‘Longlegs’ Director Osgood Perkins Explains the ‘Tragic’ Ending, Those Satanic Dolls and Borrowing From ‘Se7en’

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers about “Longlegs,” now playing in theaters.

Even before its release, critics and horror fans who saw director Osgood Perkins’ serial killer thriller “Longlegs” praised it as one of the darkest, most sinister movies in recent memory. Now that the film is finally in theaters, audience members can check it out for themselves, but it’s safe to say: The horror hype is real.

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From Nicolas Cage’s performance as a demented serial killer to the pitch-perfect dark ending, “Longlegs” will leave even the staunchest horror aficionados stunned. The murder mystery has twists galore, and people going into the movie blind won’t be able to predict how it ends up.

Perkins sat down with Variety to discuss the ending, but those who want to go into the movie unspoiled should tread carefully. Ready?

It’s eventually revealed in “Longlegs” that FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) has a personal connection to Cage’s killer. After it’s teased in the film’s prologue, Lee later realizes that Longlegs visited her home as a child on her birthday, just like he does for all of his victims. Though, for some reason, she survived.

During her investigation, Lee connects the dots that Longlegs must have had an accomplice for all of his gruesome murders. But who? After the FBI captures him, Longlegs tells Lee to talk to her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt). He then brutally smashes his face on the table after his interrogation, killing himself.

Lee drives over to her mother’s house to discover the truth: She was Longlegs’ secret partner all along. After Longlegs visited Lee as a child, Ruth made a deal with him to protect her daughter. Ruth dressed up as a nun and visited families’ homes to drop off mysterious dolls as gifts from the church. Longlegs infused the dolls with supernatural, Satanic whisperings, which put the family in a brainwashed trance and convinced them to murder each other. Longlegs lived in the Harkers’ basement, and Lee’s doll gave her psychic abilities.

After Ruth destroys Lee’s doll and escapes, Lee pinpoints her mother’s next target: the home of FBI Agent Carter (Blair Underwood). It happens to be Carter’s daughter’s birthday, but Lee is too late. Ruth is already there in the living room with a doll, and the Carter family is brainwashed. Agent Carter kills his wife in the kitchen, and just before he goes after his daughter, Lee shoots her mother and breaks the trance. However, Lee runs out of bullets and the doll is intact. The movie ends with an ominous “Hail Satan!” from Longlegs, leaving the surviving characters’ fates unclear.

Where did the character Longlegs come from? Did you have him in mind then build the movie around him, or were you making a murder mystery and then created this villain?

It was building around the character of Longlegs, which was a character that had tried to make himself fit into other projects that I had worked. 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. You end up with a universe of things that are swirling around, and you try to pull them out and stick them in. Longlegs was an entity, this shabby — is he a birthday clown? Is he a puppet master? Does he deal with stuffed animals? Is it little pianos? You start to wonder about this person who comes to your kid on their birthday and you’re in another room and you don’t know they’re interacting and that’s weird. He doesn’t abduct the kids because we’ve seen that 1,000 times before. He kind of talks to them. You start to be curious about that. When I decided that I was going to try for a serial killer procedural that was going to be something else, I needed a bad guy. Longlegs was like, “I’ll do it.” In your drawer of ideas, one of them says, “Put me in, coach.” And in goes Longlegs.

The word “Longlegs” itself is just so creepy, but we don’t get a reason for why he calls himself that. Where did that name come from?

We writers just like words. We like how certain words sound and look and shape and feel. Yeah, it has daddy longlegs and a creepy-crawly aspect to it, but it also feels ’70s to me — almost like a Led Zeppelin song or someone would have on the side of their van, something groovy like that. It feels like a vintage word that people wouldn’t toss around much today. It positioned the movie in a weird place. You don’t get to fully understand it. It doesn’t fully fit, which is more alluring to me and creates a curiosity that I think is important.

Your previous movie, “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” also featured Satanism, but this film takes it up a notch. What made you want to tackle that again?

All of this Baroque devil worship, it’s not that I don’t take it seriously; to me, it’s window dressing. It’s like Halloween stuff, people getting dressed up. It’s just ceremony and pomp and circumstance and music and celebration and weirdness. It’s all the things the horror genre wants to be, this exploration of what we don’t understand. That’s really intriguing and attractive. I really just tried to make something that would be noticeable and enjoyable, especially to a horror audience. Horror audiences put up with a lot of bad stuff and they take it because they need it; they need the horror fix. But every once in a while you want to give them something that’s a little bit more manicured and curated for them.

Longlegs’ dolls have this supernatural element to them. Do you have an explanation for how they actually work?

I do, but I won’t say. It’s part of the playfulness of the devil. Wouldn’t it be kind of amazing if you brought a doll into someone’s house and it made everybody crazy. 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.

We don’t find out Ruth’s religion, but it appear to be some form of Christianity. Did you have a specific religion in mind or intend the movie to be a critique on it?

I’m not religious. I don’t take religion either seriously or not seriously; it’s not my place to tell people what they should believe or feel or where they should go to feel safer or guilty or whatever they need. I think it’s just sometimes sort of funny that people are devout. People are funny, right? We’re all running around doing our thing trying to stay above water. Even Ruth Harker has the last laugh at that notion of prayers. Like, prayers? Everybody’s praying. Everybody in the Middle East is praying all the fucking time. And then using stuff from the Bible, it just has good language in it. The Bible just has some fucking crazy, funky language in it. “A beast rising out of the sea with 10 horns and heads and crowns.” It’s awesome. Not to be sophomoric about it, but the Bible has a lot of really fun, silly wording in it that’s useful if you’re a writer just looking for words.

Was that always the ending you had in mind? Was there ever a lighter ending for the movie?

That was always the ending. The ending was meant to be tragic. 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.” It never gets to that point for me with the devil. The devil is a little more amusing and playful than that. The story of Lee Harker ends with the ending of the movie. The last shot that she fires is the worst thing that can happen to her.

Killing off Longlegs before the ending of the movie is such a surprising moment. Did you ever plan to have him stick around longer?

We were consciously aware of our references and we wanted to create a pop art piece. As many times we could crib or steal a move from one of the great serial killer movies, we wanted to do it. That’s just “Se7en.” I think Kevin Spacey has three or four scenes, right? He gives himself up, he’s in the thing and then he’s in the car and there’s the end. He’s always present, which we had with Cage too, like there’s a presence of this thing, but once you get to the guy, it’s almost anticlimactic. Of course, he becomes very climactic in “Se7en,” but I love the fact that John Doe and gave himself up. We wanted to sort of — “rip off” is not the right word — “borrow” is more close to what we were doing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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