“There was a moment where it was like, ‘why doesn’t everybody do this?” Perkins tells RANGE. “The great thing about horror generally and the supernatural especially is that you get to open up the world to anything you want to do. That’s why the horror genre for me is so engaging and interesting. The landscape is infinite. It’s everything. Every rule is for you to design. You can go in any direction, utilise any emotion, any kind of shape, colour, creature, fact, fiction, mythology — it’s all at your fingertips… You can come in the door with something very tangible, and juxtapose that against, like, ‘no, we don’t really know anything about how shit works.’” 

To avoid being swallowed up by this infinitude, Perkins keeps himself connected to a certainty, too, when setting out to make a movie. For Longlegs, he was guided by the idea that parents tell their children lies hoping to protect them that go on to shape them in unintended ways. “It’s a simple truth, it’s not complicated, it’s not clever, it’s not esoteric or opaque,” he says of his process. “It’s a struggle, and as a parent, and about my own parents, this struggle of: don’t you protect your kid no matter what? And sometimes you got to really obscure the truth of things. And sometimes you got to do some shit that you don’t think is that great. And this movie is the most extreme version of that.” 

But his explorations of single ideas are anything but straightforward. The theme of parenthood ricochets through the film like an echo. For the first two acts, Harker’s own mother appears only as a thin voice over the telephone. And Longlegs goes so far in his infatuation with female children as to propagate his own in the form of lifesize dolls. These dualities between good and bad parenting emerge in the yin-yang characterization of the reticent and repressed Harker and Longlegs, a madman undone at the seams. Monroe and Cage, both genre heavyweights, deliver career best performances. Where Monroe perfects a subtle and controlled performance, Cage goes full id. Together, they are positive and negative space, and their collaboration is the full picture. 

“To be honest with you, everything was written. It all starts on the page,” Perkins says of preparing the actors. “I offered Nick: you can do whatever you want, improvise, I don’t care. And he was like, ‘no, no, no, man, I’m gonna do everything that you wrote just the way you wrote it.’ And I was like, ‘well, that works too.’”

“I’ve only ever experienced actors who really care about what they do and really care about servicing the text and servicing the project,” he continues. “And so I leave them alone. Why would I tell them what to do? Why would I tell Nicolas Cage what to do? If he agrees with the text, then it’s 99.9% of the way there.” 

“Why would I tell Nicolas Cage what to do?” 

— Osgood Perkins

Though it begins with the script, the final product bears no resemblance to what Perkins envisioned when writing dialogue. Cage’s Longlegs, though true to the text, is all Cage. That, for Perkins, is the joy of filmmaking. Teamwork transcends one person’s idea. Longlegs feels so layered and complex because of the talented crew who put themselves in its fabric, comprised of the connections between their care, craft, and collaboration. 

“The only way I know how to act is nurturing and gentle,” says Perkins on his directorial style. “Like caretaking. Caretaking the other people who are making the same movie as I am because they want it to be great too. They’re not just doing their homework, they care, they’re invested. Because it’s also theirs. And I say to other people who work on the movie all the time: ‘this is as much yours as it is mine.’ I don’t say it’s an Oz Perkins film. I don’t know what that means.”