“Manson had accomplices. His family.”
“You’re dirty sweet. And you’re my girl.”

A mother’s selfish love. A father’s implicit evil. The daughter as a result.

The family; a divisive portrayal of good and evil. Two sides of the same coin. Light vs. dark. God vs. the devil. “Work that gets dirty as it cleans.” But is it ever really that simple?

Watching the film, the quote “we have both good and evil within us, whether you choose to listen to it or not” was ringing in my head. This is the baseline for the themes analyzed below.

I. The House

Inside a home, you have the mother, the father, and the daughter. The mother loves the daughter because she should, not because she wants to. She mourns the day she arrived, “I bled…bled…bled”, “I came out wrong…bled her up too much.” Not only selfishly, but because she also knows firsthand the terrors that await little girls in this world. “It’s a cruel place out there, especially for the little things.” The father exists in the function of a man, and by that he is implicitly capable of evil, specifically towards women. He is the one to kill them all, because hatred is built into a man, he just needs a push to activate it. It’s almost as if as soon as the father sees the daughter as something other than his pure, sweet little angel, he no longer wants anything to do with her.

Now, Lee and her mothers house is much more than just this dynamic. It provides itself as the literal “home” for a physical manifestation of evil. “Oh, but Lee. Your house was even whiter when I came to visit”, white meaning purity, and Longlegs burrows his way in, bringing black plumes of smoke with him to bury the devil deep within this house of “purity.” The house has gotten grayer now in the present, the demonic forces spreading into the very foundation. But Lee has “been allowed to grow up”, to become an “old angel” as Carrie Anne puts it, triumphing good, all because of what evil her mother has kept housed within the floorboards. They are her family, whether she knows it or not, consisting within the predetermined constructs listed above. They’ve lived in that house together her whole life, they’ve been ingrained in her psyche (quite literally through the doll). It feels as if Longlegs prayed on the Harker household with the knowledge that they were lacking a father figure in mind. He inserts himself, and by default the devil, as the “father” of their home. Lee has coexisted with evil her whole life, without the knowledge of it. Not only within her home, but within herself.

II. The Daughter

Now, the daughter. “Break just like a little girl!” the sticker in the shop states. The vulnerability of a young girl to be so susceptible to great evil and therefore the one targeted by such. Carter stares at his daughter in the end as if he’s so afraid of her, of what she had become. “Dad says he wants to keep some of my stuff around so I don’t grow up too fast but I'm gonna grow up anyways.” The emphasis on “growing up”, almost as if they are being saved from it, and therefore from becoming “impure” as they age. When the devil takes a hold of the daughter through the doll, the father sees her as such, as “impure” and tainted. The choice to never actually show what the fathers see their daughter as is intentional, leaving the interpretation up to the viewer. Is it a “big bad wolf” that has been hinted at under the black cloth throughout? Or is it simply still just the daughter, but grown up and impure?

Longlegs blurts out in the car “Mommy! Daddy! Unmake me! And save me from the hell of living!” It is often said that when a child is taken too soon they were “too pure for this world.” This implies that death is a better option for the “pure” being of a child. It is almost as if Longlegs in this moment attributes their work (Lee’s mom and himself; mommy and daddy) as a saving grace for these pure beings to be done in the name of the “father” (the man downstairs). An interesting similarity to the way people of God speak. As if, in their satanic minds, they are taking them early to contain their purity and not taint it for the devil. Because of this, Lee’s mother’s vision of her daughter in itself becomes tainted. Initially, it was a heroic choice for her to save her daughter from death. However, her initial reasoning dissipates as she becomes more and more attuned with the man downstairs. Every time Lee phones her mom, “Hi, Mom”, she responds with “Lee?” As if she cannot fathom to be associated with something impure like the child who was allowed to grow up. Her daughter became “impure” with age, and that initiates the response in the end of “DON’T CALL ME THAT” the last time Lee refers to her as “mom”. She does not associate herself as her mother, Lee is not the pure child of all those years ago; that’s the last time she was a mother.

III. The Doll

The dolls represent an exact juxtaposition between good and evil. Longlegs has taken the little girl (innocent, sweet, pure) and instilled within her the darkness of the devil, literally placing evil inside. “You’re not afraid of a little dark. Because you are the dark.” The family accepts the good (from the church) only to reveal the evil (Mr. Downstairs himself). The internal destruction is made to look like it is done by human hands which emphasizes the idea of people having evil inside them all along. Even if that evil is placed there by the devil, it is orchestrated to look like a human decision. It is very possible that that’s all it is: a human decision. The devil just provides the push necessary, by showing what it is they fear most: their daughters being allowed to grow up. The doctor even describes it with an emphasis, “there’s nothing…IN there.” Just smoke and mirrors. Is the devil even there at all? Does the cloud of smoke actually contain this all-encompassing evil, or is it as fleeting an image as the ghostly horned creature we see in passing throughout? Is that actually representative of a real evil or simply the evil we all have in us?

As Lee’s mother was able to strike a deal with Longlegs, Lee has been attached to her doll since she was nine years old. The doll has shielded her from the memory of all that is evil around her, yet she has been directly attached to this vessel of darkness her whole life. Thus is the reason she has these “psychic” powers; she can sense and recognize evil because she has been tethered to it since she was nine years old. Not simply through the doll, but she has grown up living within its walls, absorbing it by proxy. Upon seeing the inverted triangle flash across the screen in her psychic analysis, Lee blurts the word “father.” And later in the film, when her mother asks if she still says her prayers, she replies with “Never, not once. They scared me” causing her mother to erupt with laughter at the implication. The devil is clearly a force within her, whether she recognizes it or not.

