Things you can't unsee: Longlegs, Red Rooms, and the cursed aesthetics of true crime

In 2019, while on a trip to Los Angeles, I decided to visit the Museum of Death. I have a complicated relationship with true crime. It’s a morbid and problematic fixation, sure. But there’s a reason why it’s also a pervasive one. We all die, and most of us are terrified of the prospect. Some people run away from their fears. Others run towards them.

Personally, I run towards the things that scare me. But I found my limit that day, at the end of a sharply angled hallway across from a bunk bed taken from the Heaven’s Gate compound. It was a series of framed photographs where two people, naked and covered in blood, smiled as they posed next to the dismembered corpse of the man they just murdered. I remember a head in a plastic bin, although that might be my imagination. It was something I never should have seen, and it left a stain on my soul. 

The revulsion I felt in that moment is as old as humanity itself. (Or older—our Neanderthal ancestors buried their dead, too.) Taboos around death and dead bodies are, at their center, meant to protect the living from literal physical infection. But they’ve been in place for so long that they’ve taken on a metaphysical cast as well. Just seeing an image of a dead person is enough to make many recoil, particularly if it’s real—or even just realistic. It’s as if we are spiritually infected by these images, and that seeing them opens a door to our own mortality.

Still, some seek them out. Online subcultures devoted to 911 calls, body cam footage, and the infamous gore boards of the unregulated early internet are niche. But the repackaging of death as entertainment has a long history in exploitation filmmaking. First came the “Mondo” movies of the ’60s and ’70s—one notable entry in this subgenre, The Killing Of America, was co-directed by Paul Schrader’s brother Leonard—and then the Faces Of Death series, which traumatized a generation of kids whose parents didn’t pay attention to what they rented at the video store. 

Many (but not all) of the death scenes on those tapes were faked, but the packaging of Faces Of Death as “real” gave the series an almost totemic power. (An upcoming Faces Of Death remake scraps the clip-show pretense in favor of a standard narrative, which is both disappointing and kind of a relief.) And although Faces Of Death’s commitment to the bit does make it unusual, it’s not the only horror film to use the aesthetics of real death to enhance its shock value. 

Framing images as “snuff films” or “crime scene photos” transforms them from spooky fabrications to “cursed” and “things you can’t unsee,” even if, as viewers, we understand that they’re not actually real. Director Osgood Perkins makes fantastic use of the technique in his most recent film, Longlegs. Although it is, for the most part, a traditional narrative, Perkins turbocharges the already-unsettling vibes with scripted “911 calls” and staged “crime scene photos” early on in the film. 

These are used to set the tone, as Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) familiarizes herself with a series of crimes where fathers have killed their entire families—a gruesome phenomenon, but not an unknown one. The weird part is that each of the crime scenes had a letter left behind, written in code (shades of the real-life Zodiac Killer) and signed by someone calling themselves “Longlegs.” The audio is muffled, and the photos have the soft blur of automatic film. “That’s not my daughter,” a man whispers in the first call, as the camera zooms in on a snapshot of a family standing in front of a “Happy Birthday” banner. The father’s smile is wide, and his eyes are red. From there, the film flips like a slideshow into a “newspaper headline”—another visual that connotes truth—revealing that the call has come from one of the “family annihilators” Harker is investigating. 

A series of images then flashes across the screen, each rendered to look like crime-scene documentation with harsh flash photography and rusty splatters of dried red “blood.” The framing of the photos is awkward and amateurish, cutting off parts of the “victim’s” bodies so that they look more like limp dolls than human beings. Hands and feet stick out from under bloodstained white sheets—implying that, even in recreations, there are some things that are too horrible to see. “There’s such a thing as looking too long,” Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) tells Harker when he finds her asleep on the floor of her office with these photos spread out in front of her. 

The upcoming Strange Harvest: Occult Murder In the Inland Empire, which premiered at this year’s Fantastic Fest, takes the concept even further. Directed by Stuart Ortiz, best known for his found-footage series Grave Encounters, the film is indistinguishable from a true-crime documentary in every way—except that the “crime scene” photos and videos shown in the film are way too graphic even for a premium-cable doc. 

Longlegs is set in the ’90s, so its faux evidence is presented with the analog aesthetics of film and audio tape. Strange Harvest is set in the ’00s, the era of grainy digital—including a “webcam video” of a teenage girl being shot execution-style on camera. The blurry visuals give the scene a sense of unadorned, amateurish reality: Not something that was created to be seen, but was captured by accident. Combined with the ghoulish imagination of the extreme gore, it feels like a violation. 

Pascal Plante’s Quebecois techno-thriller Red Rooms is more restrained in its approach, exploring the blackest recesses of the human psyche without becoming a ghoulish display. It does so by utilizing a time-honored horror technique: implying more than it’s showing, and letting the audience’s imaginations fill in the details. The story revolves around the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a Montreal man who’s been accused of torturing and killing young girls in so-called “Red Rooms” on the dark web. These videos are discussed at length, but not actually seen, save for one blurry, faraway still of an empty concrete room spattered with blood. 

Chevalier has—for lack of a better term—groupies, besotted young women who attend his trial every day to support his innocence. Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) appears to be one of them, although her true motivation is more obscure. Regardless, she strikes up a friendship with Chevalier fan Clementine (Laurie Babin), who comes to Kelly-Anne’s place after Kelly-Anne finds out that she has nowhere else to stay. There, they view one of the Chevalier snuff films that Kelly-Anne has saved on her hard drive. 

Plante focuses his camera on the women’s faces in an unbroken static shot, and their expressions reveal much about both their characters and the content of these forbidden images. We don’t see what’s happening, but we do hear the sounds of screaming, squishing, and the revving of power tools. The screen glows, bathing the women’s faces in blood red. Clementine starts crying, and goes home to small-town Quebec the next day. She’s been broken by what she’s seen. Kelly-Anne’s face, meanwhile, remains placid and expressionless. Her obsession will only grow darker and more perverse from here. 

In a recent interview with Indiewire, Plante compares Kelly-Anne’s actions—and true-crime fandom in general—to an addiction, saying that she’s “nurturing this sense of danger in order to feel alive.” Horror movies in general provide those who consume them with a controlled dose of death and danger, whether they’re abstracted into a metaphor or presented straightforwardly in the form of gory “kills.” The aesthetics of these glimpses evolve with technology, and with audiences’ growing media savvy: Where once you could shock by smearing corn syrup and food coloring on a head of cauliflower—as filmmakers did for the infamous “monkey brain” scene in Faces Of Death—the growing availability of actual crime-scene photographs and cell-phone videos capturing real death have prompted filmmakers to adopt a different approach, one where grainy amateurism combines with a clinical attention to blood-soaked detail.

But one thing remains true across the decades: the more realistic the depiction, the more potent the kick. You can judge someone for having an addiction, if you must. But it doesn’t make their compulsion any less human.