Osgood Perkins Explains How ‘Longlegs’ Is an Ode to His Celebrity Parents’ Dark Backstory: ‘A Mother Can Lie Out of Love’
Osgood Perkins can’t avoid the associations of being a horror director who is also the son of Anthony Perkins, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock‘s “Psycho” as a cross-dressing, mother-obsessed murderer. The filmmaker, who as an actor had a small role in the “Psycho” sequel from 1983 as a kid and then most memorably as an adult in “Legally Blonde” as Elle Woods’ dorky classmate, has made original horror on introspective terms for the past decade.
There was the stylish dark academia giallo “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” in 2015, followed by “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House” for Netflix and the Brothers Grimm adaptation “Gretel & Hansel.” His latest film, his first of three set up at Neon, is “Longlegs,” starring “It Follows” scream queen Maika Monroe as a tortured FBI agent on the trail of a Satan-worshipping serial killer. He’s played by Nicolas Cage in bulbous prosthetics and ghoulish face powder that make Pennywise look like a children’s birthday clown.
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Perkins funnels his own difficult past into what turns out to be a mystical procedural with a tormented mother-daughter storyline at its center. His father died of AIDS complications in 1992 after a lifetime in the closet and much speculation about his personal life aired by the likes of Confidential magazine, including an on-and-off affair with Tab Hunter. Osgood Perkins’ mother, Berry Berenson, was a model and actress who stayed with Anthony until the end, keeping her husband’s sexuality (and illness) a secret from her children. They married in 1973 after Anthony tried conversion therapy. Berenson died on September 11 in the first American Airlines plane that hit the World Trade Center.
As Osgood Perkins told IndieWire in a recent interview, “Longlegs” is his most personal film yet. In its own strange way, it’s an ode to the precarious secret his mother maintained, and the generational tensions that bloomed out of lying for a long time to her children (including Osgood’s brother, singer/songwriter Elvis Perkins) about her husband’s sexual identity.
Here, Monroe’s character, Lee Harker, has managed to escape the deluded clutches of a deeply religious, vacant soul of a mother (Alicia Witt), who lives on a farm and may have a psychic connection to the serial killings. “Longlegs” is set in 1993, which, according to the director, was meant to summon memories in the audience of the ’90s heyday of great murder mysteries like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Seven,” but that’s also the year after his father died. And Berenson herself came from a lineage of supposed psychic mediums.
“Everything I try to do, I try to make it about myself, only so that it creates a truth for me and an honesty, and I know I’m never full of shit if I’m talking about myself,” Perkins said. “As coded as it might be and as many layers of other stuff on it that there are, at the end of the day, all the movies I generate are essentially based on my experience, and that tends to be my experience with my parents.”
This is Perkins’ third time writing his own script, and an autobiographical touch is felt in a story as much about the pain parents inflict on their children as it is a straight-up entertaining serial killer genre picture. It’s hard to talk about the movie’s familial underpinnings further without taking the piss out of the whole thing in the form of spoilers.
“In the case of ‘Gretel & Hansel,’ I felt like I missed an opportunity to make a movie about the fact that a mother can lie to their children,” he said. “The mother can create a cover story, but a mother can submerge a truth in what she feels is the service of the family, and how that creates what it creates. In the case of my family, I was dealing with public-figure parents. My father was a gay man who was closeted, and in the world that we lived in, it wasn’t acceptable. And it still isn’t, as insane as that is. My mother made this decision that that wasn’t going to be true for our family. I wanted ‘Gretel & Hansel’ to be more about that, and I didn’t get there with it because it wasn’t my script and for a hundred other reasons. [When] I set into ‘Longlegs,’ that was the core truth: A mother can lie, and she can lie out of love.”
“Longlegs” is backed by an ambitious marketing campaign courtesy of Neon, drumming up buzz with horror fans and those seeking a disturbing theater-going experience that delivers thrills and chills with hardly a dose of hope. “The good news is, the horror community wants to see fucked-up things. I don’t watch contemporary horror pictures,” he said. “It’s not something that interests me. I don’t have Netflix so I’ve never seen any of the serial killer things, ‘Haunting of Hill House,’ I’ve never seen those things, so I don’t know what’s going on. I think I’m OK with that.” Perkins’ next movie is the Stephen King adaptation “The Monkey” along with another movie set up at Neon he’s not ready to discuss.
“Longlegs” oozes the forbidden feeling of looking at a crime scene photo, something sensationally awful you’re not supposed to see, but can’t look away from anyway. “I’ve had times in my life where you’re in a bookstore, you’re in the true crime section, and in the middle of these books, they’ve got these picture pages, and you don’t really want to see them,” he said. “One of the worst things to look at is the redacted crime scene photographs, like the Manson crime scene photographs, these black blobs. The feeling of looking at those pictures is in the movie.”
