How ‘Longlegs’ Director Osgood Perkins Made One of the Scariest Movies of the Year

“Longlegs” is a movie whose advanced hype and ingenious marketing campaign has turned it into the must-see horror movie of the summer. But the film is a rare feat, one that actually lives up to the hype, if not surpasses it. It’s the kind of movie that burrows under your skin, one that you’ll find yourself thinking about days or weeks later. The malevolence remains long after the movie is over.

The fact that it came from Osgood Perkins, the director of gauzy, somewhat difficult horror movies like “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” and “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House,” makes the more commercial elements of “Longlegs” seem even more bizarre and unsettling. Sure, it’s a movie set in the 1990s that follows a young FBI agent (the always great Maika Monroe) as she tracks a ruthless serial killer (an unrecognizable Nicolas Cage), which is the set-up of countless thrillers. But the way “Longlegs” is told (and the way its very specific atmosphere settles over you) is what sets it apart.

This was, Perkins will tell you, all by design.

“The basic step is to pick something that’s true,” the director told TheWrap. “Write to a theme that’s a true theme for me. In the case of this, that true theme was, it’s possible for parents to lie to their children and tell them stories. It’s very basic and easily understandable. If you want to start building projects that way, it should be simple.” (Perkins’ father was actor Anthony Perkins, star of “Psycho,” who was a closeted homosexual. He speaks about how his mother aided in the obfuscation of his father’s sexuality, including how he contracted AIDS, a disease that would ultimately take his father’s life, in the Emmy-nominated documentary “Queer for Fear.”)

Once he had his theme, Perkins said he needed “a delivery system of that truth.” “I knew I wanted to make a movie that netted more eyeballs, that was an easier in for people than the previous pictures had been,” he explained. “I very shamelessly and deliberately said, ‘Well, probably a serial killer movie.’” He was fascinated by how many assassin movies were coming out (“That’s not even a real job”) and figured a serial killer movie was as good a delivery system as any. “There also hadn’t been a really good one in a while,” Perkins noted. “There’s only a couple of really great ones and they were from the ‘90s when I was a kid.” Perkins remembered seeing Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” and David Fincher’s “Se7en” and thinking, Wow, these are perfect . “Every once in a while, there’s a perfect movie. And here’s two of them and they happen to be in the serial killer genre.”

He soon landed on a notion — What if an audience was given a chance to see “Silence of the Lambs” again? “Wouldn’t they like that? Wouldn’t they take that hook?” Perkins shared. “The idea was — redo it, come in the same door, but once you’ve invited the vampire into the door, it is what it is. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen … usher the audience in and then drop them off.”

Perkins also said he was more interested in “pop art than I am Gothic art or anything like that.” The ’90s setting was a key part of the movie’s pop architecture. “This movie is very pop. And it starts with reproducing ‘Silence of the Lambs,’” Perkins said. “If it’s pop art, then you want to adhere to certain indicators. And so the ‘90s became an easy indicator that we were in the realm of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Se7en.’ We were wanting to sit alongside the good ones and invite the audience into a safe space.”

Of course, the casting of Cage, an actor who careens between sincerity and kitsch (all with full commitment) was also a key part of the pop art aspect of “Longlegs.” “It really works much better than anybody else in the part because he does bring that pop sensibility — the idea that this is being performed was always an important aspect of the Longlegs character. He’s a performer,” Perkins said.

Working with Cage, the director added, was fascinating because he is an actor who really appreciated the script. “He connects to the words and likes the poetry and likes the cadence and likes the melody of it,” Perkins said. “He doesn’t change any of the words. Everything that Cage says in ‘Longlegs’ was part of the original script that I sent him.” Cage doesn’t ad-lib; he strictly adheres to what is there, with the delivery being crucially important. “If the music of it works, Nicolas Cage will hear it,” Perkins said. “From there, everything gets built. The cadence of speech, where punctuation is sets the tone of how he talks, the volume in which he says things, all of that becomes part of what gets played through the instrument. That’s Nicolas Cage. If the script is the sheet music, then Cage is the instrument.”

The look of Cage’s character was something that he and Perkins built together. Cage told Perkins that he wanted to disappear under prosthetics, so together they worked with make-up artists to get the design just right, with Perkins saying things like, “Oh that’s too much — the nose is too big, the chin is too big, that’s looking a little ‘Dick Tracy,’ let’s take it down.” What he was trying to capture in the character was “the embarrassment of plastic surgery, the shame that one wears with badly done plastic surgery.” For much of the film, Cage is obscured, or slightly out of frame, which was again inspired by a ‘90s serial killer classic. “That’s the trick of ‘Se7en,’” Perkins said. “We don’t see him until he gives himself up in the police station.” With Cage’s appearance, Perkins “wanted to show someone who had been wasted by their employer, that their employment with the devil had not treated them well, so by the time he’s finally revealed, he looks like shit.”

For Perkins’ next swing, he’s adapted Stephen King’s short story “The Monkey” (originally published in Gallery magazine in 1980 and included in King’s “Skeleton Crew” collection in 1985). It’s out early next year from Neon, who is also releasing “Longlegs.”

“The best news about it is that it could not be more different than ‘Longlegs,’” Perkins confirmed. When he was given the project, he knew that it would be “more ‘Creepshow.’” “It’s a comedy about the fact that we all die,” Perkins said. “The basic premise of ‘The Monkey,’ of course, is there’s a toy monkey and when it winds up and plays its thing, people die. It’s the curse of the family who found it. Extrapolating out from that, I wanted to make a movie about the fact that everybody dies. It’s not the f–king monkey that makes people die. Everybody dies and that’s life. And to make a delirious throwback comedy that feels like ‘Gremlins’ or ‘American Werewolf in London’ felt like a better medium than doing something serious.”

“The Monkey” will be followed by “Keeper” (again, for Neon), which he described as “a two-hander over the course of a night or two at a house in the woods that follows the end of a relationship.”

When asked if Perkins had any IP in mind that he’d like to tackle, he offered, “They don’t let you pervert things like ‘Doctor Strange,’ There’s too many safeguards in place at those places to be able to really actually do that. That said, he did say he was looking at a couple of interesting pieces of IP that he could “reinvent, in a sense not try to remake the thing.” He remembers Luca Guadagnino, who said, “I can’t remake ‘Suspiria,’ I can only remake how I felt when I saw ‘Suspiria.’” “I thought that was such an intelligent thing to say,” Perkins praised. “And I loved his remake. I mean, it was pretty f–king great.”

Whatever Perkins wants to make — or remake — we’ll be there for it.

“Longlegs” is in theaters now.

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