The Definitive Explanation of Longlegs

What is Longlegs about?

Cast

• Lee Harker – Maika Monroe
• Ruth Harker – Alicia Witt
• Longlegs – Nic Cage
• Agent Carter – Blair Underwood
• Anna Carter – Carmel Amit
• Ruby Carter – Ava Kelders
• Agent Browning – Michelle Choi-Lee
• Carrie Anne Camera – Kiernan Shipka
• Written by – Osgood Perkins
• Directed by – Osgood Perkins

How Osgood Perkins explained Longlegs

So Perkins grew up in a household where his parents kept fundamental information from him and his brother. And he wanted to translate that feeling to a movie. We refer to this as defamiliarization. He could have told the story in a very grounded, realistic way. Lee grows up believing a lie her parents tell her. Maybe she believes her dad is a traveling salesman. But it turns out he’s actually a CIA agent. Or that they’re actually his second family and his primary family is a few towns away. Or that he’s actually closested. Or that the family has money issues, or that a sibling is adopted, etc. etc. Perkins “coded” that dynamic via a horror narrative that transforms a familiar experience into something unreal and fantastic. 

As Perkins said to Fennessey—all the FBI stuff, all the supernatural stuff, that’s simply the sleight of hand that gets people to pay attention. It’s not what Longlegs is actually about. If you’re trying to understand “the intention”, then, broadly, Longlegs is just about exploring that feeling where a parent hasn’t told you everything there is to know because they believe they’re protecting you. Is that fair? Not fair? Is that healthy? Not healthy? How do you process that? 

Explaining Longlegs without input from Osgood Perkins

The creator of a work of art can’t always be trusted to fully explain what’s going on. That’s essentially the foundation of “death of the author”. Especially because there are a lot of subconscious/unconscious ideas and beliefs that can inform a work. So what happens if we ignore what Perkins said and analyze Longlegs on its own merits?

In the Kinds of Kindness explanation, I deconstructed my process for writing one of these pieces. I look for commonalities, compare the beginning to the end, look at the title, form a hypothesis, research, put individual scenes/actions/dialogue/etc. into the context of the hypothesis, then repeat until I feel like I’ve arrived at something. 

Doing that for Longlegs, I was going a bit crazy. So many bits and pieces felt like roads that go nowhere. It’s not that Longlegs is incoherent. Rather, it just is not trying to add some pieces to the whole. What does that mean? Let’s use Silence of the Lambs and Se7en as examples.

Silence of the Lambs

In Silence of the Lambs, the case is the case and there isn’t really a deeper, character-driven stake. Until one conversation between Clarice and Hannibal Lecter. Clarice explains how as a child she went to live with a relative who had a sheep and horse ranch in Montana. “I heard a strange noise. It was screaming. Some kind of screaming, like a child’s voice. I went downstairs, outside. I crept up into the barn. I was so scared to look inside but I had to. Lambs. They were screaming. They were screaming. First, I tried to free them…I opened the gate to their pen—but they wouldn’t run. They just stood there, confused. They wouldn’t run…” She took one lamb and tried to leave. But the cops found her a few miles later and brought her back. 

To which Lecter says “You still wake up, sometimes, don’t you, wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs? And you think if you saved poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark, ever again, to the awful screaming of the lambs?”

There you have what the case means to Clarice. That’s what’s at stake during her showdown with Buffalo Bill. It’s about closure and redemption and overcoming the sense of powerlessness that’s part of childhood. 

Se7en

Se7en has two protagonists. One, Somerset, is a week away from retirement and pretty jaded by his career as a homicide detective in New York. Mills is young and idealistic, his whole career ahead of him, recently married. Right away, you have a classic tension between innocence and experience. Will Mill’s youth renew Somerset? Or will Somerset’s jadedness infect Mills? The serial killer, John Doe, drives the conflict, as his seven-deadly-sins-inspired murder spree causes each detective to confront their views on the world and thus each other. 

