Warning: This article contains spoilers for Longlegs.
Longlegs director Osgood Perkins has lifted the lid on the movie’s dramatic ending.
The acclaimed horror hit cinemas over the weekend, with Maika Monroe taking the lead as Lee Harker, an FBI agent assigned to investigate the case of a mysterious serial killer, who refers to himself only as Longlegs.
After a series of dramatic twists and turns, the film’s final act sees Lee discover that her mum has been Longlegs’ accomplice all along, helping deliver satanic dolls to families that lead them to commit atrocities.
With Longlegs (played by Nicolas Cage in yet another unforgettable performance) having already taken his own life, Lee then shoots her own mum dead, before trying to destroy the doll taken in by her boss and his family.
However, in that moment she finds her gun is out of bullets, leading some to ponder exactly what’s going on in Longlegs’ last sequence.
Asked about the finale by Variety, Oz said: “That was always the ending. The ending was meant to be tragic.”
The filmmaker added that Lee shooting her mum was a case where “the devil wins again on a small scale”.
“One of the fun things about using the devil as your villain is that the devil never really goes for world domination,” Oz explained.
“The devil always feels like, ‘I’ll just fuck with this person, I’ll wreck this family, I’ll mess this kid up, I’ll torment this priest’. It’s never like, ‘I’m going to eat the Vatican’. It never gets to that point for me with the devil. The devil is a little more amusing and playful than that.”
He added: “The story of Lee Harker ends with the ending of the movie. The last shot that she fires is the worst thing that can happen to her.”
In a separate interview with Collider, Oz said that he thinks Lee’s own horror is over after she kills her mum.
“Where she has to get to at the end, her final act with her mum is the worst thing that you can do, right?” he suggested. “Matricide, let’s say, is probably the lowest form of – that’s your worst moment, right? You can’t be like, ‘Oh, well, something else sucked worse than that’.
“So I think the fact that the devil gets it to this place where that’s what she has to do, the devil’s like [done with her after that].”
Following its release last week, Longlegs has already won critical acclaim and been a big hit at the box office.
Nicolas Cage plays the title villain in Longlegs, donning elaborate prosthetics to help him get into character, with a performance that he’s revealed has a particularly personal connection for him.
Longlegs is in cinemas now.