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Osgood Perkins Explains How ‘Longlegs’ Is an Ode to His Celebrity Parents’ Dark Backstory: ‘A Mother Can Lie Out of Love’

IndieWire talks to 'Longlegs' director Osgood Perkins about how his dark family backstory influenced the horror movie starring Nicolas Cage.

The filmmaker, who as an actor had a small role in the “Psycho” sequel from 1983 as a kid and then most memorably as an adult in “Legally Blonde” as Elle Woods’ dorky classmate, has made original horror on introspective terms for the past decade. In its own strange way, it’s an ode to the precarious secret his mother maintained, and the generational tensions that bloomed out of lying for a long time to her children (including Osgood’s brother, singer/songwriter Elvis Perkins) about her husband’s sexual identity. Perkins, meanwhile, had more to say about the film’s 1993 setting that only emboldens further how close to his own moviegoing heart the project was: “It’s meant to invoke ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Seven’ and the golden age of the serial killer movie, those being the two great things that have ever happened to the genre.

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