Longlegs, writer-director Osgood Perkins’ latest film, is a detective thriller that morphs into a special kind of religious horror. Maika Monroe stars as Agent Lee Harker. Somber and driven by an eerie intuition, Lee has to help find a serial killer who kills families in their homes, leaves behind notes that need to be deciphered, and yet leaves no sign of ever being in the home. As she assembles the pieces, she uncovers the series of occult clues that tie everything together.
We got the chance to talk with Osgood Perkins about crafting his story, the importance of trusting your creative team, and ultimately, why you should go into Longlegs expecting humor as much as scares.
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Longlegs, like Perkins’ other films, thrives in a unique visual style. With gorgeous and dynamic sets that take the mundane corners, doors, or windows of a house and transform them into foreboding horror elements, we asked Perkins how he arrived at his detailed set design.
Osgood Perkins explained, “It’s funny to talk about craft. I just do it.”
He explained, “I just write it. Yes, of course, tell the story and include the dialogue. But as important as all of that is to get all of the other artists who are going to collaborate on the movie on the same page with me as soon as possible. So, I tend to write more literary scripts. They’re not prescriptive—It’s not interior exterior. I don’t write those words because [they are] buzzkills. [Those words are] almost procedural or antiseptic, almost like medical, to say, interior and exterior. [Instead], I try to keep [everything] in the script itself because that’s what everybody that’s the one thing we all have in common [while working] on a movie, right?”
Keeping that common language allows Perkins to make sure creatives on the project are on the same page, but it also adds depth to how they communicate. Perkins continued, “We’re all working [with the] same text to make this script really robust. Sound is written into it. Thoughts are written into it. My thoughts are written into it—so that everybody’s in the same kind of stream of ideas and vibe. It’s everybody putting their best foot forward. [I align] myself with people whose artwork I respect and whose taste matches mine. If you have all that going [into filming, it’s] a kind of a nice, hot stew. You’ve got that going on with the base of a really kind of good script that’s working, and you can get a lot done. It’s not as hard if you set yourself up.”
One of the elements of the film that struck me was the fact that we know who Longlegs is, even before the mystery has begun. But that knowledge we have is obscured by the camera. It’s a mouth, hands, a car, a silhouette. Osgood Perkins’ slowly showing the man is what builds him up, and that connects us to Lee as she learns. That’s the point.
“Not seeing Longlegs directly was just a function of the sort of the main character’s psyche. [She’s someone] who can’t see him clearly, [but] who has seen him in on her ninth birthday. [He was] in her face, directly in front of her. She’s seen this guy. She’s experienced this guy. Not only that, but the story also reveals that he never left. He’s been in her life the whole time, but she can’t, she can’t see it. That’s the theme of the movie. We need to demonstrate that through the filmmaking,” Perkins explained.
He continued, ” So it’s written again, written into the script. She sees him kind of like you see a photograph that’s out of focus—or a photograph that’s been cropped. We just went in for this cropping feeling [with the camera because] in the narrative, he’s literally cropped out of her mind. You have to crop him out of the picture, and then when you do show him, it’s a matter of fact. There was nothing so special about him. He’s just a person. He’s just, like, a shitty, washed-up, kind of chewed-up husk of a person.”
But where there is nothing special about Longlegs, Special Agent Lee Harker doesn’t fit into the existing mold of other women in the genre. While many have lodged comparisons between Lee and Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, Lee’s connection to the darkness she’s chasing makes her stand apart.
Osgood Perkins drives this point home, “I think what sets Lee apart [from others] is that she’s connected to the darkness. She’s connected to the dark source that all the stuff is pouring out of in a way that those [other] detectives are not. Clarice Starling is the daughter of a cop, kind of like a good old-fashioned southern woman who doesn’t really come from the darkness. The idea is that Lee would be sort of a daughter of the darkness if you want to put it that way. She’s like a child of the same evil source that all this other stuff is. She’s so close to the case that she can see things, but she’s also so close to [the case] that she can’t see the things too.”
But darkness isn’t the only thing that Longlegs offers. It also offers a campy levity that taps into Nic Cage’s iconic filmography. It also adds softness to Lee’s character. “I think there’s, there’s quite a bit of levity and comedy that kind of sweetens [the film], like weird sort of sweetness, especially with Lee,” Perkins explains,
He continued, “To me, the movie is really funny, and I think all the audiences I’ve ever watched it with, they laugh a lot. I feel like it’s measured out. It’s never meant to be an onslaught. It’s still meant to be a song where there’s a refrain, and there’s a verse and a refrain and a verse and a bridge and all that. So it’s meant to have a rhythm that’s not like a chokehold the whole time. I do give you an opportunity to breathe and laugh and kind of adjust.”
That humor, while captured throughout the film, feels the freshest in a hardware store. Longlegs approaches the counter, says weird nothings, and makes a strange hand motion. He’s meant to be intimidating and scary, but the little girl (played by Perkins’ real-life daughter) behind the counter just calls her dad. In that scene, Osgood Perkins explains the importance of maintaining intelligence while crafting humor out of horror.
“You’re just trying to do something that is worthwhile,” he said, “Part of that is that you’re just trying to do something interesting or is intelligent—a big part of that is humor, and a big part of that is going left when everything else has gone right. In a setup like the hardware store, yes, the anticipation is that he’s going to do something bad or that he’s going to be in full evil mode. But in reality, he’s in his bathrobe and his slippers, and the girl at the hardware stores—played by my daughter, by the way—she doesn’t care. She’s totally bored by him. [He’s] just this guy that comes in all the time, because we established that he makes things. Anybody who’s a hobbyist or a builder, things like that, they’re always at the hardware store buying glue and things. So this was just someone who this girl had seen a lot. He was just—in her mind—just a gross dude. And I think that that that kind of juxtaposing his his real command over the world.”
That juxtaposition is important to the film and only manifests as Longlegs comes more into focus. “Everybody is in trouble because of Lonlegs. Everybody’s getting up in the morning to try to figure out what Longlegs is doing. Everybody’s trying to stop Longlegs. But the reality of him is that he’s really just this pathetic human entity that doesn’t have any power—like none of us really does. I wanted to highlight that discrepancy. I think I thought that was interesting and amusing… I wanted to be amused”
And that amusement is key to Osgood Perkins’ goal of the film. He wants you yo have a good time at the theater. “I want people to leave feeling that that was a fun time. Sure, it’s dark. Sure, it’s brutal. Sure, it’s scary. But that’s why, that’s why they walked in, right? They didn’t walk in to see Trolls or Minions or something. They walked in for that cathartic near-death experience thing that also you get let off the hook for. At the end, you get to go validate your parking, go home, and go to sleep. [I want you to think] it was pretty wild, but it was also sort of funny and kind of silly and kind of rock n’ roll and kind of punk and kind of pop, and it was a good time. I want people to enjoy themselves. I never set out to make people feel bad.”
Longlegs is playing now in theaters nationwide.
