Longlegs Ending is a Compilation of “Three Different Takes” (Exclusive)

Longlegs has been the horror film of the summer. The Osgood Perkins-directed serial killer story mesmerized audiences with its marketing campaign, concealing Nicolas Cage’s titular terror throughout all promotional material while simultaneously peppering cryptic symbolic text throughout teaser posters and billboard-style artwork. The trailers for Longlegs also emphasized the enigmatic, as all that was communicated about the narrative was that young FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) has reopened a case of murders that had long been believed to have gone cold. Those murders left behind no clues except a card of cryptic text signed with one word: Longlegs.

Warning – The rest of this article contains spoilers from Longlegs.

Alicia Witt Reveals Longlegs’s Ending Used Three Different Takes

Director Osgood Perkins maintained the mystery with Longlegs‘s grand finale.

Speaking to ComicBook, Longlegs star Alicia Witt opened up about shooting the final scene in the summer’s hottest horror film.

“It was two days that we took to film the whole scene because there were so many different angles,” Witt said. “By the time we got around to my coverage and it was time to put the camera facing me, we’d already been working on it for a day and a half.”

Witt plays Ruth Harker, the mother of Maika Monroe’s Agent Lee Harker. While initially believed to be a harmless, overly-religious older woman, the film reveals that Ruth is actually Longlegs’s accomplice in the murders. Ruth agreed to assist the devil in exchange for her daughter’s life, as Longlegs was prepared to kill Lee when she was a young girl. 

When Lee is made privy to the reality of her mother’s work, there are some lines blurred in regards to who Ruth truly is. Was she just acting to protect her daughter, or was there genuine evil inside her?

“Oz gave me the greatest honor and one of my favorite experiences ever in my four decades of making movies. He gave me six or seven completely opposing directions in a row,” Witt continued. “We would do the whole scene from my perspective and he would say, ‘Okay, play this one full of rage, just pure unbridled rage. Go.’ I would do it then cut. ‘Right now, you’re going to do it in the throes of grief, pure grief.’ Totally different. The depths of my soul were grieving, crying. ‘Then, play it mischievously,’ and, ‘Then, play it reverently.

“It kept coming at me, no time to think or question. It was like the ultimate finale to my time on set of being trusted, of trusting of letting go and being in the hands of a master filmmaker. We finished this scene and there was a round of applause. It was just so special. [My co-star] Blair (Underwood) came over and he shook my hand and it was really amazing.”

As for what the audience ended up seeing, Witt revealed that Perkins spliced together three different takes of her performance.

“I asked Oz. I saw a bit of it when I did ADR. I’m not seeing the movie because I felt the role, the channeling that happened for me was so personal and so cathartic, I want to leave it there and I don’t want to see it from the outside,” Witt continued. “He told me he used I think three different takes. That was why he asked me to do that in the moment because he wasn’t sure [what emotion to film] because there’s so many different ways Ruth could go and he used parts of many of them.”

Longlegs is currently in theaters.