Don’t cry, Neon. It’s not all poor Oz Perkins’ fault that “Keeper” is getting such nasty reviews. This mess of a horror movie and its director’s mystifying track record in the genre is your doing, too!
Starring the ever-incredible Tatiana Maslany in a stew of baffling choices, Perkins’ third feature at Neon has its fans — but it’s damned by faint praise with 67 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (technically “fresh” but still low for the generally positive platform) and 52 percent on Metacritic, which doesn’t bode well for opening weekend. “Keeper” hits theaters Friday, November 14, and it’s projected to be Perkins’ least lucrative film yet. Yes, the single-location haunted house story cost a lot less to make than his earlier “Longlegs” and “The Monkey.” But diminishing returns and precipitous reputation decline suggest the oddball filmmaker, whom a lot of indie folks seem to like personally, has been hurt by bad marketing.
Coming Up Short After the Fever of “Longlegs”
Anyone who has survived the end of a rocky relationship knows the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there’s no question Neon has pushed the auteur trajectory for Perkins with the hope of giving him a permanent foothold in horror. After acquiring “Longlegs” on the 2023 European Film Market, the studio ripped a hyperbolic marketing strategy straight from the 1970s that, for good or bad, totally worked. Despite Nicolas Cage’s impressive transformation into a supernatural killer of children, and Maika Monroe’s wide audience of fans and reigning status as a scream queen, the mostly solid FBI procedural didn’t have the goods to be one of the “scariest” movies ever made. Not even close.
Paired with a cryptic ad campaign that was fun to see but oversold the terror at its center, “Longlegs” got as far as it did on Neon’s insistence that Perkins’ debut title at the studio wasn’t just “good” but outright revolutionary. That insulted many of the more intense genre-heads online, but it also created a false impression for moviegoers unfamiliar with their horror history, inadvertently setting Perkins up for the eyerolls he’s enduring from seasoned cinephiles as well as newbies now. “Longlegs” made $127.9 million in ticket sales globally, once again proving that clear messaging is key when you want to put butts in seats. But you can’t rip off the ad campaign for “The Exorcist” twice — certainly not for the same guy — and Neon hasn’t been able to figure out what story they’re telling with Perkins since.
The Marketing Spin That Put “The Monkey” on Perkins’ Back
There’s no question “Longlegs” is still Perkins’ best film, but when the director delivered “The Monkey” earlier this year, Neon made an outsized mess of the movie’s campaign. Quality filmmaking has to take over for buzz eventually, and “The Monkey” has demonstrable flaws. It’s a junk drawer of darkly comic ridiculousness based on a Stephen King story that, on its own merit, doesn’t appeal to everybody. But Perkins’ decidedly original approach — and his first film with future “Keeper” star Maslany — deserved a smarter playbook. Sure, Neon got what it wanted then, but they’re partly why Perkins is in trouble today.
“The Monkey” made $68.9 million worldwide, confidently riding the reputation of “Longlegs” to set up Perkins’ next film as proper “event horror.” Tons of moviegoers who didn’t consider themselves outright scary movie “fans” got into the genre because of “Longlegs,” and Perkins’ impressive production speed gave them a new project to hype up and check out in less than a year. The box office decline was matched in critical reception. Today, “Longlegs” has an 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a 3.3 rating on Letterboxd, while “The Monkey” has a 77 percent and a 2.7 rating — i.e., good enough but not great.
Plenty of legendary horror directors have struggled to get audiences to appreciate their lighter side in sophomore features; see Sam Raimi, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper, for starters. But none of them got stuck with the Neon marketing team, which made the unwise decision to push “The Monkey” on the basis that it was not a scarier answer to “Longlegs” but an extraordinarily violent one. That’s a borrowed approach other movies have tried too, but Quentin Tarantino is living proof that pushing pulp in mainstream media is a dicey maneuver that often ends in needless controversy for directors.
Skip Genre History Class? Fail Basic Psychology
Worse still, “The Monkey” campaign undermined the credit Neon deserved for their part in “Longlegs.” During the rollout, the studio successfully built up public suspense by showing real restraint with the assets they shared. The trailer didn’t reveal too much about the actual movie Perkins had made, and pounding the pavement with cryptic clues splashed across billboards, posters, marquees, and more, the eventual Best Picture winners behind “Anora” made their money through intrigue. “The Monkey” took the opposite tactic.
Racking up more than 100 million views on YouTube in just three days, the trailer for “The Monkey” went viral because of its association with “Longlegs.” But when TV stations refused to air the only marginally violent material without edits, Neon spun that response to suggest a level of audacity in Perkins’ movie that wasn’t there. Television networks routinely insist on studios toning down content so they can advertise more extreme films within family-friendly programming blocks. The level of gore and violence readily accessible on social media can’t always play on primetime TV by law. But that doesn’t make every movie with promo materials rejected by major networks more extreme than other movies.
