SPOILER alert:This story contains spoilers for “Longlegs,” now playing in theaters.
When “Longlegs” sound designer and editor Eugenio Battaglia first spoke with director Osgood Perkins about the audio design for the film, he says Perkins told him he wanted it to feel like “rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Given the ’70s rock ‘n’ roll vibe he wanted and because of the Satanic aspect of the film, I thought it would be pretty neat to do some sort of subliminal message profile to the sound,” Battaglia tells PvNew. “[Os] wanted it to feel like something was being projected into our minds because that’s basically what’s happening to the main character.”
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Battaglia says he knew exactly what he needed. He immediately grabbed a 360 ambisonic microphone, a type of microphone typically used in ASMR audio and video, and began to rub a towel over and whisper into it to create a weird combination between hypnotic and horrific.”
“I did a lot of whisper stuff,” Battaglia says as he recounts his recording process. “Like subliminal stuff. I would sometimes even put funny stuff like ‘Give us a good review on Rotten Tomatoes!’ or just pretend to be Longlegs himself and then reverse it…Hopefully, if you reverse the whole movie, you can find some of those funny details.”
“Longlegs” follows FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) attempting to hunt down the titular killer (Nicolas Cage), who somehow murders families without leaving a trace of him anywhere near the scene. She unearths a multitude of evidence, eventually finding out that she has a personal connection to Longlegs: he visited her home near her birthday, like he did for each of his victims.
Lee is deeply connected to the killer throughout the movie, even displaying signs of psychic abilities, like getting visions of red snakes. Battaglia says he clanked metal balls together to accompany the visions, hoping for it to sound more like a projector.
Battaglia says he made the sound its own character throughout the movie, fluctuating the audio levels to help the audience feel like they were in Harker’s shoes.
“I wanted to keep the backgrounds pretty low, but the rest of the sounds loud, so you could hear every footstep around her or the music that the neighbors are playing or things like that,” Battaglia says. “I feel like having that relaxing tone just kind of gives you like a sense of anticipation of ‘Oh, something’s about to happen.’ Then we’d take it for a little bit too long, people drop their guard, and then you hit them with a high-pitched sound and it just completely catches you off guard.”
Longlegs states multiple times throughout the film that he serves “the man downstairs,” a theme that Battaglia referred to during his audio filming process.
“I just basically recorded myself going up and down stairs,” Battaglia says of the heartbeat sound featured in the film. “Then I just layered that with heavy hits, reversed it and did a bunch of stuff. I kind of wanted it to sound like a 70s raw, rock record, full of whispers and little experimental things.”
As for that first scene of the film, where Longlegs visits Lee as a kid, Battaglia says it used to be entirely quiet before seeing part of the murderer’s face. The addition of short orchestral bursts came from Perkins, who wanted to play with the idea of incorporating sounds earlier on to throw the audience off.
The scene starts off quiet, Battaglia says, with viewers only really hearing the sound of her footsteps and jacket. But, once Longlegs whispers his signature “cuckoo,” there’s an immediate feeling of danger.
“The score just gets so tremendously dreadful, and the visuals are so crazy,” Battaglia says. “There wasn’t much technique there other than kind of dropping everything and putting super quiet whispers, which also goes with the vibe of subliminal stuff. Thinking that you heard something just puts you in a vulnerable trance.”
When Longlegs drives off from a camera film store after harassing a young girl, he terrifyingly screams and sounds almost inhuman. Similarly, viewers hear another inhuman pitch in a flashback, when the serial killer sings to Ruth (Harker’s mother, played by Alicia Witt) after she finds him in her backyard.
An electric guitar, Battaglia says, helped him achieve that unnatural shriek.
“I thought it would be cool if he had this demonic help to get to a different level of pitch,” Battaglia says. “I basically just slapped a guitar in there and pitched it to the exact same pitches as [Nicolas Cage’s] voice. It was a super easy trick, but it doesn’t sound like a guitar at the end. It just sounds like him getting totally possessed.”
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As Harker continues to research the killer, she discovers that he had an accomplice the whole time: her own mother. Ruth would dress up as a nun, take a possessed doll that Longlegs had made, give it to a family as a “gift from the church” and then watch the family murder each other in a trance. The dolls each had an orb, presumably infused with Satanic whispers from Longlegs, put into their head.
In one climactic moment, Lee finally connects the dots – Longlegs isn’t working alone and must have an accomplice. Longlegs tells Lee to talk to her mother, Ruth. Lee drives over to her mother’s house to discover the truth: She was Longlegs’ secret partner all along.
As Harker walks through the house in anticipation of confronting her mom, Battaglia played the footsteps and creeks a bit louder than the rest of the movie to build anxiety.
“I just put that heartbeat of me going up and down the stairs and whispers throughout that, to show that she was getting close to finding out where this thing was coming from,” Battaglia said. “I drew a lot of inspiration from ‘Lord of the Rings,’ because when the Eye of Sauron would call to someone, there was a lot of super cool whispery stuff that made it feel like there was a spell being put on you.”