In the opening scene, Somerset arrives to a murder scene where a wife slew her husband. He asks a random detective if the kid saw it. The other detective says, “What kind of f***ing question is that? We are all gonna be real glad when we get rid of you, Somerset, you know that? There’s always these questions with you. Did the kid see it? Who gives a f***. He’s dead. His wife killed him. Anything else has nothing to do with us.”

While this dialogue may seem innocuous, it actually gets at the impact a crime has on someone. The character viewers should feel closer to, the one played by Morgan Freeman, thinks the reaction matters. The other random detective doesn’t. Because Somerset is the perspective character, the scene asks us to agree with his position and think the other detective is being dense. 

What happens at the very end of the movie? John Doe brings Somerset and Mills to a random spot in the desert and has a delivery driver drop off a box. Somerset opens the box. Inside is the head of Mills’s wife. We then get the iconic scene where Mills keeps asking Somerset “What’s in the box?” When Doe explains, Mills has a choice. He can let Somerset bring Doe in and allow the justice system to do its thing. Or he can shoot Doe, thus becoming vengeance, and completing Doe’s whole seven-deadly-sins plot. The entire movie comes down to psychology, to the impact a crime has on someone. Because Doe was a prisoner, Mills will actually get tried for murder. And thus you get the answer to the film’s tension between innocence and experience. The finale reinforces Somerset’s pessimism and rejects innocence and idealism.

Back to Longlegs

So when we look at Longlegs, I struggle to find anything so coherent. I’m not saying there aren’t ideas present in the film. Just that we don’t see those things weave together in a way that turns Longlegs into a harmonious whole. 

About parents?

You have a modified family dynamic, in the sense that the Longlegs character takes on a father-figure role for Lee. He’s been in her house for nearly 20 years. Even if she didn’t know/doesn’t remember. And her mom has been his partner in crime the entire time. Reinforcing this is the bit during the FBI psychic test when the upside down triangle flashes on screen and Lee says “Father”. Right before that she had said “Mother”.

So you have this unreachable, haunting father-figure. A mother with a secret. A daughter who knows something is wrong but can’t put a finger on it. Birthdays. Dolls. Satan. 

I could see there being something to the notion of asking when is a child old enough to know a family secret? Which could be why things tie back to birthdays. Because it represents growing up and coming closer to understanding. And you have parents who can be scared to tell their kids the truth about certain things. For example, what if the child is adopted and the parents never said anything? Each birthday is another missed checkpoint. 

But there’s not enough there to really make a case for that specific question, “When is a child old enough to know a family secret?”, being the intent of the movie. Maybe if each time Longlegs gave the parents a choice to lie to their child or tell them the truth about satan. Something like that. And those who opted for the truth ended up possessed and annihilating, while those who lied ended up like Ruth—in service without their kid knowing better. Then you have a very clean, clear premise. 

Instead, Longlegs gives Ruth a choice for reasons that the movie never really gets into. Maybe it was just because he needed a place to stay and continue the rest of his work? It gets murky.

To be fair. When Lee interviews Longlegs, he mentions that the “seventh she” is given “the choice that they’ve all been given. Crimson or clover. Accept the gift and destroy it and destroy yourself and yourselves, or keep it and bow down, bow all the way down. And get right down to the dirty, dirty work. Work that gets dirty as it cleans, like a mop. Like a raaaaaaaaaag.”

While we’re told that, it’s not something we’re necessarily shown. We don’t see how Ruth’s experience differs from, say, the Camera family, or the Carters. So you have some exposition but not actual action. Which makes determining a specific intent a lot more difficult. Clearly, there’s something to the information parents don’t tell their children and children growing up, but it’s just nailing down a clean thesis. 

About Lee’s worldview and religion?

Going back to Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, we know what the confrontation represents for the characters. For Clarice it’s about overcoming her powerlessness. For Somerset and Mills, it’s about how to view the world. When we get to the end of Longlegs, what does Ruby’s birthday party mean for Lee? We don’t really know that much about her. What are her beliefs, fears, desires? We know she doesn’t pray and has no relationship to organized religion. So even though her mom’s posing as a nun and the antagonist is literally Satan…it doesn’t feel like Lee herself has any kind of spiritual awakening or revelation either way. There’s no counterpoint to the devil’s presence. In fact, Ruth has that moment where she says prayers don’t do anything. 

