Watching the new horror film Longlegs, you can pick up on some of its movie DNA – from Silence Of The Lambs to Se7en to The Shining – but the larger truth is that is that it’s a unique cinematic experience. While unfurling a story that sees the FBI on the hunt for a dangerous serial killer, it establishes a foreboding and powerful atmosphere that is not only a constant, palpable presence while watching the work but stays with you days later. It’s unlike anything audiences have seen… why is why it makes sense to a certain degree that writer/director Osgood Perkins took in a lot of random inspiration and made a lot of strange recommendations to his cast and crew.
With Longlegs making its debut in theaters this weekend following weeks full of positive buzz, I had the pleasure of interviewing Osgood Perkins and star Maika Monroe last week during the film’s virtual press day. I opened the conversation asking Perkins about establishing the special atmosphere of the movie and what he watched to stimulate his creativity, and he explained that he purposefully didn’t go about watching a bunch of serial killer features in the writing and development of his own entry to the subgenre. Said the filmmaker,
I mean, if I'm in a good limber day and it's a good writing day, then this stuff is flowing through the channel. And so any project just becomes a sampling of things about me... In the case of this movie, the setup had to be like Silence of the Lambs; we knew that much going in, that that was gonna be a rule that we were gonna follow. But for the most part, I'm pulling very disparate comps and inspirations and influences and things. And I'm saying lots of really oblique things to people and having them watch movies that have nothing to do with what we're doing. Because you can't go straight at something, right? You kind of have to come at it from a side.
So what were the kinds of things that Osgood Perkins had cast and crew watch? As he described it, it was all about having “an adventure in good taste.” Rather than specifically draw ideas from movies that are of a kind with Longlegs (a.k.a. part of the same genre and subgenre), he instead suggested the dark family drama of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under The Influence and the filmography of Oscar-nominated great Gus Van Sant. Said Perkins,
I think I said to Maika, I don't know if you watched, but it said like, A Woman Under The Influence. I was like, 'I don't know. There's no serial killers in that. There's no anything in that, but like, it's just a fucking perfect thing.’ So why not feel good about something else that's been made that's been perfect? Or I told the DP, my director of photography, we looked at a lot of Gus Van Sant movies. I mean, talk about good taste, right? So it's just like, let's have an adventure in good taste. Watch Last Days, or watch My Own Private Idaho just have like a moment of good taste and let's try to copy it.
Set in Oregon in the 1990s, Longlegs follows young FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she gets enlisted in the mission to track down a psychopath who has spent years following a specific pattern killing families. The strange modus operandi sees the film’s eponymous killer (Nicolas Cage) somehow influencing normal people to lose their minds and murder each other, and Harker has to find out both who this stranger is and how he does what he does.
Explaining his personal writing process, Osgood Perkins said that he didn’t really find himself aiming at particular works in the development of the script, and instead, he just poured everything from himself into Longlegs. Or as he put it:
I think that what ends up happening when I'm writing, when I'm putting out, right, when it's time for me to be in output mode, is that what could possibly be happening besides everything that's been input has been sort of churned through my experience, through my feelings, my sensibilities, my taste, my good, my bad, my shadow, my light. And it comes out as this other thing. And my job is just to sort of curate that so it makes sense to somebody else besides myself. Whatever's in me is coming out onto the page, hopefully.
Co-staring Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt, Longlegs has earned raves from critics, with many already calling it the best horror films of the year, and it’s in limited release now. For a look ahead at everything that is heading to streaming and theaters in the coming weeks and months, check out our 2024 Movie Release Calendar.
