LONGLEGS Director Oz Perkins Has a Horror Movie History Worth Exploring
Longlegs, the new Nicolas Cage-starring horror film from Neon, is a hit. Thanks in large part to a beguiling guerilla marketing campaign, the film grossed $22.6 million its opening weekend—the best opening ever for an independent horror movie. It’s exciting when any horror film breaks through, both at the box office and in the discourse cycle. Love it or hate it, Longlegs has people talking. And luckily, they’re not just arguing about the plot and ending, but also taking note of the filmmaker behind the movie: Osgood “Oz” Perkins.
For certain horror fans, it’s exciting to see Perkins finally getting his due. The man was pretty much born to create in the horror genre. He’s the son of Anthony Perkins, the actor who portrayed Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Sadly, the senior Perkins, a closeted gay man, succumbed to AIDS in 1992. Oz’s mother, actress and photographer Berry Berenson, was on American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. She died when the hijacked plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
These tragedies seemed to drive Oz right to horror storytelling. As he told the AV Club back in 2017, the genre is a “Trojan horse” way to convey stories of grief and anguish and familial pain to the masses. It hooks the audience and locks them into a story that might otherwise be hard to access emotionally. Perkins’ directing filmography—confirmed in interviews—makes it clear that he uses movies to explore the traumas nestled in his family.
If you’re new to Perkins and curious about the other horror films in his oeuvre after seeing Longlegs, here’s a breakdown of each one, why you should watch them, and why together they make Oz Perkins the underrated horror auteur with his finger on the pulse of our collective generational fears.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)
Though this was technically Oz Perkins’ second film release-date wise, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is the first movie he wrote, directed, and filmed. It came out in 2017 without much fanfare. A24 changed the horror game the very next year with Hereditary, so The Blackcoat’s Daughter just missed the wave that might have carried it to more recognition. But it all works out, because instead it’s something of a hidden gem, a movie horror fans can find on their own. That’s one of the best ways to engage with the genre.
And that’s an especially great way to experience The Blackcoat’s Daughter. It’s not exactly a scare-a-minute type of film. It probably wouldn’t play too excitingly in a big theater on a Friday night. But damn is it an effective slow-burn horror story, full of twists and one final shocker that reframes the entire movie and ties up its various timelines in a Gothically deranged bow.
The film stars Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, and Emma Roberts as three young women in interspersed storylines. Shipka and Boynton are schoolgirls at a Catholic academy waiting for their parents to pick them up for winter break. Roberts plays an escapee from a mental institution. If you’ve seen Longlegs, The Blackcoat’s Daughter will feel immediately familiar. It plays out with the same cold stoicism. Characters drained of energy, indebted to an unnameable melancholy. It’s also a spiritual twin to Longlegs, in how it plays with identity and family trauma through the lens of Satanic activity.
The great thing about the film is how boldly it announces Perkins’ sensibilities. Each film since plays in the same somber playbox. There are palettes drained of color and characters teetering on the brink of insanity. It conveys something about this moment we’re living in. How life can feel so absolutely hopeless that the instinct to cling to evil is understandable. Still awful, but not unrelatable. Giving into darkness is the easy route, but Perkins shows with detached accuracy how it creeps in, and the cost of letting it.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)
This gothic haunted house film—the first of Perkins’ to see release—is a great entry in a subgenre that’s mostly gone dusty. Yes, we have the Mike Flanagan Haunting series or the underseen The Little Stranger, but largely, it seems we’ve lost touch with this kind of horror vehicle. That’s a shame, because there’s nothing quite like a good haunted house movie.
Perkins knows this and uses the genre effectively. The film centers on Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss), a retired novelist who lives in a remote Massachusetts manor. Her estate manager hires a live-in nurse, Lily (Ruth Wilson), to tend to her. Almost immediately, Lily is ill at ease. She spots a female ghost wandering the halls. Mysterious mold appears on the walls. Unseen forces wrench objects from her hands. As she grows closer to the house, she begins to unravel its mysterious past, and Iris’s personal connection to it.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is another example of Perkins reconciling his own family demons. According to interviews, the film was an attempt to connect with his deceased father. Interesting, in that the film is about the complicated relationship between two women. Though the genders don’t correspond, it’s easy to see how Perkins used the movie to explore the tension that exists between the living and the dead. There’s the need for answers that will never come clearly and the acceptance that even the answers won’t save us in the end.
This movie is probably Oz Perkins’ least successful. It’s a moody chamber piece, but one that’s frustratingly slow. He obviously hadn’t quite mastered pacing by this point, and so the movie drags unnecessarily in key moments. Still, it’s a fascinating entry in his filmography, another film drenched in his trademark chilly atmosphere. There are ghostly visuals that cut through the droll. It’s a horror filmmaker exploring dark corners of the genre and sharpening his tools while preparing for what comes next.
Gretel & Hansel (2020)
The only film that Perkins didn’t write himself, Gretel & Hansel manages that personal feel all the same. It’s his most elegant film, and painfully underrated. Especially given its aesthetic similarities to movies like Midsommar and The Witch, which more easily punctured pop culture. Perhaps it was its smaller release or its production company (Orion Pictures), but it never quite got the audience it deserved. Especially given how fully formed and visually haunting it is.
An inversion of the famous Hansel and Gretel fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, the movie is a coming-of-age fable for Gretel (Sophia Lillis). Equipped with her own magical abilities, she and her younger brother Hansel (Sam Leakey) flee to the woods, where they’re taken in by an elderly witch named Holda (Alice Krige). From there, the story plays out much like the original tale. Holda is a cannibalistic witch intent on eating Hansel. But in this version, she also has a tragic backstory and uses witchcraft to hone Gretel’s inherent powers.
Despite his lack of script involvement, it’s apparent why the story drew in Perkins. It’s another film about parental abandonment and abuse—and what that does to children. It explores how it becomes both a tool for empathy and a pathway to their own sinister interiority. And it captures that same trademark and topical dread. The ever-encroaching horror on the other side of the fence. How the systems of power—Satanic witches and cruel mothers, in this case—wield their personal fury as weapons of control. Gretel & Hansel does it all with astute visual flair. Holda’s triangle house and blackened fingers, fiery amber hues, the contrast of light and dark—all haunting and evocative. And all laying the foundation for his next, and most successful, film: Longlegs.
Longlegs (2024)
We won’t get too into Longlegs here, except to say that whether you watch it first or last in your Perkins’ education, it’s really the culmination of all that’s come so far. (Check out our Longlegs review.) Encroaching dread but this time with more bursts of violence to up the pace. Elegant visuals, from Satanic symbology to vast Oregeon landscapes brushed with snow. Themes of troubled parenthood and its lasting effects on children. Perkins said this film was, in some ways, his attempt to wrestle with his complicated relationship with his deceased mother. She was a woman he loved fiercely, but who hid his father’s homosexuality and illness from her children, a decision that marked their family forever. What do our parents do to protect us, and does it ever work? Longlegs wrangles with that thorny idea.
The film jolts us into that reality—and into our own as well. The horror is not just at the surface level, but in the seams. The flaws of our criminal justice system. How sometimes the conduits of true evil are the dumbest possible candidates. How childhood trauma transforms our brains and social skills. All things we wrestle with in this modern world, despite the film’s 1990s setting. But that’s it, too. These things repeat—gruesomely, even.
Oz Perkins tapped into that impenetrable truth and excavated the meat of the horror within to craft a great horror movie. Now that he’s got it, it’s thrilling to think of where he’ll go next. What his career will continue to reveal about him, us, and how personal art can be scariest of all.