So you could try to argue there’s a whole pessimistic worldview, similar to Somerset, where only the devil exists, only evil has agency, that no angel, no god, will stop whatever’s to come. That could contextualize why Lee’s weapon doesn’t fire when pointed at the Ruby doll. It reinforces the devil’s power over this world.   

Except…the FBI forensic guy had no trouble “harming” the Carrie Anne doll. And Ruth blew the head off Lee’s doll. So we have multiple instances that show the dolls aren’t protected, aren’t invulnerable. We don’t really see what changes, either, when someone destroys a doll. 

Carrie Anne was, the hospital director informs us, pretty much catatonic for however many years. Her sudden re-awakening happened to coincide with Lee and Carter finding the doll and opening it up. That seemingly establishes a difference in personality and identity between a doll being alive vs. out of commission. Except after the destruction of Lee’s doll we don’t see a major shift in her personality or identity. It seems she gets her memories back. But we don’t really learn anything about what those memories mean to her. So what’s different? And then with Ruby: the doll seemingly survives. Which kind of gets at the persistence of evil. That’s reinforced by the jump back to Longlegs saying “Hail, Satan.” But what does that mean for Lee? She wasn’t idealistic. She wasn’t pessimistic. She wasn’t really anything.

You could argue that it doesn’t matter what it means to Lee but what it means to the viewer. Do they believe the devil is all-powerful like that? Do they believe in the negativity? Eh. I don’t know. I don’t think the movie really positions the viewer in such a way to ruminate on such an existential divide. Not like how it’s done in something like The Wailing. 

The dolls are a symbol of the child’s infantilization. Lee’s an adult but in many ways her mom still treats her like a child. That connects with parents being overprotective and not wanting their kids to grow up. So it’s not like the dolls are completely without thematic meaning or connection to the film. It’s just how they’re used and the rules around them aren’t quite clear, which can create a fogginess when it comes to theorizing. 

The end?

I know we said we weren’t going to look at what Perkins had to say. But I think it’s helpful, here, to illustrate a point. Perkins told Den of Geek, quote: “The ending for [Lee] is about as bad as it could have turned out. Like shooting her mom in the head, that’s about as bad a day as a person can have. So I think that ultimately one could say that the entire movement of the movie—or the entire movement of all of Longlegs’ crimes, starting from crime number one all the way to the Carter family—it’s all about getting this poor girl to a place where she shoots her mom in the head. Like that kind of the flourish, the devil’s ‘Yep, I did that.’”

That description clearly seems inspired by Se7en. A film that Perkins himself has cited as an influence. The same way John Doe had this plan that led to Mills shooting Doe, Perkins claims the devil had this plan to get Lee to shoot her mom. The difference is that, for Doe, it ties back to a worldview. He’s making a point about the world. About society. About the justice system. 

We get the bit from Doe’s journal. Somerset reads: “What sick, silly puppets we are, and what a gross stage we dance on. What fun we have, dancing around, not a care in the world. Not knowing that we are nothing. We are not what God intended.” He proves his point by turning Mills into a puppet that gives over to sin and goes against what was “intended” (to be a cop rather than a criminal).

Longlegs never really develops a similar thesis. What bits and pieces are there often end up in conflict. For example, you could talk about personal demons getting the better of people and how it affects the ones they love. But that’s not earned through the machinations in the story. Longlegs doesn’t select victims because one of the parents had a personal demon. It was based solely on the birthday of a kid. Meaning the parents could be perfectly innocent. Or they could be awful people. Agent Carter seemed pretty neutral. He had faults but clearly loved his wife and daughter. What demon did he have? What demon did Carrie Anne’s dad have? What demon did Ruth have?

