Longlegs director Osgood Perkins has shared further insight into the film after its worldwide release last week – on how its titular villain, played by Nicolas Cage, was inspired by Se7en, on deciphering its ending, and those creepy dolls.
- READ MORE: ‘Longlegs’ review: Nicolas Cage brings the batshit in seriously creepy serial killer movie
In an interview with Variety yesterday (July 13), Perkins (the son of Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Psycho) talked at length about the film after its first weekend at the box office.
In Longlegs, Cage’s character kills himself after an interrogation by Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), long before its climactic, bleak ending. His sudden departure was inspired by the villain of Se7en: John Doe, played by Kevin Spacey.
Perkins explains that, when making the movie, he and his team were “consciously aware of our references”, and that they wanted to “crib or steal a move from one of the great serial killer movies” when they could.
And so, the total on-screen time of Cage’s Longlegs was inspired by how Se7en’s John Doe appears in the 1995 David Fincher film only in “three or four scenes” – “the fact that John Doe gave himself up” inspired Perkins’ intention for the full reveal of Longlegs to be “almost anticlimactic”.
“We wanted to sort of — “rip off” is not the right word — “borrow” is more close to what we were doing,” Perkins says.
On the film’s ending, which sees Harker trying (and only somewhat succeeding) to stop the spread of Longlegs’ Satanic murder spree in the Carter household, Perkins maintains to Variety that it was always intended to play out that way.
“The ending was meant to be tragic,” he explains. “The devil wins again on a small scale. One of the fun things about using the devil as your villain is that the devil never really goes for world domination. The devil always feels like, ‘I’ll just fuck with this person, I’ll wreck this family, I’ll mess this kid up, I’ll torment this priest.’ It’s never like, ‘I’m going to eat the Vatican.’”
To Perkins, the story of Harker “ends with the ending of the movie,” and that the shot she attempts to fire at the cursed doll “is the worst thing that can happen to her.”
So, how about those dolls? It’s explained in the film that these dolls are infused with Satanic magic by Longlegs – when gifted to the intended family of victims, each doll possesses the ability to induce the entire family into a trance, and encourage the father of the household to commit the murders. However, Perkins doesn’t intend to reveal more – the mystery of these dolls is “part of the playfulness of the devil,” he offers.
“Wouldn’t it be kind of amazing if you brought a doll into someone’s house and it made everybody crazy,” he says. That’s sort of funny and weird. It’s almost like, ‘You fucked up and let him in. You didn’t have to sign for that! Just because a nun brings it in to you, doesn’t mean you should let her into your place with it.’”
“There is also that kind of ‘you did it to yourself’ vibe, which I think is sort of fun.”
Its main villain was also apparently birthed out of several ideas he’s had on the drawing board over the years.
“When you’re writing all the time and generating specs and no one’s paying you or you don’t have any source material, you’re making shit up all the time,” says Perkins. “You end up with a universe of things that are swirling around, and you try to pull them out and stick them in.”
He also says the villain’s name was chosen based on how it comes across as “a vintage word” that “feels very ‘70s to me”.
In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Cage also revealed that he drew inspiration for the character from the unlikely source of his own mother, Joy Vogelsang.
“Not that she was satanic,” he clarified. “But her vocalisations, the way she would move.”
In a four-star review of the film, NME wrote: “At its heart, Monroe is superb as Harker, offering up a buttoned-down performance that never breaks. Hopefully, Longlegs doesn’t get her pigeonholed as a Scream Queen; she deserves more.”
“As for Cage, also a producer here, it’s just another worthy addition to his canon of crazies. Despite limited screentime, it might just be his most bonkers role yet. “Is it scary being a lady FBI agent?” asks one little girl of Harker. Well, when you’re confronted with Cage’s Longlegs, it most certainly is.”
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