Longlegs Director Oz Perkins Finally Weighed In On Whether His Film Is Transphobic
JC Olivera/Getty Images for Neon
Longlegs director Oz Perkins weighed in on the online discourse surrounding his acclaimed horror film with some choice words for transphobic bigots.
During a recent Reddit Q&A with Perkins, one commenter noted that their friend came away from Longlegs with the impression that it was anti-trans, based on how Nicolas Cage’s eponymous serial killer character was styled.
“[My friend] read an interview with you where she thinks you’re saying that Longlegs is a monster because he’s trans and that his femininity is disgusting,” the Reddit user wrote. “I read the same article and didn’t get that at all, nor did I get anything trans-related in the film at all. My take was he was a failed glam rock musician who had bad plastic surgery, which is basically what the article said. Can you settle the score for us?”
Perkins’ response didn’t mince words: “Anyone who is anti-trans is a fucking piece of shit idiot and it would be great to not be confused with a fucking piece of shit idiot.”
Although the aforementioned Redditor didn’t specify the exact Perkins interview they were referring to, the director’s recent chat with Deadline seems to match the description. In the article, Deadline’s Destiny Jackson asked Perkins about his decision to show a bit of Longlegs’ day-to-day life so that audiences “get a little bit of him without really knowing everything.”
In response, Perkins said that he wanted to juxtapose the idea that Longlegs was an omnipresent yet unseen monster with the fact that “he’s a shitty person who’s been through the wringer.”
The film has been accused of using transphobic tropes, but *Longlegs* knows what it's doing.
“Like sometimes it’s really too much and [Longlegs is] thinking, ‘I’ve lost the color 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 the monster, but I’m also lonely and sad,’” Perkins said.
As Them editor Samantha Allen noted in a recent essay on the subject, some moviegoers have argued that Longlegs equated transfemininity with villainy because the titular character resembles a ragged glam rocker with long hair and androgynous clothing. However, as she pointed out, the film seems far more interested in exploring the long-term, almost otherworldly implications of parents keeping monumental secrets from their children in hopes of protecting them.
Although Perkins has become an accomplished horror filmmaker, he was previously best known for being Psycho star Anthony Perkins’ son. The monumental 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film has a thorny legacy when it comes to queerness: Although the movie explicitly states that Anthony’s murderous character Norman Bates is “not a transvestite,” the famous image of Norman dressing up as his late mother to kill people did associate transfeminine aesthetics with monstrosity in popular culture. Also complicating Psycho’s queer legacy is the fact that Anthony himself died from complications of AIDS in 1992, and his wife, Berry Berenson, helped hide the actor’s queerness from their children, according to Oz.
“Everything that I try to do [as a filmmaker], I try to make it about myself from the beginning,” Oz Perkins recently told People. “What’s the simple truth that I can use as a kind of a North Star? In my case, I grew up in a household with a very famous, visible father who was living two lives, at least, and was a closeted homosexual or bisexual man.”
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