Writer-director Osgood Perkins spins a tense FBI procedural steeped in occult horror and nightmarish visions, also starring Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt.

The unease lurking in a quiet Pacific Northwest town plagued by a series of murders is a distant second to the fears churning inside the protagonist’s head in Longlegs. Writer-director Osgood Perkins’ serial killer chiller fully acknowledges a debt to The Silence of the Lambs in its chronicle of a young female rookie agent pulled into the FBI manhunt for a killer wiping out entire families. But the movie is also its own freaky trip, a darkly disturbing experience pulsing with an evil that’s unrelenting in its subcutaneous creepiness.

The full extent of that horror is revealed to be alarmingly close to home for Maika Monroe‘s Agent Lee Harker, who first encountered Longlegs when she was a child, 25 years earlier.

The main action, set around 2000, opens with the adult Lee and her partner Agent Fisk (Dakota Daulby) on their first day out in the field. As they case a suburban cul-de-sac looking for a house they believe is connected to the murders, Lee focuses on an attic window. She informs Fisk, with a tone of absolute certainty, that she has identified the house and that the killer is inside. Her partner brushes off her suggestion of calling for backup, approaching the door full of misplaced confidence.

A Bureau psych evaluation finds Harker to have heightened intuitive abilities, prompting her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), to make her a key member of the investigative team on the murders. Ten houses and ten different families have been hit, with husbands killing wives and children before taking their own lives, using weapons that were already in the house. There are no signs of forced entry or outsider DNA but at the scene of each crime, a note is left behind, written in code and signed “Longlegs.”

As Lee pores over case files and graphic crime-scene photographs, she makes the connection that all the families had daughters whose birthdays fell on the 14th of any given month. She keeps some of her findings to herself, not mentioning to Carter the figure she sees watching her from the woods outside her house, or the cryptic note she later finds on her desk, which helps her crack the code.

You don’t need to have seen the Annabelle or Chucky movies or the deliciously campy M3GAN (what’s happening with that sequel?) to know that dolls in a horror movie are seldom benign playthings. Accepting one as a gift is foolishness. But even with many of the key elements in place, the movie keeps you guessing for a good long while about how the murders are being orchestrated and who else is involved.

There’s also the fear that Harker, whose heavily medicated mother suggests a family history of mental instability, might be susceptible to the subliminal influences that appear to be part of the killer’s method.

This is gripping stuff that steadily cranks up its nightmarish feeling of dread. Even if the identity of the family that will lead to a conclusive break in the case is telegraphed way too early, the movie continues to work its way under your skin for the duration.

Perkins’ stroke of genius is waiting more than 40 minutes before giving us full visual access to Cage’s Longlegs, whose look is signaled by the lyrics from the pervy T. Rex banger “Get It On” that appear as text on the screen at the start: “Well you’re slim and you’re weak / You’ve got the teeth of the hydra upon you / You’re dirty, sweet and you’re my girl.”