Everything Evil: How Longlegs Is Osgood Perkins’ Popcorn Movie

Osgood Perkins (right) on location for Longlegs with cinematographer Andres Arochi. The serial killer horror, starring Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe, is in theatres now. (Photo by Asterios Moutsokapas, courtesy of Neon)

Satanic malice lurks in both Osgood Perkins’ debut movie, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, and his latest, Longlegs. But for the director that’s not what really binds the two films together.

In The Blackcoat’s Daughter (which he still refers to by its original title, February, the horned beast stalks in the shadows of a closed all-girls’ school in the winter. Longlegs centers instead on an FBI Agent (Maika Monroe) pursuing a serial killer (Nicolas Cage) in the Pacific Northwest in 1991, only to find that hellish forces may be his co-conspirator.

However, for Perkins the similarity between the two is that they are both exactly the kind of film he wanted to make. “A way to think about it is that [February] was my first thing and therefore my most honest and closest to the bone, least distracted. I think coming back to Longlegs, given the things that had taken place and the movies I had made and COVID and all the things that were weird, life goes on, Longlegs felt like coming back to myself, coming back to what I like to do. Because that was the mode with February: I just want to make a movie that I would like, that I would think was cool.”

Perkins smiles and recalls what he would tell Greg Ng, Longlegs’ editor. “Sometimes I have to be happy too, Greg. Sometimes I have to feel good too.” For him, the film was an opportunity to “make something cool for making something cool’s sake. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. It’s a relaxed way to create, and I think it makes things better.”

With films like ghost story I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and fairytale nightmare Gretel & Hansel, Perkins has often been painted as an arthouse horror director. But while his visuals are often rich and complex, his stories are often deceptively clear, and with Longlegs he was intending to make his most popular and accessible movie to date. “I wanted more people to watch the movie, which seems like a completely wholesome intention.”

That’s why he made a film that he called “like a club sandwich” of horror moments with “a serial killer and a cop and the FBI and an axe murder and dolls and the Devil and a nun and blood.” That’s also why he’s not afraid of the comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs, which he called “a perfect thing, so why not snuggle up against the best thing?”

For him, the dark magic of The Silence of the Lambs is that director Jonathan Demme created a film that is “poetic and rich” – oft imitated, never duplicated, and head and shoulders above the endless stream of serial killer content that clogs up streamers like Netflix. Moreover, their quasi-serious approach to the most depraved of murderers doesn’t interest him in the slightest.

That’s why he wants Longlegs to be “almost a comfort watch.” He smiles again. “And then turn off with a pretty hard left turn.” However, he still believes it’s just a good, old-fashioned spooky wild ride, “so when people are like, ‘Oh my god, people are crying in the theatre; people can’t stand it; people are checking their Apple watches to make sure they’re OK; they’re checking they’re heart rates,’ I find that to be really crazy because it’s not the intention at all. The intention is to make a pop horror movie.”

Osgood Perkins (center) on the set of Longlegs with stars Blair Underwood (left) and Maika Monroe (right) (Photo by Asterios Moutsokapas, courtesy of Neon)

Austin Chronicle: When Jonathan Demme was hired for Silence of the Lambs, everyone thought he was the wrong guy, but he cracks the genre open. He tells people these films don’t need to be either a Friday the 13th knockoff or a particularly bleak episode of Kojak. He opens the language up

Osgood Perkins: I think there’s a thing you can say, and I’ve caught myself saying it too, which is that you can enjoy and like and laugh and love a movie about a serial killer, and not laugh about or love serial killers. They’re very different entities. Silence of the Lambs has nothing to do with serial killers. If you take Richard Ramirez on one side and Silence of the Lambs on the other, they have the words "serial killer" in their log line, but they are in no way related. Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy are in no way related to Silence of the Lambs. Silence of the Lambs is an opera. Silence of the Lambs is a poem. It’s like Homer compared to this dirty, miscreant, truly evil, truly evil, distasteful, should not be publicized – I’m not trying to be dogmatic about it, but Netflix doesn’t need to keep doing that stuff. "If it bleeds, it leads." I get it, you have to sell subscriptions or something, but that’s tabloid trash.

Silence of the Lambs permitted us to enjoy the fiction of it. There’s no Hannibal Lecter. That’s not what serial killers are like. Serial killers are pathetic dudes who just want to orgasm on a dead body. That’s all that is, and the poetry and the elegance and the language of Silence of the Lambs is what made it so great. The words. Everybody remembers the words of Silence of the Lambs; everybody remembers the dialogue. It doesn’t feel evil. It’s celebratory. It’s theatre, and that distinction is essential.

