Director Osgood Perkins Explains ‘Longlegs’ Ending, Satanic Dolls, and ‘Se7en’ Influences

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.

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 discussed the ending but issued a warning for those wanting to experience the film unspoiled.

It’s eventually revealed 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. 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 disguised herself 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 remains intact. The movie ends with an ominous “Hail Satan!” from Longlegs, leaving the surviving characters’ fates unclear.

It was built 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, you end up with a universe of things that are swirling around. Longlegs was an entity, this shabby — is he a birthday clown? Is he a puppet master? Does he deal with stuffed animals? 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.

We writers just like words. We like how certain words sound and shape and feel. Yes, 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 something off the side of a van. 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.

Horror audiences tolerate a lot of subpar content, craving their horror fix. But every once in a while, you want to give them something more manicured and curated for them.

Longlegs’ dolls have this supernatural element to them. 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? It’s almost like, “You didn’t have to sign for that! Just because a nun brought it in doesn’t mean you should let her into your place with 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. The Bible has a lot of exciting language in it. “A beast rising out of the sea with 10 horns and heads and crowns.” It’s useful if you’re a writer just looking for words.

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 mess with this person, I’ll wreck this family,” never trying to dominate the world.

We were consciously aware of our references and aimed to create a pop art piece. We borrowed heavily from movies like “Se7en.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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