Director Oz (Osgood) Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins. The actor who played the killer in Hitchcock’s PSYCHO died in 1992 from AIDS complications. Anthony Perkin’s never came out as gay. Oz Perkin’s mother Berry Berenson married Anthony in 1973 when the actor was going through conversion therapy. She hid Anthony’s homosexuality from the family and died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “As coded as it might be and as many layers of other stuff on it that there are, at the end of the day, all the movies I generate are essentially based on my experience, and that tends to be my experience with my parents,” Perkins says in an interview with Indiewire. LONGLEGS is about a mother who lies to her daughter out of love and about murders in the family. FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) has a premonition during an assignment which her colleague ignores. He pays for his ignorance with his life. Lee has certain psychic abilities. She gets the case of investigating a series of unsolved murders where the fathers kills entire families and himself. There are cryptic messages in the crime scenes that Lee is meant to decode. Gradually, she suspects that she was chosen by the insane mastermind (Nicholas Cage), who signs the messages with “Longlegs.“ Something seems to be watching her. Her mother keeps calling and asking whether she has been praying.

Perkins creates a sense of permanent paranoid insecurity with his shots. The camera is often positioned low, as if it was looking at a world slipping away from a child’s perspective. Nothing is as it seems. This is also what the quote from Marc Bolan/T.Rex that precedes the film refers to: “Well, you're slim and you’re weak / You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you”.

Tom Dorow

Translation: Elinor Lewy