Longlegs spoilers follow.
Longlegs was always going to have a "tragic" ending, according to director Osgood Perkins.
The movie, which has been compared to The Silence of the Lambs, follows FBI agent Lee Harker (It Follows' Maika Monroe) as she is tasked with finding a Satanic serial killer known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage).
Responsible for the death of numerous families over decades, the killer left a series of coded letters nobody has been able to decipher.
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At the end of the movie, Harker finally discovers how Longlegs managed to perpetrate the murders, as well as how everything is closely connected to her own childhood and her mother (played by Alicia Witt).
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However, in the last scene, Harker fails to end the Satanic forces at play.
"That was always the ending. The ending was meant to be tragic," Perkins explained in an interview with Variety.
"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."
"The devil always feels like, 'I’ll just f**k 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," he added.
"The devil is a little more amusing and playful than that. 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.
Perkins also explained why Nicolas Cage's Longlegs is killed before the ending of the movie during a harrowing interrogation scene.
"We were consciously aware of our references and we wanted to create a pop art piece. As many times we could crib or steal a move from one of the great serial killer movies, we wanted to do it," he said.
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The director mentions David Fincher's 1995 thriller Se7en as the main inspiration for his narrative choices regarding the character of Longlegs.
"[Kevin Spacey's character] is always present, which we had with Cage too, like there's a presence of this thing, but once you get to the guy, it's almost anticlimactic. Of course, he becomes very climactic in Se7en, but I love the fact that John Doe gave himself up."
"We wanted to sort of — 'rip off' is not the right word — 'borrow' is more close to what we were doing."
Cage's transformation into Longlegs was carefully kept out of the marketing campaign for the movie in order to surprise viewers on the big screen. Co-star Maika Monroe told Digital Spy she had a "visceral" reaction when he saw Cage in costume for the first time.
"I'm sure I had an idea in my head of the visual, but it was just so much greater than anything I could have ever imagined, seeing him and especially his performance. It was incredible," Monroe said.
Following its opening weekend, Longlegs has set an impressive box-office record, with $22.6 million at the US box office. This debut figure has broken records for distributor Neon, as its biggest opening weekend in the US.
Longlegs is now out in cinemas.
Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over eight years. Based in the UK, she is a former deputy movies editor at Digital Spy, and previously worked for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas. Mireia's work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema and GamesRadar+ in the UK. She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.
During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London. LinkedIn
