Longlegs Director Explains the Killer's Creepy Moniker

Osgood Perkins shares insight into one of the film's unanswered mysteries.

By Patrick Cavanaugh

Osgood Perkins' horror movie Longlegs had one of the most compelling and confounding marketing campaigns in recent history, as the trailers and teasers delivered audiences glimpses of the film's atmosphere more than its plot. With Longlegs out now in theaters, fans have been given the answers to questions they didn't know they had, though the actual background of the titular character has largely been omitted. While movies about serial killers have a long tradition of inventing creepy nicknames, Perkins recently confirmed that the main motivation for the killer's moniker was because it sounded cool. Longlegs is in theaters now.

"I don't know if it has meaning or not. It doesn't have meaning," Perkins detailed to Collider about the "Longlegs" name. "I like words, and it's a good word. It sounds good. It sounds sort of scary but also sort of fun. It sounds pure. It sounds like '70s to me. It sounds like something that maybe Robert Plant would have sung in a [Led] Zeppelin song. It has an old pin-up quality to it. It invokes a certain time, I suppose, and there's an awkwardness to it that he has, that the character has sort of an uneasy clumsiness to him. I don't know; it just feels good."

The movie is described, "FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is a gifted new recruit assigned to the unsolved case of an elusive serial killer (Nicolas Cage). As the case takes complex turns, unearthing evidence of the occult, Harker discovers a personal connection to the merciless killer and must race against time to stop him before he claims the lives of another innocent family."  

Much like how details of the narrative have been kept under wraps, so has the look of Cage's Longlegs. Ahead of the film's release, Cage cryptically expressed why he felt it was important to contain the mystery.

"It's the equivalent of putting a warning label on a jar of nitroglycerin," Cage expressed to Entertainment Weekly. "The monster is a highly, highly dangerous substance. The way it's moved, unveiled, deployed has to be treated very carefully. Forget about the movie theater blowing up; the whole city could blow up, nay the country, maybe even the world. He is going to change your reality. Your doors of perception are going to open, and your life is not going to be the same."  

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Longlegs is in theaters now.

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