Maika Monroe on her obsession with the sinister world of Longlegs

ILike a shape-shifting specter lurking just outside the frame, the title “scream queen” has followed Maika Monroe since her star turn in the 2015 horror hit. Follow. As Jay, the unassuming teenage protagonist of filmmaker David Robert Mitchell’s indie cult sensation, Monroe cemented her place in the horror pantheon by playing a young woman stalked by a lethal supernatural entity after contracting a sexually transmitted curse. It’s a bizarre premise that initially gave Monroe pause. “This can’t be good,” she remembers thinking after reading the script.

And she was right – in a sense. It wasn’t just good. It was a commercial and critical success, earning US$23.2 million worldwide on a budget of $1.3 million and being hailed as a highly original genre gem. “I don’t think any of us expected Follow explode the way it did,” says Monroe. “Never in a million years.”

Almost a decade later, Monroe, 31, is back in the spotlight as the lead in one of the most anticipated horror films of the year, Long legsin theaters on July 12. With early reviews praising it as “a disturbing descent into hell” It is “the scariest film of the decade”, the new feature from writer and director Osgood Perkins (I’m the pretty thing that lives in the house) debuted with a perfect 100% fresh rating on Rotten tomatoes before its US release – a rare feat for any film, but especially for a horror film.

Starring alongside Nicolas Cage, who is Long legs‘ titular threat – a disfigured, gruff serial killer with mysterious means to achieve his ends – Monroe plays Lee Harker, a talented and secretive FBI recruit whose enigmatic psychic abilities give him strange insight into his target’s methods. “It was one of those scripts where I thought, ‘I need to be a part of this,’” she says. “I was obsessed with the world it takes place in.”

This sinister scenario, built around a series of hidden murders, reminded Monroe of two iconic ’90s titles she came to love when she was old enough to start watching horror, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Se7en (1995). She remembers the visceral reaction she had upon watching that kind of truly terrifying film for the first time. “I would close my eyes a lot, but I love that feeling,” she says. “You really don’t get that from anything else.”

Despite her early admiration for the power of cinema, Monroe did not grow up wanting to be an actress. Born and raised in Santa Barbara, California, she spent her pre-teen years practicing dancing and learning to kitesurf from her father. It wasn’t until a local film production approached her dance company looking for extras that Monroe, then 13, became interested. “Oddly enough, it was a really terrible horror movie,” she says. “I just fell in love with being on set.”

From there, Monroe got a manager and an agent and began auditioning. But her attention was divided. Even as she continued acting, she was proving to be an extraordinarily talented kitesurfer. When she was 17, she moved with her mother to the Dominican Republic to train professionally in the sport (ranking 32nd in the world). But she attended auditions here and there. “I probably sent four tapes during that nine-month period and ended up booking one of them,” she says in reference to her debut feature, the 2013 family drama. Any pricewhich brought her back to Los Angeles.

Within a year, she appeared in both Sofia Coppola films The Bling Ring and Jason Reitman Work day. But it was the double whammy of Adam Wingard’s 2014 horror thriller The guest It is Follow the following year that connected her to the genre and paved a path forward. Although Monroe has taken on blockbusters such as Independence Day: Resurgenceis its lasting success in the world of indie horror – think back to 2019 Villains and 2022 Observer– this built the foundation of a career.

Thanks to its somewhat reductive history, the Scream Queen label isn’t always welcome – Barbara Crampton, 80s bloodfest icon notably ridiculed the term as implying “that you are good at two things: howling at the top of your lungs and being a woman.” Still, Monroe says she feels “incredibly grateful” to play a role in the nickname’s evolution.

“I remember some of the horror movies I watched [as a kid] and it would be hot blonde girls with half their clothes falling off covered in blood and running and screaming,” she says. “So all these movies like Follow, The Babadook, The witch started coming out and completely changed the genre. Now, those are some of the best roles out there.”

Monroe is set to star in Maxime Giroux’s next crime thriller In the cold light before reuniting with Mitchell to They followa long-awaited sequel to Follow which Monroe promises will deliver “what people want and more.”

So, she says, she’d love to do something more light-hearted, like a romantic comedy. “There’s a lack of great romantic comedies right now,” she says. “It’s time for another When Harry Met Sally.”

But as the buzz around Long legs growing up, Monroe’s main (no spoilers) takeaway from the film explains why she will always be able to return to her horror roots: for better or worse, the well of inspiration is bottomless. “Evil isn’t going anywhere,” she says. “That’s just the reality. There really is no end.”