If you saw Longlegs over the weekend, the chances are you may have left the cinema with a few questions. “What did I just watch?” being one of them, and “Am I going to be able to sleep tonight?” potentially being another.
And then, of course, there’s the titular character’s name. Despite everything we do end up learning about Nicolas Cage’s Satan-worshipping serial killer, it’s never actually made clear where he got the name Longlegs from.
Well, director Osgood Perkins – the brain behind Longlegs – has cleared things up. Sort of.
Asked by Variety where Longlegs’ name came from, Oz said: “We writers just like words. We like how certain words sound and look and shape and feel.”
“Yeah, it has daddy longlegs and a creepy-crawly aspect to it,” he continued. “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. You don’t get to fully understand it. It doesn’t fully fit, which is more alluring to me and creates a curiosity that I think is important.”
Oz also revealed that the character of Longlegs is one that he’s had in the back of his mind for some time.
“[He] was a character that had tried to make himself fit into other projects that I had worked on,” the filmmaker said. “When you’re writing all the time and generating specs and no one’s paying you or you don’t have any source material, you’re making shit up all the time. You end up with a universe of things that are swirling around, and you try to pull them out and stick them in.
“Longlegs was an entity, this shabby – is he a birthday clown? Is he a puppet master? Does he deal with stuffed animals? Is it little pianos? You start to wonder about this person who comes to your kid on their birthday and you’re in another room and you don’t know they’re interacting and that’s weird.
“He doesn’t abduct the kids because we’ve seen that 1,000 times before. He kind of talks to them. You start to be curious about that.”
Oz added: “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.”
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.
He’s joined in the cast by Maika Monroe as Lee Harker, an FBI agent assigned to investigate a mysterious string of mass murders.
Longlegs is in cinemas now.