The Big Picture

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sits down with Oz Perkins and Maika Monroe for a
Longlegs
spoiler interview.
The duo address the meaning of the film’s title, what lies ahead for Lee Harker, and more.

Longlegs
is currently playing in theaters nationwide, where it’s breaking box office records for Neon.

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Longlegs.]If you were in the market for a nightmarish film that would burrow its way into your brain and leave an evil smoke-filled orb there, you got just that via Longlegs. Yes, Oz Perkins’ latest is a mighty satisfying sinister mystery, but it’s also one that leaves you with questions that are tough to shake. Questions like, what exactly happens to someone when their doll and orb are shattered? What does the future hold for Maika Monroe’s Lee Harker after what she’s been through? Did she vanquish the evil by stopping the pattern, or will it continue to follow her forever?

In the film, Lee manages to connect the dots. Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) kills by creating dolls with a highly unusual brain, an orb that packs the power to influence those near it. But how does he get the doll into his victims’ homes? That’s where Lee’s own mother (Alicia Witt) comes in. She’s Longlegs’ accomplice. Ruth agreed to help Longlegs in exchange for Lee’s life. Posing as a nun, she delivers these deadly dolls as gifts from the church, and the next recipient on her list is Ruby, the daughter of Lee’s superior at the FBI, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood). Lee manages to save Ruby, but must kill both Agent Carter and her mother in the process. Before leaving the house, Lee attempts to shoot Ruby’s doll, but her gun doesn’t fire.

What does it mean? An eight-minute interview was nowhere near enough time to parse through it all, but Perkins and Monroe did offer up some very curious insight that’s bound to make your head spin in the best possible way. Hear it straight from them in the video above, or you can read the spoiler-filled interview in the transcript below.

PERRI NEMIROFF: Oz, I have a big two-parter to start for you. What was the original idea that started it all? But then also, did you have a break story moment on Longlegs? An idea you came up with that made you think, “It is whole now?”

OZ PERKINS: What a great question. The original intention was to make a movie that more people could access, that would please a greater swath of the general audience. I thought the way to do that would be to sort of cue Silence of The Lambs and refresh people’s memory of that and their memory of the experience of that, and then snuggle up next to one of the great things of all time as a means of getting into something else, right? Sort of going through the door of that, but then opening up into a different landscape. So that was the intention. That’s how I started to move.

Was there an aha moment? In the movie, after Longlegs kills himself in the interrogation room and she goes to her mom’s house, and she goes inside, and her mom’s outside in the nun’s garb with the shotgun, to me, when I had that and I had the quality of, “Oh, she shoots the FBI agent through the door, and then she goes around, she goes and makes sure she shoots a second time,” that was a moment where I was like, “Oh, I understand how in it the Ruth Harker character is; how invested she is in this choice that she’s made.” It’s almost a weird sympathetic attitude you start to take towards your characters, which you wanna do. You wanna like your characters no matter who they are. And so there was something so efficient about her in that moment. Sort of just like, “I’m really gonna get the job done. I’m gonna shoot this FBI person. I’m gonna blow them up twice just to make sure that my daughter is safe.” And when she does that action and seeing it in the movie now, it is for me still the part of the movie where everyone’s like, “Oh, well, fuck, I thought this was a whole other fucking thing.”

How Did Oz Perkins Come Up With the Name Longlegs?
Image via Neon

A little more of a straightforward question now; why the name Longlegs? How did you settle on that?

PERKINS: I don’t know if it has meaning or not. It doesn’t have meaning. I like words, and it’s a good word. It sounds good. It sounds sort of scary but also sort of fun. It sounds pure. It sounds like ’70s to me. It sounds like something that maybe Robert Plant would have sung in a Zeppelin song. It has an old pin-up quality to it. It invokes a certain time, I suppose, and there’s an awkwardness to it that he has, that the character has sort of an uneasy clumsiness to him. I don’t know; it just feels good.

Maika, one thing that caught my ear is when it’s mentioned she wanted to be an actress and then she decided she wanted to be an FBI agent. Did you figure out what happened to her that made that switch happen in that way at that particular point?

MONROE: There’s a very big changing point, obviously, on her ninth birthday. It’s an incredibly traumatic experience, and it’s said when a person goes through a traumatic experience, that’s where your maturity stops. I think it’s the same with kids that get super famous at a young age. It can kind of shut down this growth or maturity. So I thought that that was something interesting to play with and, like what Oz has said, there’s Lee prior to nine and then Lee post-nine, and I think it was so brilliant with bringing that line — it just showed this polar opposite young girl to what she is now.

PERKINS: Could you imagine Lee auditioning for a play?

MONROE: That’d be so sweet.

What Happens to Someone When Their Orb Is Shattered?
Image via Neon

Related This ‘Longlegs’ Scene with Maika Monroe & Nicolas Cage Is VERY Real While on Collider Ladies Night, Monroe recaps her journey from professional kiteboarder to certified horror queen.

So there’s pre-nine Lee, there’s post-nine Lee. There’s also pre-brain ball breaking Lee and post. What was it like figuring out how that felt for her emotionally and also physically?

MONROE: With Lee, there’s so much that has been suppressed, so much that has been blocked out of her mind, and I think within a very short period of time, almost everything gets brought to the surface. Everything that she thought she knew is gone, is destroyed and I think you see everything falling down around her, and how you handle all this information. It was a lot.

I love the shot after, when she comes to in the basement and you get that upside-down reveal. Oz, I feel bad because I’m essentially gonna ask you to pick a favorite child now, but do you have a single favorite frame in Longlegs?

PERKINS: The very first shot of the movie was always the first shot of the movie from the minute that I started to do it. It’s a fixed camera from the passenger seat of Longlegs’ car looking through the black veil to the house that they’re going to up the road, and that, we just got it exactly as I saw it. It’s rhythmically right for me, it’s matter of fact in a way that’s right for me. It’s like, this is just what’s happening now. Like one day, a car just comes, and then everything changes, right? That’s just how life is, right? One day, the thing happens, and everything was fine, and then it’s not fine. That approach up to the house is just right for me, I think we really got that right.

What Happens Next? Is Lee Harker Free of This Evil?

I feel like a jerk asking you to explain away the ending of your movie, but I can’t stop thinking about what her next moves could be. How much thought have you put into that? Is it a situation where the evil continues to follow her? Does she have to repeat the cycle?

PERKINS: I’ve talked about it a little bit. I feel like it is complete for her. Where she has to get to at the end, her final act with her mom is the worst thing that you can do, right? Matricide, let’s say, is probably the lowest form of — that’s your worst moment, right? You can’t be like, “Oh, well, something else sucked worse than that.” So I think the fact that the devil gets it to this place where that’s what she has to do, the devil’s like, [wipes hands clean].

So it doesn’t matter that Ruby’s doll has not been broken?

PERKINS: Not my problem.

MONROE: Hands up on that one.

I like that. I feel like that puts my mind at ease a little.

PERKINS: It should! It’s contained. It’s done. It’s over.

Looking for even more Longlegs talk? You can catch my conversation with Blair Underwood below:

Longlegs A chilling horror thriller directed by Osgood Perkins. The film stars Maika Monroe as Lee Harker, a promising new FBI agent assigned to solve the mystery of an elusive serial killer played by Nicolas Cage. As Harker delves deeper into the case, she uncovers disturbing evidence of occult practices connected to the murders.Release Date July 12, 2024 Cast Maika Monroe , Nicholas Cage , Alicia Witt , Blair Underwood Runtime 101 Minutes Distributor(s) Neon Expand

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