Prime Video has just added 2024’s absolute scariest movie

We'd argue it's one of the scariest films Hollywood has put out in years.

Hailing from writer-director Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat's Daughter), modern horror icon Maika Monroe (The Guest, It Follows, Watcher) stars in the film as Lee Harker, an up-and-coming FBI agent in the '90s with a knack for vaguely psychic hunches.

When these unique abilities enable her to identify and apprehend a wanted criminal in a truly unnerving early-on sequence, Harker finds herself recruited by a superior (played by Blair Underwood) for a much more complicated investigation.

Over three decades, a number of families unknown to each other have been killed. While the forensics seem to imply that the members of these families inflicted this violence upon each other, a cryptic note signed with the name 'Longlegs' was found at the scene of each crime.

As such, it's up to Harker to help bring the sinisterly elusive Longlegs killer (played by an electric, unrecognisable Nicolas Cage) to justice.

Story-wise, the horror thriller shares DNA with a handful of other legendary movies about the hunt for a serial killer. The most clear-cut comparison is The Silence of the Lambs with Lee Harker being very much a Clarice Starling type and Cage's Longlegs figure comparable to that of Buffalo Bill.

On top of this though, Longlegs' coded calling cards recall the Zodiac Killer's taunting letters. Plus, in the same way the Zodiac movie made Donovan's tune 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' sound like the most evil song ever, Perkins' film does similar to T-Rex's 'Bang a Gong (Get It On)'.

What sets Perkins' film apart from these classics is the supernatural twist it puts on these types of tales, as well as the writer-director's complete command of atmosphere.

He and his cinematographer Andrés Arochi constantly frame Monroe's protagonist Harker in striking, eerie environments that first appear out of focus or obscured to the viewer. This is before they are slowly unveiled through the use of disorienting camera moves or off-kilter cutting to both the audience and the hero.

Combined with the menacing ambient soundtrack by Elvis Perkins (brother of Osgood), the effect is that even the most typical scenes in Longlegs - like Harker meeting with her boss to discuss the case or her visiting her hyper-religious mother (Alicia Witt) - are utterly drenched with dread, because of the feeling that something horrible could happen at any possible moment.

And with the spectre of Cage's seldom-seen but mysteriously seemingly all-powerful villain - wisely hidden from the marketing materials for the movie - it probably could.

Longlegs - with its hypnotic gloomy pacing, its investigatory scenes filled with creepy codes and densely enigmatic conversations and its plot, which as it goes on becomes more dreamlike and nightmarish - somehow manages to conjure a true sense of evil, a feeling which lingers long after its closing moments.

While the structure of Longlegs is more akin to a thriller, the raw power of Perkins' filmmaking craft elevates it to a full-on horror - one of the scariest Hollywood has put out in years in fact.

And audiences seem to agree. Made on a moderately low budget of $10 million, the film far exceeded expectations - grossing over $125 million at the worldwide box office.

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