Longlegs gripped the cinemagoers last year, with Osgood Perkins' bizarro horror movie grossing more than $126 million worldwide. That's a staggering number for such a deeply weird feature that left many audience members scratching their heads.
The film stars Maika Monroe as Lee Harker, a young FBI agent in the Pacific Northwest who uncovers dark secrets in her own past while investigating a killer with the ominous moniker "Longlegs." What begins as a thriller in the vein of The Silence of the Lambs soon evolves into a disquieting exercise in dread, featuring possessed dolls and the devil himself.
Love it or hate it, Longlegs leaves viewers with plenty to ponder. Is Lee possessed, too? What's the true nature of her relationship with her mother? And WTF is Nicolas Cage doing?
We address those questions and more below. Here's the Longlegs ending explained.
What is Longlegs about?
Maika Monroe in 'Longlegs'.
NEON
Set in the '90s, Longlegs follows Monroe's Harker as she investigates the Birthday Murders, a series of eerie slayings that have plagued the region for decades. The cases share a similar arc, with a father killing his wife and daughter on the child's ninth birthday and leaving behind a cipher that's signed "Longlegs."
Lee soon discovers that Longlegs is a shrieking, flamboyant Satan-worshipper named Dale Cobble (Cage). See, Dale isn't a traditional serial killer. Instead of wielding the blade himself, he makes dolls possessed by, as he puts it, "the man downstairs." He then delivers the dolls and lets the devil do the rest.
Maika Monroe on her intense Longlegs scene with Nicolas Cage and that heartbeat video
What happens at the end of Longlegs?
Ruby with a possessed doll in Longlegs.
Hulu
There's a twist!
It turns out Lee was visited by Dale when she was a child, as seen in that chilling cold open. The only reason her family didn't suffer a similar fate as the other Birthday Murder victims is because Lee's mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), offered to help Dale carry out his crimes. Thus, Dale constructed dolls in the Harker basement, while Ruth, dressed as a nun, delivered the dolls to houses, saying they were a gift from the church. Lee only recalls this after a doll made in her image, which blocked her memories of the encounter, is destroyed.
After a tense interrogation with Lee, Dale kills himself. Lee then drives to her mother's house with a fellow FBI agent, who is killed by Ruth. Ruth's next victim, we learn, is Lee's boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood).
The doll is already inside when Lee arrives at the Carter home for his daughter Ruby's ninth birthday party, as is Ruth. Ruby is hypnotized by the doll while Carter is also under its sway. He kills his wife and is then shot by Lee before he can attack Ruby.
Ruth tries to stop Lee, saying they'll both burn in hell if they defy the devil. This leads Lee to kill her own mother to save the young girl. She points her gun at the doll but chooses not to destroy it. In the final shot, we flash back to Dale in the interrogation room, where he leaves us with a chilling cry of "Hail Satan."
What does the ending of Longlegs mean?
Alicia Witt in 'Longlegs'.
Neon/Courtesy Everett
Longlegs can be interpreted literally, of course. There's nothing wrong with the ending entailing nothing more than Lee's triumph over a Satanic serial killer (who just so happened to rope in her mom).
But there is a trace of ambiguity in the final moments. Since she doesn't destroy the doll after killing her mother, some fans have wondered if Lee herself is possessed at the end of Longlegs. Lest we forget, it wasn't Dale or Ruth who triggered the murders, but the devil himself, who lives within Dale's dolls. That the film ends with a "Hail Satan" from a euphoric Dale could signal that the devil's influence perseveres.
Perkins touched on this theory while speaking with Den of Geek. "The ending for her is about as bad as it could have turned out," he said. "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’s kind of the flourish, the devil’s 'Yep, I did that.'"
If that's too bleak for you, there are other ways to view the film's broader arc. Lee's relationship with Ruth, for example, speaks to the lengths a parent can go to protect their child. Love, after all, can serve as a justification for all kinds of unpleasant (or murderous) behaviors.
Perkins related this idea to his own experience as the son of actor Anthony Perkins, a closeted homosexual, while speaking with The Big Picture podcast. "A parent can deceive a kid out of love," he said. "And that comes down to my growing up with a famous father who was a closeted gay man, and that fact didn't fit the narrative of my family... On a sort of elemental level — consciously, unconsciously, whatever — my mom became part of the cover."
He continued, "And that's a strange thing... The fact that there was a whole other thing behind a curtain was known to my brother and me in some way or other, but we had no grammar for it, we had no language for it. So Longlegs becomes just a story about well, what if there's a mom who has this huge thing that she can't tell her kid, and what's that like in the most baroque horror movie version?"
In that same interview, Perkins also discussed Longlegs as a subversion of traditional serial killer narratives. By making Dale a minion of Satan, for example, the director sought to shatter the enigmatic aura that we often see in murderers on screen.
"[Dale] is just a gross guy to me. That's the movie. He's just a dude who fell in with the wrong crowd: the devil," Perkins said. "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, they just get off. That's all they do. They're just trying to have an orgasm and they do that from killing people. It's f---ing wack."
He added, "When you put that forward, even in the context of a serial killer movie, where the serial killer historically is interesting, powerful, it's Hannibal Lecter, it's John Doe. It's these omniscient, unbeatable forces. What if he's a piece of s---, which is what they actually are?"
Is Longlegs based on a true story?
Blair Underwood in 'Longlegs'.
Neon/Courtesy Everett
No, thank goodness, though the plot clearly has roots in the Satanic panic of the '80s and '90s, when the U.S. media proliferated unsubstantiated reports of Satanic rituals and abuse.
Perkins did, however, take inspiration from one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases in history: the death of JonBenét Ramsey. "The murder took place approaching Christmas, and one present that the parents had gotten for JonBenét was a life-size replica doll of herself, wearing one of her pageant dresses," Perkins told Inverse. "It was in a cardboard box in the basement, 15 feet from where she was killed, and there was something so insane about that, I'd cataloged it away."
Why does Longlegs look like that?
Nicolas Cage in 'Longlegs'.
NEON
If for nothing else, Longlegs is memorable due to Cage's looney performance, pale makeup, and his character's sloppy plastic surgeries. You can credit his look to Perkins' aforementioned desire to make Dale a "gross guy," but Cage spoke with Entertainment Weekly about his own contributions to the character, noting that he was partly inspired by his mother, the late Joy Vogelsang.
"My mom put on Noxzema cold cream. I was 2 years old, and I opened the bathroom door [to see] what she was doing," Cage told EW. "For no reason, she turned her face really fast and stared at me after [putting on] the cold cream. The whiteness of the cold cream just really spooked me."
Maika Monroe on her intense Longlegs scene with Nicolas Cage and that heartbeat video
The actor elaborated on how his mother struggled with schizophrenia and severe depression. "I was coming at it from, what exactly was it that drove my mother insane?" he said. "It was a deeply personal kind of performance for me because I grew up trying to cope with what she was going through. She would talk in terms that were kind of poetry. I didn't know how else to describe it. I tried to put that in the Longlegs character because he's really a tragic entity. He's at the mercy of these voices that are talking to him and getting him to do these things."
Where can I watch Longlegs?
Maika Monroe in 'Longlegs'.
Neon
Longlegs is now streaming on Hulu. It's also available to rent via Amazon Prime Video.
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