‘Longlegs’: How Osgood Perkins’ Film Became the Scariest Movie of the Summer

Longlegs is the horror event of the summer—a serial killer thriller that plays like a nightmarish swirl of The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Psycho and Zodiac, albeit with far less rationality and considerably more demonic derangement.

Featuring a maniacal performance from an unrecognizable Nicolas Cage as a fiend who preys upon young girls, it’s the kind of movie that lingers long after the credits have rolled, its shocking images burned into the brain. A genre film whose superficial conventionality masks underlying insanity, it’s a saga of mothers, children, intuition, and dark idolatry that unnerves by providing few comforting answers to its bizarre secrets.

Part procedural, part fairy tale, Longlegs is a uniquely demented affair, if also the recognizable work of Osgood Perkins, who infuses it with the same off-kilter menace and dreamy deviance that he brought to his prior The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and Hansel & Gretel.

The son of Psycho icon Anthony Perkins, the writer/director has, over the past decade, established himself as one of horror’s most idiosyncratic and assured voices thanks to films about alienated and sorrowful women struggling to maintain control (of themselves, and their lives) in the face of ghastly threats. That focus continues with his latest, which follows Maika Monroe’s FBI special agent Lee Harker as she endeavors to solve a series of grisly homicides committed over 30 years by an unknown assailant dubbed Longlegs, who appears—against reason—to be persuading men to kill their wives, their children, and themselves.

A cat-and-mouse game that takes on obliquely mythic qualities as it ventures into unholy realms, Longlegs is another triumph for Perkins. Ahead of the film’s release over the weekend, we spoke with him about moms and dads, maintaining monsters’ mystery, and Cage’s transformative turn.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

When I spoke with Nicolas Cage last year, he said that he based Longlegs on his mother—and that you also felt like you were making a movie about your mom. Is that true?

Everything I do that’s self-generated from scratch and write on spec, like Longlegs, always starts with, and has to be about, something that’s true. It has to be, in some way, autobiographical, in terms of being thematically autobiographical. In this case, what I was interested in is the quality of parents telling stories to their kids, or parents telling cover stories to their kids, or parents telling lies to their kids. The quality that a mother can lie to a child seemed to me to be a very basic truth that people could understand. Your theme, if you’re going to talk about it that way for your movie, should be pretty basic. It should be elemental. Then it becomes about, how do you dress that, and how do you address that?

What was your experience with that?

For me, it became about the fact that I’d grown up in a very public family with not all the truth always told to me and my brother about who the players were, and who my dad was. His sexuality was not something that was permitted, so there was a story, and the story was constantly refreshed and kept up at my house. It was supported. For me, Longlegs is just that—it’s a movie about how a parent can tell a story to a kid.

How did Nic first become involved?

I feel like you get a sense of somebody right away, and then you either get vulnerable or you clam up. For me on the phone with Nic, he’s so present and so brilliant and so smart and so attentive and so connected—he knows everything, he reads everything, he’s seen every movie, and if you tell him to see a movie, he watches it that day and calls you back. He’s such a fucking expert. To me, that felt very open and limber, so on my first phone call, I said, just so you know right out of the gate, this movie is about my mom. I didn’t want to hide that from him; why would I hide that from him? He said that’s fine, Oz, because it’s actually about my mom.

Perfect.

I said, I think we’re going to do fine, Nic. We laughed, and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Speaking of hiding things, the marketing has gone out of its way to conceal Longlegs, as you do for the film’s first third, at least in terms of full close-ups. Did the two of you talk about how to balance revealing too little versus showing too much?

It’s in the script. It starts on the page. Young Lee’s first interaction with him is in the script, told as a neck-down experience. We’re dealing with a protagonist who isn’t connected to her childhood memories, and so it became elemental that we wouldn’t show him until it was time to show him at his most vulnerable. We wanted to pocket the monster because, why not? There’s only so much you can do in a movie, and you want to be able to have things that you’re holding back, and you want to have things that you’ll show when you’re ready. That’s the way it goes.

We do show him; we have close-ups of him in all cases. But the idea was to treat him as a movie monster, and then when we reveal him at the bus stop when he turns himself in, we wanted to reveal him as pathetically and matter-of-factly and ghastly-y as we could.

You don’t divulge anything about Longlegs’ backstory or specific motivations. Is that type of withholding important if you want to make a monster truly terrifying?

Absolutely. There are gods and goddesses that represent things, like in Greek mythology—there’s a god of the ocean, and the god of suns. For me, the muse that hangs around horror movies, books, poems, and the idea of it is the muse of what’s hidden from us. The muse of what’s not known, or knowable.

I write everything down, and I know everything about it. But I don’t need to say it all. If I write 100 pages of prose, which I do, then my job as screenwriter is to take things away and leave only what’s necessary to point to the rest of it. Nic and I know a little more about Dale Cobble than the movie does. But of course we do, you know what I mean? Otherwise, how would Nic play subtext and how would I have anything to hide?