There’s a perverse wanting to know what’s behind the redaction. “The redaction is worse than the thing, which is the true nature of what I’m trying to do,” Perkins said.
Lee Harker uncovers Longlegs’ trail of killings dating back to the 1970s, where the scenario is consistent: a father suddenly and without explanation offs his entire family in brutal fashion, and then himself. The investigation, in which Lee appears to harness her own psychic powers to envision how the murders went down (and with those moments shot in 16mm Academy ratio), involves a lot of sifting through crime scene photos unsparing in their gruesomeness.
“What crime scene photographs look like is something that everybody has in their mind, so you don’t need to get them out and look at them and say, ‘Well, how does that body look?,'” Perkins said. “We inherently understand what that is. In pre-production, we found a house in Vancouver, and we went in with the production designers, the art directors, my DP, the cameraman, the camera team, and we hired some families. We dressed them in period clothes. We blew up some balloons. We put some ‘happy birthday’ shit around, and we just went to town. It was like a scavenger hunt. We had 10 people walking around with Polaroids, 10 people walking around with wind-up disposable cameras, we had people walking around with digital high-end things, and we just got what we thought looked good. And we did it all in a day.”
What’s rendered onscreen in harrowing detail didn’t translate to a bad time on set, as Perkins explained: “It’s fun. What could be more fun? If you’re a bunch of nerd filmmakers trying to fake crime scenes all day, it’s a good time. There’s nothing grisly going on. Sometimes you’re like, ‘Eh, I don’t want to lay that six-year-old girl down on the ground and pretend she’s dead.’ That’s not the greatest thing that ever happened, but let’s just get it over with. You get the picture, you pick her up, you say, ‘Do you want a juicebox?’ And you keep going.”
In its promos and trailers, Neon has deftly concealed what Cage’s character — a basement dweller who lives for the devil and has stringy, white hair and a rictus grin — actually looks like. It’s another typically unhinged performance from Cage, who we’ve seen have many a freakout from “Leaving Las Vegas” to “Snake Eyes” and “Mandy.” Does a director just hire him and get out of the way, or is there more to getting the Oscar-winning actor to such theatrically manic heights?
“I’ve sort of likened it to the old cartoon of the lion tamer that goes into the cage with the stool and the whip,” Perkins said. “That lion tamer doesn’t do an awful lot. He’s kind of there, and sometimes you’ve got to move the lion over a bit, and sometimes you have to remind it not to fucking eat me. But beyond that, it’s a lion, right? The reverence I feel and felt for Cage and his ability, his power, his energy, his accomplishment, you’ve got to lean into that. You don’t get Nic Cage in your movie to then tell him what to do. He’s an extremely collaborative guy. He’s insanely smart, and he knows everything about every movie ever made. He can quote everything, he knows every detail. We had a real shorthand, very easy, on a lot of that stuff. He’s just in command. He’s a perfectly tuned instrument, like a lion is a perfectly tuned instrument.”
You may have heard Cage’s wince-inducing, high-pitched voice in the film’s trailers or if you called the number posted on billboards in Los Angeles. “We worked on the voice and the mannerisms and all that together. But that’s him coming up with stuff and pitching it back to me and me making suggestions. I stay out of the way,” he said.
Perkins, meanwhile, had more to say about the film’s 1993 setting that only emboldens further how close to his own moviegoing heart the project was: “It’s meant to invoke ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Seven’ and the golden age of the serial killer movie, those being the two great things that have ever happened to the genre. They were sort of tightly packed in the early ’90s, and it was exactly the time I was absorbing movies as a teenager, 16, 17, 18, in that realm of it’s all pouring in, and you’re lucky to have something as exquisite as those movies — in your movie theater — and you don’t know anything about them, and you’re just overwhelmed by them,” he said. “It became a natural extension of the references we were working with, the fact that I wanted to invite the audience in by saying, ‘It’s like “Silence of the Lambs!” You know!'”
Perkins also said “Longlegs” was originally “written as 1992, and then 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.” We don’t need to go back there, Perkins said. “It’s ugly enough.”
The year 1993 is also one where 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs” would’ve already come out and possibly been seen by the characters. “That I never did think about, but that is funny,” he said. But it’s not like Lee Harker, a taciturn obsessive prone to falling asleep in front of evidence spread on the floor, would’ve seen it or gone to the movies anyway. “I don’t think she does that,” Perkins said. “I think she spends a lot of time looking at the ground.”
“Longlegs” opens in theaters from Neon on Friday, July 12.
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