“Daddy! Mommy! Save Me From the Hell of Living!”: Longlegs

As the 90s seem to be seizing hold of the box office this summer (with Twister also reanimating as Twisters), it’s only right that someone should, er, take a stab at what amounts to an updated version of The Silence of the Lambs and Seven. That person is none other than the son of Anthony “Norman Bates” Perkins himself, Osgood Perkins (formerly known as “Oz”). And yes, being a child of such a particular kind of actor has undoubtedly influenced Perkins’ overall “spooky” bent in terms of generally opting to make creepy films (some of his previous ones include The Blackcoat’s Daughter, The Girl in the Photographs, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and, more commercially, Gretel & Hansel). That in addition to playing “Young Norman Bates” in 1983’s Psycho II. But, obviously, more than anything, the lives and deaths of Perkins’ parents would be enough to inspire him to pursue this genre (and for his brother, Elvis Perkins, to score the soundtrack for Longlegs as Zilgi).

It was already bad enough that Anthony, his long-closeted father (though, of course, it was an open secret in Hollywood), died of AIDS in 1992 (along with Robert Reed a.k.a. “Mr. Brady”), but then, nine years later, his mother, model/actress Berry Berenson, died in one of the planes that was hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center. Really, shit doesn’t get more horrific than that in terms of parent-related trauma and loss. Which is exactly why one of the most standout lines from Longlegs is: “Daddy! Mommy! Save me from the hell of living!” This delivered hauntingly and, it goes without saying, memorably by Nicolas Cage in the titular satanic killer role.

As for the nickname, well, it pertains to “Longlegs” approaching children with a life-size replica doll of themselves and, instead of bending down to meet them at their eye level, saying, “It seems I wore my long legs today.” The “jovial” saying usually directed at children (especially in a pre-twenty-first-century era) is, thus, turned on its ear (or leg)—rendered bone-chilling in a way that one never thought possible…and all done so simply, too.

Indeed, “simplicity” is the keyword for this film. As Perkins put it to The Wrap, in terms of conceptualization, “The basic step is to pick something that’s true. 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.” What builds out of that simplicity is a haunting, unforgettable story centered on a young FBI agent named Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, who, like Perkins, is also known for making mainly horror movies). Tasked with tracking an untrackable killer in the already ominous setting of the Pacific Northwest (rendering the supplemental Twin Peaks nod complete), Harker falls as far down the rabbit hole as Clarice Starling ever did. And, among one of her more unique skills (besides being what Karen [Amanda Seyfried] from Mean Girls would call “kind of psychic” and having a “fifth sense”), Harker is extremely well-versed in the Bible. A knowledgeability that leads her to decode Longlegs’ formerly undecodable letters to the police. Accordingly, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), Lee’s superior, is starting to understand why he enlisted her to take on this case.

Alas, the case quickly starts to take her on instead, permeating Lee’s entire life until it leads her down the path of having to question her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt, who, incidentally, was in Twin Peaks: The Return), about Longlegs’ appearance in Lee’s childhood decades prior, at a time when Marc Bolan and T. Rex would have been all the rage (another reason it was important to set the timeline of the story in the nineties for a flashback to the seventies). As far as Longlegs is concerned though, T. Rex remains “king” in his world (well, apart from Satan) as he constantly belts out chilling ditties of his own in the style of Bolan. This, of course, was already foreshadowed by the opening title card featuring the “Get It On (Bang A Gong)” quote, “Well you’re slim and you’re weak/You’ve got the teeth of a hydra upon you/You’re dirty, sweet and you’re my girl.” “His girl,” unfortunately, extends to many children who grow up not fully aware that they’re under his spell (in this sense, there’s more than a touch of Charles Manson [no stranger to satanism and the occult] to the Longlegs character). Chief among them being Carrie Ann Camera (Kiernan Shipka, who also starred in Perkins’ The Blackcoat’s Daughter), the sole survivor of one of Longlegs’ killings, which always follow the pattern of infiltrating a family’s home and miraculously getting the father to slaughter his wife and children, with no signs of outside force anywhere.

With Lee’s gift for what some might call “supernatural” intuition (though not quite to the extent of Phoebe Halliwell’s [Alyssa Milano] premonitory abilities in Charmed), Perkins adds another element into his elixir of pastiche-laden ideas that are often incorporated into different sub-genres of thriller/horror films, rather than all rolled into one theoretically full-stop horror or psychological thriller movie. As he described, “This movie is very pop. And it starts with reproducing Silence of the Lambs. If it’s pop art, then you want to adhere to certain indicators. And so the nineties became an easy indicator that we were in the realm of Silence of the Lambs and Seven. We were wanting to sit alongside the good ones and invite the audience into a safe space.” Of course, what’s also important about the nineties as the film’s backdrop is that it makes it much more difficult for law enforcement to track a killer without the modern technology of today. And yes, even the Longlegs of 2024 would be forced to have a phone, freakshow or not (besides, how else would he troll plastic surgeons’ accounts?).

But no matter what decade Longlegs existed/came of age in, he seems the type that was doomed to be a failure. And it is precisely that failure that turns him toward darkness, toward channeling his “talents” into killing. Like the aforementioned Manson, Longlegs might not have become a satanic serial killer if his music career had taken off. As Perkins speculated, “Longlegs probably wanted to be a guitar player in a glam rock band called Longlegs. One day, the Devil started sounding through his headphones and through his records in the Judas Priest sense.”

Secret demonic messages hidden in backwards-playing vinyl aside, more than being a movie about a devil/glam rock-worshiping serial killer that targets children as the weak link for entry (a.k.a. possession), Longlegs speaks to the harmful ways in which parents lie to their children from an early age. All under the pretense of “protecting” them, of course (even from music like the kind T. Rex made)—but, in the end, that protection usually turns out to be a disservice. Especially as the child, in their “grown-up” years, has to learn how to actually grow up after being insulated from harsh reality for too long. Again, Perkins knows all about this, better than most people, in fact. To that point, he would also state of this particular theme in the film, “It’s a bad world, and when Ruth finally comes out with her truth and tells the story, it makes me think about my own parents. That resonates as the most dynamic section of the movie; the revelation.” No biblical pun intended…probably.