How much did you concoct about Longlegs’ history that was just for background?

I wrote Nic some really long passages that were sort of lyrical and poetical. Words that point to the meaning. Symbols. Not, when Cobble was 6 years old, this happened, and when Cobble was 25 years old, this happened. But more like, this is something he thought or felt when he was a kid. He used to take apart radios, he used to take apart cats. You say something like that. You put out into the world that he used to take apart radios—which I got from Snoop Dogg, who apparently liked to take apart electronics—and he used to take apart cats, and if you just say something like that, the artist can then fill in what they want to fill in about that. As opposed to, on his fifth birthday, he killed a cat. It’s a fine distinction that creates space.

How much freedom did Nic have to create Longlegs, and how much of him came from the script?

We talk about it based on the words. It all starts with the words that are written. I’ve been really lucky to be able to write dialogue for actors—in general, and certainly in this case with Nic—that they don’t want to change. They feel the music of the words, and they’re interested in making those words work, as opposed to saying, I don’t want to say that, I want to change it. Every once in a while, Nic would change the word at the end of a sentence or move something around, but we treat it very much as text. It’s not a flip thing that he’s just riffing off. It’s a fixed text that’s in place that points to the thing.

Working from that, all of Cobble’s dialogue is punctuated strangely—there are lots of periods where there shouldn’t be—to suggest a certain kind of rhythm. Nic goes away with it, and we talk a little bit about who we think this is or what this sounds like or what he’s got to hide, and he comes back with voice recordings, trying things. It’s just chiseling and adding. It’s like making a soup.

Longlegs operates in a familiar serial-killer thriller framework. Did you think a lot about how to reconfigure well-known conventions in order to keep audiences off balance? Was that a deliberate process?

Actually, we were as deliberate as we could be to establish the reference as an invitation to the audience to connect. Mike Nichols was a great friend of my dad’s and, later, a friend of mine, and he said that one of the very, very first things you need to do as soon as you can is to get the audience to feel like you’ve got them—that you’re taking care of them. You know what you’re doing, and they’re safe with you, and you’re going to give them this thing that you want.

That’s great advice.

For me in this case, it was that serial killer movies, when they’re done really well like The Silence of the Lambs or Seven or Zodiac—and there’s not very many other ones—they go like this. It’s almost like, and a one, and a two, and a three, and you go for a while on the energy of that. You include your audience and you make them feel safe and you make them feel like you’ve got them and you’re giving them what you want. Then, you can do whatever you want. That’s the fun of it. The fun of it is, you get to a certain point, and you go, I’ll just take a left turn here. That’s how that was planned.

Were those movies the specific inspirations for Longlegs?

Yeah, there’s one-for-one stuff! There are direct lifts. The female FBI agent who doesn’t quite know why she’s being picked. The scene in the FBI senior’s office where they first see the evidence board. The cipher handwriting, which is basically just the Zodiac’s code. The serial killer who gives himself up on purpose is John Doe from Seven. All of those things are super deliberate, and completely intentional.

Longlegs feels in tune with Gretel & Hansel courtesy of its fairy-tale elements. Were you trying to differentiate this film from the aforementioned influences by giving it a mythic, fantastical quality?

I think if anything, it continues to weave the audience into the collective unconscious of the world, which is where you want to be sitting, because it gives you so much runway, and so much space, and so much opportunity to deviate. If you say, “Big Bad Wolf,” everybody knows what that means, so now you’re chummy with the audience; you’ve made friends, because you’ve extended a peace branch to them. You’ve said, don’t worry, it’s just like the story you know from when you were a kid. It’s very easy to understand. You’re fine here in this space. You get it. And then you’re able to put plenty of stuff in that they don’t get, or can’t see, or haven’t been able to predict.

The really gratifying thing about watching this movie with an audience, still, is that they don’t see it. They don’t see what it is until it’s passed. In the rooms I’ve been in with people watching it, I don’t feel that people are ahead of the movie. That’s a really happy thing for a storyteller, as you can imagine.

The opening T-Rex quote felt very Stephen King-ish—which is fitting given that your next movie is an adaptation of the author’s The Monkey. Where did that come from?

I think King’s use of song lyrics and recognizable little ditties and melodies and snippets of poetry—it’s the same thing, it locates you, and locates a thing in an unexpected way. T-Rex was just music that I was listening to at the time. I didn’t mean to listen to it, and I didn’t intentionalize it into the movie. It announced itself as the right music for the movie.

You start to listen to it a lot, and you start to hear the lyrics, and you go, actually, this fucking song is talking about the teeth of the hydra, and I also have this thing from the bible talking about the beast that comes out of the sea with many heads. So Bolan is singing hydra to me, and the Bible is saying many-headed monster, and you go, oh, right, it’s working! These disparate things which don’t go together. Marc Bolan and the Bible don’t, but they do.