What? This was way too convoluted. Spoilers ahead.
Why did Harker have to be psychic? This played absolutely no part in the rest of the movie!
So the FBI knows about telepathy? And they have an elaborate system for testing for it? But we learn nothing about why, or how, or who else might have it? Or why it’s necessary to the plot at all?
How did nobody solve, in the span of 30 years, what was a basic 26-letter substitution cryptogram? These things are so trivial to solve that you can buy them in the checkout line at the supermarket.
Why did Longlegs give the partial cryptogram key to Harker?
When she saw somebody walking through her home and found evidence that they had been there, why did Harker just hang out??
Why didn’t Harker tell anybody about the note Longlegs left her?
Why did Longlegs’ note say “Don’t open until January 14” or whatever? I get the “birthday on the 14th” thing but — did he actually not want her to open it? Or was it just a vaguely creepy detail for no reason?
Why the dolls? Couldn’t the hypnotic steel balls have been put in just about anything?
Why were the dolls so elaborately made? Couldn’t they have been off-the-shelf Barbies?
If you want a bunch of families to die, is blackmailing someone into (checks notes) posing as a nun and showing up with a (checks notes) huge wooden box with a lifelike doll in it as a (checks notes) “gift from the church” — is this really the best way to do that? What the hell is this scheme??
Why did Harker’s mom fetch the doll and prop it up in the backyard in order to shoot it?
Why did shooting the doll have some kind of effect on Harker? In addition to hypnotizing the family into killing each other, the doll brains also formed a bond with the recipient?
Why is Longlegs so clearly modeled after Tiny Tim?
Why was he called “Longlegs” at all? I think he was called “Longlegs” because Oz thought it sounded like the name of a creepypasta urban legend, and that was enough.
Et cetera! Et cetera!!
I was on board for like the first half of it, but once the doll contrivance was introduced, it just really lost me from that point onward. It was a bunch of half-baked ideas all kind of thrown in together.