Deglamorize

There’s an anticlimax to the Longlegs character. He lacks the glamor of Hannibal Lecter and John Doe. Despite how terrifying he initially seems, he never really does anything meaningful. He builds dolls and lives in a basement. That’s it. He doesn’t commit the murders. He’s not all-knowing. All-powerful. He’s not particularly smart. When his picture makes the news, he immediately turns himself in. By the end of the movie, we realize he was never the puppet master but another victim of Satan’s influence. That would be why he’s so irrelevant to so much of the story. He’s ultimately a pretty pathetic character. 

The FBI is also deglamorized. Instead of being super capable agents who stop evil, Carter’s reduced to a family annihilator and Lee’s forced to shoot her partner and her mother. This isn’t an example where good triumphs. Where the powerful government entity can muster its resources to make the world a better place. Satan triumphs. Evil’s presented as much more palpable, a true force. Same with Lee’s psychic powers that help her once, in the first 10 minutes of the movie, but after that they don’t really matter and don’t save Carter or Ruth or stop evil. 

So maybe Longlegs is deglamorizing everything. Which leads to the question: what about evil? What about Satan? Is that also deglamorized? In some ways, no. The devil is a very real thing in this world. And isn’t necessarily defeated at the end. Carter’s gone, Carter’s wife, and even though Ruby lives…what she experienced was horrific. 

But what is the devil in Longlegs? Maybe it has operatives all over the world. But we don’t see any of that. All we see is Longlegs, Ruth, and some dolls that have caused a dozen-ish homicides. Now that Longlegs and Ruth are gone…what will Satan do? Like how easy will it be to get a new henchman? What happens if the FBI destroys the Ruby doll? With Longlegs gone, how does the devil have influence over the world?

So there is something to the idea that Satan is the embodiment of evil but is operating on such a small scale in a relatively rural community. It feels almost satirical. Like how English artists would, in newspaper cartoons that would spread throughout Europe, depict Napoleon as child-sized.

But nothing in the movie really presents Satan as inconsequential. Murder is murder. Lee and Ruby are still victims who will carry trauma with them forever. So the deglamorization angle doesn’t feel right, either, though it’s certainly present for Longlegs himself (as we’ll discuss later).  

Conclusion

There’s definitely something to the dynamics between parents and children. And we see with Ruth and Lee how that becomes specifically about the information parents keep from their children. There’s also something to the idea of coming of age and realizing things about your parents. And how that’s a kind of death. The family annihilations would represent the “ruin of the family” and loss of innocence for the child, rather than a literal loss of life. 

For example, we saw Agent Carter drinking a lot. Imagine being a kid and you reach the age where you realize your father is an alcoholic. And how that changes how you view not only your father for being that way but also your mother for accepting it. There’s a realistic version of the ending where Lee shows up and Carter’s drunk and he hits the mother in the kitchen and Lee has to arrest him. Instead, we get the coded, defamiliarized version of that. Where it’s possession by Satan. 

Same with Lee shooting her mom. It’s essentially the loss of seeing her mom through the eyes of a child. 

Perkins told The Hollywood Reporter: “I try not to tell my children any protective lies, having grown up in a family where certain truths were curated, not maliciously and with any kind of cruelty or dismissiveness, but rather as a move to sustain the family and keep things together. So the idea that a mom, in this case, can create a story, a lie, a narrative, a version and dress their children in it like a hazmat suit, is definitely where the movie came from. That’s the kernel of truth that started the process. What gets the ball rolling for me is, ‘What’s the kernel of truth?’ And then you figure out how to dress that truth up.” 

I want to call attention to the similarity between what Perkins said about parents lying to kids and about his process for writing. Specifically, “A mom can create a story, a lie, a narrative, a version and dress their children in it…” and “And then you figure out how to dress that truth up.” 

With that in mind, when we look at Longlegs, we see that the form functions in the same way as a parent lying to their children. Most of Longlegs presents itself as one thing: it’s dressed up in a FBI-serial-killer-psychic-devil-worshiper outfit. Only to eventually reveal the truth—it was lying to us. It’s not about Longlegs or the devil or the FBI. It’s about what a mother did to protect her daughter and the effects of lying about it. 