In the interrogation scene, Longlegs explains exactly how the doll works. “Accept the gift and destroy it and destroy yourselves. Or keep it and bow down, bow all the way down, and get right down to the dirty, dirty work. Work that gets dirty as it cleans.” If the family chooses to listen to the manipulative evil of the doll, you are destroying yourselves by letting the devil loose from within the hiding place. But if you keep it, like Lee’s mom, you will need to do the work of the devil himself in exchange for your life. “Work that gets dirty as it cleans,” a reference to the bloody job of Longlegs and Lee’s mother working in the name of the devil. Cleansing the world for him. After Longlegs makes a reference to a she, Lee asks who he is talking about, to which he replies “the seventh she. To be given the same choice that they’ve all been given. Crimson or clover.” This is of course about Lee’s mother, and it is interesting that they were the seventh house visited by Longlegs, alluding to the scripture mentioned from Book of Revelation (no S. it’s singular.) of the “beast with seven heads.” It seems as if this was an offer made to the previous houses visited by Longlegs, “the same choice they’ve all been given.” Crimson denotes blood, and clover to flowers. This can be interpreted as the bloodbath of destroying your family, “destroy it and destroy yourselves”, or the flowers of growth; the daughter being allowed to grow up but at what cost, “keep it and bow down.”

If we look at Carrie Anne, we see a direct link to her doll and her real self. She has been in a comatose state for at least eight years as her doll has been locked inside a box for those years. “Nowhere between here and there. What’s that called, doing the limbo.” Purgatory. She’s been trapped because her soul hasn’t been freed from being intertwined with the doll. As soon as they lift her doll up, and the eyes open, Carrie Anne suddenly has life within her. But it is not until Carter says “we opened up the brain and there was nothing inside”, we learn that they have destroyed the ball and thus have released the devil inside. Notice how directly following this, Carrie Anne kills herself. Yes, she has been freed, but her freedom was always “to do something for the man down the stairs.” Carrie Anne suggests she would do anything for him, and continuously throughout the third half of the film, “death” is stated in conjunction with “freedom” for the “friends” of Mr. Downstairs. I believe Carrie Anne jumped of her own accord, to be freed and to be “everywhere,” as Mr. Downstairs is described as existing. Longlegs states in the interrogation scene right before he takes his own life, “Waiting in the wings. In the father’s wings.” They will be freed through death to go be with their father.

Part of Lee’s stiffness of personality is also attributed to the doll. Lee’s doll has undoubtedly been kept somewhere in the house for all these years; standing upright and kept alert thanks to her mother. Her tension of personality could be attributed to the doll’s stiffness, “legs bound together” as Ruby puts it in reference to a Veel doll. When Lee sees her mother standing outside with her doll, her mother tells her “he’s free now” though Lee keeps insisting that Longlegs is dead, not free. We know that death is considered freedom for the devil worshipers, that they get to go be with their father, so the next statement her mother makes, “you’re free now too, babygirl” has deadly implications for Lee. However, after her mother frees the evil from within the dolls head, besides being a bit shaken up and frazzled Lee does not die, nor does she have the same suicidal inclination as Carrie Anne did upon her doll’s brain opening. This is a perfect example of good over evil. Even after all the exposure Lee has had to evil her entire life, she still has not succumbed to it. She does not wish to join Mr. Downstairs, even though her mother believed she would want to be “freed.” Thus leading to her mother to go through with gifting the Carter family, almost as if she did not expect Lee to show up.

IV. Interlinked

There is much duality between them throughout the course of the film, picking a few that stood out to me as something more impactful. The two shots of them before the interrogation; her looking straight ahead (in flux between above and below) and him looking downward (having picked his side long ago), yet again on opposite sides of a door. In Lee’s psychic analysis earlier in the film, she says “door” for one of the images. Clearly her unconscious is aware of the significance of the door keeping evil a mere hair’s breadth away. It’s almost akin to the door in her very own psyche that is barring the evil from taking complete control as it did Carrie Anne and her mother. The two car shots of them screaming within the exact same car mere days apart.

Lee wears red the day she meets Longlegs. Yet, he is in white. She stands out, as if she has already been chosen by the man downstairs himself. Later, we see him bathed in red light almost constantly, including wearing a red shirt when he is shown making the dolls. Lee wears red in her first adult scene as well. Red is tainting; it is branding. It places emphasis not only on her link to Longlegs but more specifically the man downstairs. If we think about it in relation to her mother being the “seventh she”, we can see why Lee would be branded in red. She, her family, her home; they were all chosen. “You are the dark.” And thus she is marked as such.

The interrogation scene. He’s known her her whole life, been with her her whole life. He’s been that knocking in the back of her skull with evil implications, that dark force literally living beneath her. “Hes downstairs. Right under your feet.” The exact place where he has always been Lee’s whole life; evil is so close to you, right down the stairs. Just a hairs breadth away, not only in Longlegs but in her mom, and Mr. Downstairs himself. She has been consumed with evil her whole life, yet she has not succumbed to it. The interrogation scene is joyous for him, the girl who was allowed to grow up in front of him for the first time in over a decade; it’s almost her birthday too. It’s horrifying for her, restructuring her whole world as she sees the face her mind made her forget. They are on two sides of a table, representing polar extremities but exhibiting the opposite effect. The devil; feeling joy. The old angel; feeling terror. Can they coexist? They do within Lee.