Still, Neon presented fairly normal rejection emails as a pearl-clutching declaration of war “The Monkey” couldn’t wage. They shared redacted screenshots of their failed marketing efforts as if they were evidence from a pop culture crime scene and not proof of a missed business connection. Positioning “The Monkey” as outrageously controversial and ultraviolent when it was “not for everyone” at most put even more pressure on Perkins’ second film and let a big chunk of his audience down. Then, there was “Keeper.”
Are You Sure You Want to Use an Eli Roth Quote Right… Now?
Less than a year ago, Perkins was widely considered a horror legend in the making. The son of “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins, the “Longlegs” director accounted for the divisiveness of his first film for Neon with a series of tender interviews that reflected the considerable heart and thought Perkins put into that movie. Some more aggressive “Longlegs” critics softened their assessments when they understood that emotional context, myself included, and remembering Perkins as the quietly lovable actor they met in the background of all-time greats like “Legally Blonde” and “Secretary” instead, they chose to root for him.
That’s what makes the bone-headed move Neon pulled days before “Keeper” came out so maddening. Poster quotes can come from almost anywhere these days. Sentiments from professional film journalists, social media influencers, and even the random Letterboxd user have been used to sell tickets in 2025 — and hell, studios have been using out-of-context quote pulls, from hacks or bona-fide-established critics, for more than a century. But when it comes to getting one man’s movie an endorsement from another famous filmmaker, advertisers should move more cautiously than Neon did in associating “Keeper” with Eli Roth.
The director known for the horror classic “Hostile” and the recent slasher favorite “Thanksgiving” is quoted in the latest teaser for Perkins’ new nightmare, calling it “like a surreal David Lynch movie.” That’s not just a redundant phrase — all David Lynch films are surreal, considering he was a surreal filmmaker — but a reductive one that smacks of the film-bro fakery so many movie lovers struggle to endure online. Yes, Roth worked with Lynch in the early stages of Roth’s career when he was making scrappy short films and Roth’s directorial debut “Cabin Fever,” but that relationship phased out around the time that feature hit theaters in 2002. Has Roth seen or understood a single Lynch movie since? Who knows.
Despite his schismatic professional history and provocative approach to discussing Israel and Palestine online (when activist Greta Thunberg was detained amid aid efforts to Gaza, the filmmaker wrote, “She needs to be eaten by cannibals” via Instagram), Roth is networking more visibly to promote his own indie genre label, The Horror Section. It makes sense that Roth would want to be associated with Perkins after “Longlegs,” but Neon should have stepped in before they let an arthouse movie get anywhere near such an explosive political persona. That quote wouldn’t have gotten a fraction of the scrutiny it did if it weren’t attributed to Roth — and even running it alongside sentiments from Guillermo del Toro, Bong Joon Ho, and more iconic forces in film, Roth’s flattened assessment of Perkins’ work created a viral meme with a stronger message at the wrong time.
Do You Want to Trust One Director or Annoy Every Audience?
“Keeper” is an opaque arthouse effort that might work for someone, but it’s one I genuinely detested and doubt the majority of “Longlegs” and “The Monkey” fans will like. Walking into a press screening of the film earlier this week in Los Angeles, other horror critics mentioned the Roth/Lynch snafu, and those same conversations — now with specific complaints about the movie! — continued on the way out.
That debacle was sort of on my mind when I was watching “Keeper” (though I was mostly trying to find the plot), and I tried to put it aside when I gave Perkins’ latest a “D+” review. In fact, I looked for something nice to say about “Keeper” precisely because Neon was letting Perkins do something new. But heading into opening weekend, the embattled director may want to consider if the studio “gets” him at all.
Of the three movies Perkins has made at Neon — and all in the last 16 months — “Keeper” is projected to earn the least but also cost the least. That means the first-look deal Perkins signed earlier this year — giving Neon right of first refusal for all of his projects, including the upcoming “The Young People” in 2026, set to star Nicole Kidman — is still working out for them. But consciously or not, the risky strategy that put money in the bank on “Longlegs” and “The Monkey” could tank “Keeper” and leave its auteur feeling as used and abused as the lead in Neon’s “Anora.”
Good, bad, or surreal-surreal, Perkins’ latest film shouldn’t have been a national release; it might have done better as a limited offering, but if it didn’t, the PR impact wouldn’t be as dire. Even riding high on globally recognized success, this filmmaker is trying to make a comeback with a team dragging him down. Neon has been audience-testing horror to its detriment, and if you see “Keeper” this weekend, you’ll walk away feeling like you witnessed the clinical average of a flattened dream. Maybe that’s OK with the business executives at Neon, who will get their money back, but it’s probably not what Perkins wanted.
The creative partners have at least one more film to make, and they could turn things around then. But if “Keeper” disappoints the general public — armed with a fraction of this context and even less empathy — then it’s a knock against going to not just Neon’s next big horror release but the movies writ large. That’s bad for Perkins’ career and art, but a great reason the director, who made other movies before he signed with Neon and has plenty of serious cinephiles still rooting for him elsewhere, to finish out this contract and move on.
From Neon, Oz Perkins’ “Keeper” is in theaters now.