, timeless, liminal dreamscape. But this quote also illustrates the nightmare of my mental collapse over the summer.

I fell into a liminal rift where time stopped and I became a ghost. I drifted through my small town as a weeping specter. The world carried on, but I was trapped in a timeless chrysalis of pain. One day, I wandered into a local hardware store and bought a stuffed tiger, because I needed something to hug. I mumbled to the rough country woman behind the counter that it was for my niece, but I suspect she knew it was for me. I — a large, bearded, physically fit, 35 year old man was reduced to buying stuffed animals for myself. I brought my stuffed tiger with me everywhere I went, like a gigantic, distraught, bearded toddler.

 I hiked the mountain trails, driven by a cold, strange fire, weeping as I did. My fellow hikers, understanding that forests are a temple of solitude for the suffering, did not disrupt my tears.

On occasion, I became the recipient of unexpected kindness. A sweet, motherly trans woman at Starbucks saw that I was suffering and gave me free food. I don’t know her name, but I’m absurdly grateful to her for seeing my suffering and showing me a bit of kindness.

Like any dream, I have begun to forget the details. I remember knowing that I was tormented by feelings so rare and horrific that they felt like alien beings. I remember thinking that I could not stand another minute of the nightmare — that I didn’t think I could go on. I remember how the mundane world of ordinary time, regular routines, and simple pleasures seemed like another planet, unreachable to me. I just remember the pain in a second-hand way, now, as if it were told to me by someone who saw the whole ordeal first-hand, but can’t communicate the hellish quality of the suffering.

“I don’t ever want to forget him,” the girl says. She was referring to Longlegs, who paid her a visit after she woke up in the hospital. But I don’t want to forget either. I don’t want to forget the torment. It seems precious to me – too important and meaningful to not forget, though I don’t know why. Longlegs, with its liminal ambiance and unspeakable horror, is a way for me to remember something of the nightmare. Maybe then I can incorporate it into my story and build some meaning out of it.

“Cuckoo, cuckoo.”

Longlegs is haunted by the tragedies of those who made it. You can sense this in the film — that it carries a deep history of true suffering. Nicholas Cage explained that the character of Longlegs was inspired by his mother.

Joy Vogelsang suffered from severe depression and schizophrenia and spent much of her life institutionalized. Cage, having spent a lifetime in close proximity to her, put her gestures, voice, and mannerisms into the character of Longlegs. He explains,

I was coming at it from, what exactly was it that drove my mother insane? It was a deeply personal kind of performance for me because I grew up trying to cope with what she was going through. She would talk in terms that were kind of poetry. I didn't know how else to describe it. I tried to put that in the Longlegs character because he's really a tragic entity. He's at the mercy of these voices that are talking to him and getting him to do these things.

The film is an attempt to capture an unspeakable family tragedy. In the process, Cage does the miraculous: he embodies the Praecox Feeling.

Profoundly ill people — those living with shattered minds, paranoid delusions, etc. — can give the sane an uncanny, alien feeling known as the Praecox Feeling. The sensation is indescribable and hair raising, and anyone who has shared a space with a profoundly ill person knows what I'm speaking of.

The Praecox Feeling isn’t polite to comment on, as it highlights an unseemly fact of mental illness: no matter how destigmatized, deep mental illness is terrifying. Longlegs terrifies us because, by masterfully channeling Cage’s mother, he gives us the Praecox Feeling.

In one particularly unhinged scene, Longlegs goes to a convenience store and freaks out the girl at the counter. I couldn’t help but relate to the girl. I manage a grocery store in an industrial district, and Longlegs could have been any number of mentally ill customers who drift through my store.

Emmett Rensin, in his memoir of madness The Complications, calls them ghosts. They die by freezing to death in winter, are too ill to understand that they are sick, get lost on the streets of major cities, and find themselves locked away in prisons.

Ghosts surround us. Every town has them. We see them lurking on the train tracks and smoking cigarettes beneath awnings. We all hear the stories of someone’s mother, or daughter, or brother, or uncle, who had a psychotic episode and is now a family’s secret agony. We fear them for the same reason we fear Longlegs – they give us feelings we can’t describe. The only way we know to cope is to forget that they are there.

As inspired as Nic Cage’s performance is, there is also something unfair and tragic about it. The truly ill often can’t speak for themselves — they can only serve as inspiration for the craft of the more competent. We will all remember Nic Cage, but do we remember his mother and those like her? As Freddie DeBoer explains in his article The Gentrification of Disability, the competent mentally ill, like myself, are the ones who write about it and vouch for ourselves. The competent become the spokespeople for mental illness, while the profoundly ill continue, as always, to be forgotten.

“The doll maker started his work — his terrible magic.”

At the end of the film, we discover that Longlegs is a Satanic doll maker who has enlisted Harker’s mother to deliver the dolls to families. Once the dolls are delivered, the devil in the doll possesses the father and drives him to murderous insanity.

I again felt eerily seen. I have frequently felt possessed by illness, especially when, like a seducing demon, it whispers to me to do real harm to myself. “You aren’t afraid of a little dark,” Longlegs whispers into the ear of a doll, into the ear of the father that doll would possess, into my ear, “because you are the dark.”

Mental illness is nothing but violence. It perpetrates violence against your own mind. It hacks and burns and dismembers. It commits harm against others through neglect, burned bridges, and hurtful words. Sometimes, the violence turns physical. Often against oneself. Rarely, tragically towards others. To suggest, as many deluded denizens of the internet do, that violence is never the natural outgrowth of mental illness is blinkered in the extreme.

I started self-injuring when I was 16 years old and continued consistently hurting myself for a decade. I didn’t stop cutting myself until I was 26 when I got on Lamictal and started dating my now partner of a decade, both of which are profoundly stabilizing forces in my life. If the opening of flesh out of despair is not violence, then what is violence?

Possession is certainly a barbaric explanation for mental illness, but it still feels like the only apt description. In Mark Chapter 5, Jesus encounters a demon possessed man:

This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him any more, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.

This is the face of hideous illness, and I relate to it. Only a few are fortunate enough to have their demons exorcized by modern medicine and loving community. Too many become ghosts.

Longlegs delivered a doll to me when I was a teenager, and it periodically possessed me, made me go mad with anguish, and do horrible damage to my own body. My adulthood has been one long exorcism to subdue the demons that possessed me in my youth.

I’m better now. I keep to my bipolar monastic rule, I’m on new stabilizing meds, and writing has been a wonderful outlet in these last days of summer. Most important of all, I am surrounded by other human beings who support me. For the moment, I am well. But I also know that my condition is permanent. Someday in the future, a doll maker will arrive on my doorstep again, and with it another possession. I can only prepare for that day.

There’s more to say about Longlegs. It’s a rich film that could be unpacked for days, but it’s legacy, for me, is giving me a filter through which I could examine madness. The experience of mental illness is too bright to look upon, even in retrospect. I need stories to look at it, and stories to heal. As harrowing as that process is, I’m grateful to Longlegs and the creators who gave voice to their nightmares. Maybe, just maybe, it will help cauterize the wound.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below. If your comment is excellent, I might share it in an upcoming post.