It’s ironic. Perkins says that, as a parent, he avoids protective lies, but he employed the technique as a filmmaker. In that way, he causes all of us to experience that sense of an authority figure telling us a story that ends up not being true. And viewers have to come to terms with that. Do you understand why he did it? Do you forgive it? Do you feel betrayed? Do you reject it? Do you celebrate it? 

Even though Perkins is on-record saying that he doesn’t care about the FBI stuff or the supernatural stuff, there will be viewers who want such things to mean more. Who want to see Longlegs as a coherent whole that’s making a larger statement about evil and the world. Rather than as a kernel of truth surrounded by plot devices that sustain a story and keep things together. They will believe the protective lie, even when told its a lie, because it feels better and the truth, like your mom actually works for the devil, can be hard to accept.  

I think that makes Longlegs pretty fascinating. Its marries form and function in a way that gives the audience a similar experience to Lee. You can accept that the movie has kind of tricked you, that it isn’t what you thought, and work through how you feel about that. Or you can fall under its spell and believe the protective lies it told you to get you into the theater. 

That’s actually pretty cool.  

Remember what Ruby tells Lee?

Just coming back to the whole “parents keeping their kids from growing up thing.” When Lee first meets Ruby, she asks about the dolls in the corner of Ruby’s room. Ruby’s response? “It’s too baby-ish. Dad says he wants to keep some of my old stuff around, so I don’t grow up too fast. But I’m going to grow up anyway. Even veals grow a little and they live in a box with their legs tied up and everything.” 

We see that Ruth has Lee’s baby teeth. And has preserved Lee’s childhood bedroom. So this preservation of childhood by protective parents is definitely the major theme and concern of Longlegs. 

Does Lee become an agent of the devil?

When Longlegs mentions that the “seventh she” will be given the choice of crimson or clover, you could see that as referring to Lee at Ruby’s birthday party. Both of Ruby’s parents are gone, Ruth’s gone. Lee and Ruby are left with the devil doll. There’s enough exposition to argue Lee now has the choice to become like her mother and do the devil’s work or refuse and maybe turn into an annihilator. Either way is a loss. 

That’s poetic and tragic. But we probably don’t know enough about the process to really say that’s the case. The Carter family was the one to accept or reject the doll. Not Lee. And, still, at the end Lee tells Ruby “Let’s go.” Though she doesn’t actually leave. But it doesn’t seem like she has to make a choice. Or will be possessed. Unfortunately, it’s unclear what happens next. 

I would guess that, no, Lee doesn’t become an agent of Satan, like her mom. The mom did say “you’re free” when she shot Lee’s doll. And we saw the black smoke leave Lee’s head. That would seem to imply Lee’s life moving forward is her own. Even if it’s in a world where Satan is present. But she’ll definitely deal with the fallout and trauma of what she experienced. 

Perkins did tell Variety: “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.” So I don’t think she’s going to go on to do the devil’s work.” 

What is the movie called Longlegs? What does “Longlegs” mean?

So obviously the title puts emphasis on the character of Longlegs. The same way calling a movie Batman emphasizes Batman. But what do we take away from this?

Second, the moment of meta humor could connect with the film’s formal emphasis on deglamorizing the monster. By calling attention to the formal aspect, Perkins asks viewers who are aware of such things to think about how the film portrays Longlegs. Specifically, how Longlegs ends up as a bit of a pathetic figure. 

