Nicolas Cage’s Terrifying Transformation & Villain’s Backstory Clarified By Director

Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Longlegs!

Longlegs used makeup to hint at the villain’s horrifying past. Unlike many contemporary horror movies, Longlegs was not inspired by real-world crimes, but it still retains a realistic and horrifying approach to the concept of mystical serial killing. Starring Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe, the story follows Monroe’s Lee Harker, an FBI agent desperately searching for a way to stop a series of murder-suicides. The movie has proven to be a hit at the box office, more than doubling its $10 million budget in just its opening weekend.

Director Oz Perkins used several tricks to ensure that the movie would be terrifying, but the most significant that he cites was the make-up. In an interview with IndieWire, Perkins explained the painstaking process of ensuring that Cage’s makeup was eerie without being unrealistic. In doing so, Perkins hoped to hint at the villain’s haunting backstory without being too blatant or over-the-top. Check out his quote below:

We don’t need to see him, that’s the oldest trick in the book,
the audience’s imagination will provide
better than you can. The idea ultimately was to say, “Hey, this guy is obviously something you don’t want to see.” The idea was that he’d been busted by shitty plastic surgery. And that’s about the mask, it’s the masked killer, it’s a genre imperative, whether it’s Michael Myers or

Jason or ‘Black Phone.’ If you ever watched episodes of ‘Botched,’ there’s no end to striving for perfection in your whole look, and that’s what we were trying to do. The balance between tightening the face and also filling the face is sort of typical in plastic surgery. First you tighten, and then we have to fill it to make it more youthful. And there’s that dance back and forth, often resulting in
puffy, sort of disfigured skin
.

The pale makeup is Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan’s my god, and so I’m always looking for ways to use Bob’s stuff, and that white makeup that he uses on the ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’ tour is this weird sort of performative thing. It’s like, ‘I’m here to perform for you, and I put on this white makeup, so I’m more visible to you in a way, but at the same time, I’m also more invisible,’ which I find fascinating. That always is a very tricky thing because there’s another line you can cross. You’re into third-degree scarring, which is monstrous. It was that fine line of making it look like there was some damage, that mysterious backstory, but how far do we go? A guy whose face is bad plastic surgery and white face makeup, that felt really scary to me, and it also felt sad to me, which was important.
He’s not the Hydra, he’s a person
who was presumably doing something else in his life before the devil tapped him on his shoulder and said, “It’s time, you’re now my secretary”.

Who Really Was Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs

Longlegs’ Backstory Remains A Mystery

Like Lee Harker’s mother, Ruth, however, the idea behind Cage’s character is that he was originally a regular man. Before being commanded to cause murder-suicides, he might have been an everyday accountant, lawyer, or teacher. After becoming the Devil’s tool, however, he was left to wander the world while driving fathers to murder their families. Along the way, he happened to recruit Ruth, which eventually led to his downfall and Satan’s spoiled plans. Regardless, Perkins intended that he was originally a regular human being.

By refusing to portray Longlegs as an eternal monster, Perkins had to ensure that he blurred the lines between horror and realism. Longlegs could not appear too monstrous, or else it would spoil the relatability of the character’s potential backstory. Balancing the horror and the realism made the movie terrifying, and it also served to make Longlegs‘ stunning ending more effective. Instead of a demon freeing himself from a human body, Longlegs ends his own life simply to serve Satan’s purpose, which is even more horrifying.

Longlegs’ existence and his profound desire to kill reflect the idea that future mortals can be forced to play the same role he was. While there is no post-credit scene in Longlegs to set up a sequel, the story is leaving a path for future follow-ups. Ruth and the original Nicolas Cage villains were both corrupted, and Harker could easily find herself falling victim to the same horrifying process. The Longlegs makeup told a story that made its villain more terrifying, while also setting up plot points for a potential sequel.

Source: IndieWire

Longlegs

Longlegs is a horror thriller film by writer-director Osgood Perkins. When FBI agent Lee Harker is assigned to a serial killer cold case, their investigation leads them down a rabbit hole riddled with disturbing discoveries and the occult at the center of it all. When the trail of evidence reveals a personal connection, it becomes a race against time to prevent another murder.

Director

Oz Perkins

Release Date

July 12, 2024

Studio(s)

C2 Motion Picture Group , Saturn Films

Distributor(s)

Neon

Writers

Oz Perkins

Cast

Maika Monroe , Nicholas Cage , Alicia Witt , Blair Underwood

Runtime

101 Minutes

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