Whether you found yourself scared stiff and suffering sleepless nights or simply bored to tears – Longlegs is the film that everyone is talking about right now. Oz Perkins ’ new horror features Maika Monroe as an FBI agent assigned to a mysterious case involving mass murders with satanic undertones, with Nicolas Cage dialling the Nicolas Cage up to 11 to play the titular serial killer. Much has been made about the film’s distinct feel, not to mention its Oscar-winning star’s wild character choices, which have led to plenty of discussion among those who’ve already seen it. So, for those who want to know more about the making of Longlegs, here are 16 behind-the-scenes facts about the film you probably didn’t know…
For starters, those allusions to Silence Of The Lambs were very much on purpose “It’s a deliberate one-for-one relationship,” director Osgood Perkins told Gizmodo. “When I sat down to write the movie, the question in my mind was: what’s the invitation to the audience that I can make early on that sort of gets people in the roller coaster car. What gains them admission to the world?” “The Silence of the Lambs stuff, it’s like your admission ticket. It gets you through the door,” he also told IGN, adding to Gizmodo: “I just cheated. I just used it as a crib, as a way to soften or tenderise the audience, to say, ’You know, it’s this! You remember this’. And then, of course, take a pretty hard left turn to make it not that at all.”
But there was another film that influenced Longlegs just as much Asked about why the title character appears in the film as little as he does, Oz told Variety: “As many times we could crib or steal a move from one of the great serial killer movies, we wanted to do it. That’s just Se7en. I think Kevin Spacey has three or four scenes, right?” He added: “We wanted to sort of – ‘rip off’ is not the right word – ‘borrow’ is more close to what we were doing.”
Oz chose the 90s time period for a specific reason “The ’90s was a formative time for me,” the filmmaker recalled to Deadline. “I was graduating high school, these great movies were coming out, my father died, shit was happening, like a lot of stuff was very much coming together. “It was that transition from childhood to stupid young adulthood, where you don’t know anything and you’re out in the world. So those elements just made it a good time to be in.” “It looks good, too,” he added.
Although the specific year was changed for one big reason When Longlegs was originally written, Oz told IndieWire he’d set the film in 1992, but ultimately decided to push it forward a couple of years when he realised what an FBI movie set in that year would require. “I realised 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,” he remarked.
Even before writing the film, Oz Perkins had the character of Longlegs in his mind for a long time “Longlegs was this entity that kept surfacing in things that I was trying to write,” the director told RogerEbert.com. “There would be moments where I’d have written a scene or an act of something, and he was this shadowy figure who was in the fringes of those moments, peeking around and trying to fit into the story.” Oz continued: “From the start, I knew that he was this weird and uneasy guy who had performance anxiety. I thought he could be a birthday clown or a birthday performer … that kind of person who comes to your house and talks to your kids when he’s not there.” Speaking to Variety, he recalled: “When I decided that I was going to try for a serial killer procedural that was going to be something else, I needed a bad guy. Longlegs was like, ‘I’ll do it.’ In your drawer of ideas, one of them says, ‘Put me in, coach’. And in goes Longlegs.”
And if you were wondering about his curious name, Oz has answers During his Variety interview, Oz shared: “We writers just like words. We like how certain words sound and look and shape and feel. “Yeah, [the name] has daddy longlegs and a creepy-crawly aspect to it, but it also feels ’70s to me – almost like a Led Zeppelin song or someone would have on the side of their van, something groovy like that. It feels like a vintage word that people wouldn’t toss around much today. “It positioned the movie in a weird place.