Perkins told Sean Fennessey, “Alright, so he gives himself up. Alright, so when he presents himself, he’s gonna be pathetic. Not strong. He’s not the Jigsaw killer or Jason, you can’t kill. He’s just a guy. He’s just a gross guy. So when he goes into the hardware store, and that’s my daughter behind the counter, and he tries to talk to her and she’s like, ‘Dad, that gross guy’s back again,’ to me, that’s the movie. The movie is like, ‘He’s just a dude who fell in with the wrong crowd. The devil.’ He was just riffing on his guitar one day and the devil starts coming through the headphones…. So the idea was to say he’s nothing special. He’s just a gross dude. Which, at the end of the day, all serial killers are just gross dudes. They just are. There’s nothing cool or interesting about them… Historically, [the serial killer in film] is interesting, powerful. It’s Hannibal Lecter. It’s John Doe. It’s these kind of omniscient, unbeatable forces. What if he’s a piece of s***? Which is what they actually are.”

That can connect back to the first point about protective lies. Essentially, as a kid, you have a more innocent view of the world. You more easily believe in fairy tales and myths and monsters, in Longlegs as this evil force. But then you grow up, you get your long legs, and you see protective lies for what they were—lies. And people like Longlegs for what they really were—gross pieces of s***. 

Do Lee’s answers to the FBI psychic test mean anything?

The FBI has Lee do that “first word that comes to mind” test. These are all of her answers (including when they switch to numbers): Camera. Table. Lights. Tiger. Door. Mother. Father. Piano. 33. 0. 

What was Satan’s plan? 

If there was a deeper plan, it doesn’t seem like it was developed in a way that mattered all that much. Longlegs had his algorithm that has a reference in the book Nine Circles of Hell. Which doesn’t seem like a real book. You could argue Longlegs/Satan is trying to bring about prophecies from the Book of Revelation. Revelation specifically talks about how “Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth.” Sounds good for the devil. Except then Satan will be “thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” Revelation ends with a new heaven and a new earth and “God himself will be with” the people. So bringing about Revelation doesn’t seem in the devil’s best interest. 

We know from Oz Perkins that the supernatural was just a hook for the audience and a formal exercise for him, rather than the point of the story. So I wouldn’t read too much into it. You can try. But a deeper intentionality from the filmmaker isn’t there the way it is in some other films. 

Why did the mom not recognize Lee on the phone?

So two theories jump to mind. Ruth is aware that doll Lee exists. So maybe there’s part of her that always worries it’s the doll calling and not Lee herself. Which would be more of a mental health issue than anything. The other theory is that we know the devil had some influence over Lee. Maybe sometimes it acted through Lee and called Ruth? So Ruth’s checking because it’s not always Lee calling but sometimes “Lee”.

I’d lean more towards the former because it’s more in-line with what we see. If the latter was happening then it’s a part of Lee’s character that’s seriously underdeveloped.

But! Lee gets that call on the phone at the end. And it certainly sounds like a devil telling her to go to Ruby’s birthday party. If that’s who was calling Ruth…I get it. It might have even been Ruth calling. 

What were Lee’s psychic powers?

So Lee had some devil mist in her because of Longlegs. Which meant she had some kind of spiritual link with Satan. Or at least with evil. So her intuition was a byproduct of that. Either the devil “tapping her on the shoulder” to make her aware of things. Or some kind of radar for evil. For instance, in that manhunt scene, that feeling told her what house the killer was in. It could have been Satan arranging things so she could work the Longlegs case. But to what end? Why would Satan want her on the case? Especially when Longlegs lived in her mother’s basement. So you could argue it was less directly the devil and more an awareness of evil that acts as a kind of metal detector. 

Either way, the “powers” have something to do with the mist in her head and the doll and her connection to Satan. It’s just a matter of how much it’s Longlegs/Satan actively directing her versus intuition as a byproduct/symptom of that connection. 

What did Longlegs mean when he said he’ll be everywhere?

Literally, in the movie, you can view it as he’s free of his physical form and can go do work on Satan’s behalf in other ways. Remember, Perkins wasn’t too concerned with the supernatural stuff being logical and definable. On the symbolic level, Longlegs represents this mystery that’s been part of Lee’s life. The truth that her mom would never tell her. The sense of dread that permeates the movie has less to do with Satan and more to do with that feeling that your world isn’t what it seems. Because your parents haven’t told you the truth about them or yourself. Lee’s always going to live with that, even when she knows the truth.