I Genuinely Cannot Watch "Longlegs" The Same Way After Learning These 15 Fascinating Facts
Longlegs was released in theaters earlier this month and suddenly became the movie EVERYONE was talking about.
It made $22.4 million during its opening weekend, the highest total for an original horror movie in 2024.
Here are 15 behind-the-scenes facts about the movie that you probably didn't know, but definitely should:
1.Longlegs director Oz Perkins is the son of actor Anthony Perkins, who most notably played Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho movies.
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2.Oz has also done some acting himself. He played Dorky David in Legally Blonde.
3.Longlegs is set in the '90s because that era was a "formative" time for Oz. "The ’90s was a formative time for me," he told Deadline. "I was graduating high school, these great movies were coming out, my father died, shit was happening, like a lot of stuff was very much coming together."
"It was that transition from childhood to stupid young adulthood, where you don’t know anything and you’re out in the world. So those elements just made it a good time to be in," he added.
4.The film was initially set in 1992 but was pushed forward a year because Oz didn't want the presidential photographs to be of George H. W. Bush. “I realized that if it was 1992, all the presidential photographs would be of George Bush, so I just tweaked it up by a year so it would at least be Bill Clinton. Not that he’s any better,” he told IndieWire.
5.Nicolas Cage plays Longlegs and said that he took inspiration from his mother, who lived with conditions like schizophrenia and severe depression throughout her life until she died in 2021, when creating the role. "It’s the voices, it’s not really him; he’s been hijacked by something else," he explained to The Hollywood Reporter. "I’ve often thought what was it that happened to my mom — if I’m any good in this movie, it’s because of my mother. That also gave me a bit of empathy for the character, as crazy as what his situation is and what he’s getting up to with these effigies."
He also told Entertainment Weekly, "It was a deeply personal kind of performance for me because I grew up trying to cope with what she was going through. She would talk in terms that were kind of poetry. I didn't know how else to describe it. I tried to put that in the Longlegs character because he's really a tragic entity. He's at the mercy of these voices that are talking to him and getting him to do these things."
6.Maika Monroe, who plays Lee Harker, didn't even meet Nicolas Cage before filming began. Oz wanted to keep them both separate until their characters came face-to-face at the end of the film. "I wasn't shown any photos of what he looked like [as Longlegs]," she told Seth Meyers. "It wasn't until I was brought up to the interrogation door. The director called 'Action!' and I walked into the room, and there was Nic Cage in...I mean, it was fucking crazy."
There's a scene early on in the film where Longlegs can be seen lurking in Lee's home. However, Nicolas Cage wasn't the one playing the role then. It was his stand-in.
7.During their first meeting, Maika had a small mic taped to her chest that could pick up the thumping of her heart. According to the film's production company, Neon, Maika's heartbeat reached 170 beats per minute when she finally met Nicolas Cage in his full Longlegs form. Her resting heart rate is 76 bpm.
"Because I was freaking out, about to have a panic attack, they were able to pick up my heart beating," she told Entertainment Weekly.
8.Creating the character of Longlegs took a lot of collaboration between Nicolas and Oz. Nicolas began preparing for the role around Christmas of 2022. Nicolas said that Oz even called "at 4:30 in the morning on Christmas Day two years ago" to get soundbites of Nicolas rehearsing the dialogue.
"I started memorizing my dialogue and trying to find a way into it," Nicolas told Entertainment Weekly. "I kept going over it and over it. By the time I got to Canada, I was shooting rehearsals on my cell phone and trying to find the moves and the rhythms and melodies of the Longlegs character so that by the time I got on set, it was so dialed in and became almost like performing a song or a bit of music."
Oz compared working with Nicolas on this as similar to a student showing the teacher their homework. "[He] sort of does his homework and brings it to me at the front of the classroom, and I sort of check it, and if something looks good, I say yeah, if something is a little too far, I bring it back," he explained to The Hollywood Reporter. "I’m just curating it, I’m not telling him what to do."
9.And then when creating Longlegs' physical appearance, it was about "finding this very androgynous, he-she look, glam rock look." Nicolas told The Hollywood Reporter, "That was important to me so that he didn’t look anything like me and that I found liberating, that I could speak in this way and move in this way and talk about these very dark things. I wanted the character to be an androgynous almost prophet, in the Fellini movie Juliet of the Spirits."
Oz said that for the voice, “We talked about what was the opposite of being aggressive. Was there sort of a feminine aspect that would be interesting?”
10.Longlegs' pale appearance was inspired by Bob Dylan. "The pale makeup is Bob Dylan," Oz told IndieWire. "Bob Dylan’s my god, and so I’m always looking for ways to use Bob’s stuff, and that white makeup that he uses on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour is this weird sort of performative thing."
"It’s like, ‘I’m here to perform for you, and I put on this white makeup, so I’m more visible to you in a way, but at the same time, I’m also more invisible,’ which I find fascinating," he added.
11.Longlegs is also meant to look like he's been through several botched plastic surgeries. "His jam is really that he’s trying to make himself beautiful for the devil," explained SFX makeup artist Harlow MacFarlane. "He’s in love with the Devil, and he’s trying to impress the Devil, so he’s gone through all these plastic surgery botch jobs to make himself look as pretty as he can for the Devil. Everything he does is for this evil force that he’s trying to impress."
“You can just imagine it’s some hack job of a doctor in a strip mall somewhere,” Harlow added. To get the look just right, Harlow worked with Oz and Nicolas to make Longlegs look like he'd gotten too much filler and had excessive scarring.
Oz also wanted Longlegs to feel wrong about his work for the devil. He told Deadline, "Like sometimes it’s really too much, and he’s thinking, 'I’ve lost the colour in my hair, and I ruined myself with plastic surgery, and I’m fucking sad, and I’m just trying to be nice to this little girl at a hardware store, and she thinks I’m a fucking creep, because I am a creep, and I’m gross, and I’m lonely, and I’m sad, and I’m the monster, but I’m also lonely and sad.’”
12.The teenager working in the hardware store is Oz's daughter Bea.
13.Longlegs was partly inspired by The Silence of the Lambs. Oz explained that he felt The Silence of the Lambs similarities would help get people to the theater to see the film. He explained to Gizmodo, "When I sat down to write the movie, the question in my mind was: what’s the invitation to the audience that I can make early on that sort of gets people in the roller coaster car. What gains them admission to the world?"
“The Silence of the Lambs stuff, it’s like your admission ticket. It gets you through the door,” he told IGN during another interview.
He also added, "I just cheated. I just used it as a crib, as a way to soften or tenderize the audience, to say, 'You know, it’s this! You remember this.' And then, of course, take a pretty hard left turn to make it not that at all."
14.Oz said that he'd listen to T. Rex's music while writing the script. "As the writer who’s essentially alone, I’m showing up every day to the computer by myself, no one’s there to help me, and it can be quite miserable at times," he told IndieWire. "To my mind, I got to be open to what else is out there to help. Angels, whatever you want to call it. I started listening to [T. Rex] while I was writing, and it was like the universe, or the source, or the muse, or whatever you wanna call that saying, 'I think it’s T. Rex.'"
"T. Rex just became correct. The humor of it became right, the language of it became right, the look became right, the affectation became right, and it just fit." he added.
15.Finally, Maika said that filming a movie like this can take a toll on her mentally, so to decompress, she watches rom-coms like When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and 10 Things I Hate About You. "I've figured out the easiest ways for me to tap into that darkness and then get out of it," she told Entertainment Weekly.
Longlegs is in theaters now.