You lose touch with that in something like – and I’m not trying to criticize other people’s things – but like Mindhunter. It’s like, "Alright, it’s a bad thing and it’s grisly and it’s kind of ugly." Silence of the Lambs is never ugly. Neither is Se7en, by the way. It’s too smart. What a brilliant movie. What a perfect script. I’ll tell you who doesn’t write things – John Wayne Gacy. Richard Ramirez doesn’t write poetry.

AC: Terrible artist.

OP: Terrible artist. Charles Manson’s songs? No thanks.

"Why not snuggle up against the best thing?" Osgood Perkins on why he's not afraid of comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs for his new film Longlegs starring Maika Monroe. (Image Courtesy of Neon)

AC: You talked about the language of Silence of the Lambs, but your scripts are very spacious. So how do you build the visual language here? What were the touchstones for you?

OP: I think that it was in the same way that serial killer movies don’t have to do with serial killers, in the same way rock and roll like Black Sabbath uses the iconography, uses the majesty of the Devil. There’s nothing evil about Black Sabbath. There’s nothing evil about Judas Priest. There’s nothing evil about death metal bands. They’re not doing anything evil – the one exception being that one group, Swedish …

OP: Mayhem. Maybe they got a little close. But if you’re talking about Sabbath or somebody like that, the iconography is really playful, and it’s really theatrical, and it’s a good time. It’s fun and sexy and full of life. No one’s trying to hurt anybody. They’re trying to make you rock out, to feel alive. So when I’m thinking about the way things are going to look like, it’s more like the spirit of Halloween, the celebration of the weird darkness, the celebration of ... Shit, we all die and we’re all groping through life, wondering what’s behind the curtain. If you’re thinking of it in terms of Sabbath or Iron Maiden or the Misfits, it’s intelligent because it's got humor to it.

AC: It kind of reminds me of Stuart Gordon.

OP: Or Brian De Palma. Perfect example. Brian De Palma’s not out to hurt anybody. He’s just out to have a good time, and he loved movies. Part of the fun is that you’ve seen it before. Part of the fun of the Campbell’s soup can is that you recognize it from your own experience, and I think that type of pop attitude was driving me in Longlegs, just out of the pursuit of the not-serious.

You see a picture like Hereditary, which is a brilliant movie, but I can’t stand it. I can’t watch that. I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to be with that, and as a result didn’t see Midsommar, didn’t see Beau Is Afraid. I’m sure they’re really brilliant works, and [Ari Aster] is a great guy, but I don’t want to be put in that place. It doesn’t feel good.

Face to face: Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe in Longlegs, the new Satanic serial killer horror from Osgood Perkins (Images Courtesy of Neon)

AC: Maika Monroe’s performances are very internal, so it really fits with what you’re doing here. If you give her spaces and places in the script, she’s absolutely the perfect choice to fill those spaces with character development and emotion, almost wordlessly.

OP: She’s great, and I’ve always thought that her film acting was really sober in a really good way, and really understated in a great way, in the Michael Caine school that you just don’t blink, or in the Steve McQueen school of acting, giving his dialogue to other actors in the scene so the camera can just watch him listening. Those two things always struck me as being really interesting, and someone who has sort of a vacuum effect where things are being pulled toward them when they’re not really doing anything. There’s an absence of histrionics, an absence of emotion, an absence of demonstration, and that brings things toward the actor and therefore character and therefore the audience in a really interesting way.

The thing about Maika is that I’d known her movies, and Watcher was especially recent in my mind, and thinking, "Wow, what an understated, serious film performance," and I was really impressed that a young person could do that. Then meeting her in person, she’s just nothing like that. For me, the disparity between those two poles is really interesting. That wonderful thing that happens where the person on camera is not the person who you see at lunch.

AC: Why Cage? Because that seems like a simple question, but there are so many multiplicities of Cage. He’s so stylistically varied. You look at something like Pig and then you look at his big action stuff, and you wonder if it’s the same performer. So what did you want from him, knowing his tool kit is so huge?

OP The thing about him is that he, more than anyone I’ve worked with, loves movies, just worships movies. Actors, performances, movies, scripts, storylines, accents, everything. He ingests all of it; he reads everything. He reads every review – he and I text about what’s being written in reviews constantly. Song lyrics. He doesn’t miss anything. He has an incredibly encyclopedic catalogue mind where nothing slips by.

So I think the manifestation of that when you think of his career being so varied that he really tries to serve the thing that he’s in. Maybe somebody thinks that someone like Cage has an ego trip, but it’s completely the opposite. He engages the text and wants to be in service of the text, like I imagine Ian McKellen would be.

The most gratifying thing probably of my career was when I said to Cage, "Say whatever you want. You don’t have to say the dialogue. Make something up, please," and he says, "Nah, nah, nah, nah. I say every word the way that it’s written."

Longlegs is in cinemas now. Read our review and find showtimes here.