CONTAINS SPOILERS
The shadow of Psycho looms long over many things. What would, say, the modern movie twist be without it? Rug pulls don’t come much more severe than the true nature of Mrs Norma Bates, let alone Alfred Hitchcock’s brutal decision to cut down his protagonist less than halfway through the runtime. Would horror villains be as spiky without Norman Bates either? A simmering undercurrent of transgressive sexuality, repressed and constricted with the naughty, knotty implied relationship between mother and son at its centre galvanised whatever was simply teased by decades of horror before it. While not the most timeless of classics (especially given the clumsy explanation surrounding Anthony Perkins’ queer-coded villain), its legacy is difficult to deny, clinging on so many others of its genre that it’s a footnote to most horror films.
Yet perhaps there’s no more pertinent a comparison than to the work of its star’s son, Osgood Perkins, the 50 year old up-and-coming auteur whose fourth feature, Longlegs, has set the box office ablaze with the strongest opening weekend for an independent horror film of all time. Fearsome in reputation from even before its release, film distributor Neon’s inspired marketing campaign harnessed the eerie power of Perkins’ images by stripping them of context; the arrival of its terrifying teaser trailer was heralded by post-murder scene posters captioned with Zodiac-like ciphers and Biblical quotes, and it wasn’t long before the first claim of it being “the scariest film of the decade” was plastered over every bitty bit of promotional material out there. Bums were planted in seats for a good ol’ fashioned serial killer thriller, bolstered by the enticing mystery of just what the hell Nicolas Cage is going to look like as its freakish villain. Its actual revelations are perhaps cleaner than people would have expected, with Perkins’ screenplay dotting its Is and crossing its Ts in a noble effort to bridge its isolated horrors with a coherent narrative.
But what horrors they are! Electrifying scares jolt like a cattle prod to the belly button; violence hits hard, sudden and bloody; most shots are filled with at least one open doorway that feels like a point for invasion rather than escape. It’s a dread-fuelled experience from minute one, a Perkins flick through and through…but would Osgood be the Osgood we now know without the legacy of his father, Anthony? Let’s have a look at the shared DNA of their respective work…
Neither Longlegs or Psycho would hold their ferocious stopping power without their killers. In Psycho, Norman Bates is a polite young man with a damaged mind; a dangerously close relationship with his mother caused the unassuming motel owner to slay her and her lover, a trauma so massive that Norman kept her alive by adopting her identity and living a half-life as her. Her mummified corpse is moved around the house, not quite being kept as a preserved meat puppet for Norman’s nefarious deeds, but instead an important totem of the abusive manipulation she still holds over her son from beyond the grave. Crucially, when Vera Miles’ Lila Crane searches the Bates house for her missing sister, she discovers Norma’s corpse in the basement, turning her round in a swivel chair to reveal her abyssal eye sockets, necrotic skin and tombstone teeth for the mother of all reveals. The descent into darkness reveals the basement to be the key to unlocking Psycho’s terrible mystery, where traps are laid and secrets are repressed to lethal degrees.
Basements hold a similar shattering importance in Longlegs. ‘Mr Downstairs’ is a threat consistently mentioned throughout by victim and villain alike, an unseen force that suggests something is always going on beneath the surface, and even beneath the layers that are peeled back by each new development. The titular ‘Longlegs’ is indeed a basement-dweller; a prosthetic-lathered Nicolas Cage portrays oddball dollmaker Dale Ferdinand Kobble as a gibbering lunatic with a Vitamin D deficiency. Looking like Tiny Tim if he married into the Kardashians, his overinflated forehead and beestung lips make him look at best like an aging rocker who has made some terrible cosmetic decisions, and at worst decidedly inhuman, a creature of a subterranean hellscape lit by make-up mirrors and candlelight. Although he claims to be a harbinger of Satan’s will throughout the film, he might as well be the devil himself, unwavering in his faith in all that is unholy and wholeheartedly committed to executing Lucifer’s will and those he wants wiped off the face of the earth. His devil’s business involves painstakingly creating accurate lookalikes of his target’s children in porcelain form, effectively Trojan horses for metal mind control orbs that will turn families against one another and lead them to total annihilation. He does surface to do the odd bit of shopping, but he mainly lurks beneath the home of the Harker family, a mother and daughter unit who form a tragic diptych as the film draws to a close. While daughter Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) works as a “highly intuitive/half-psychic” FBI agent, mother Ruth Harker (Alicia Witt) is a god-fearing woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown who performs terrible deeds for Longlegs, allowing him to work from her basement and then smuggling his dolls into the homes of families under the disguise of a benevolent nun, telling the (un)lucky parishioners they have won a lifelike replica of their daughter. Carnage ensues as each family is driven mad by their misplaced and new-found love for this eerie inanimate object, and the diabolical work of Cobble and Harker is complete.
In both Hitchcock and Osgood’s films, an upstairs/downstairs relationship exists between the central perpetrators. Despite being one of the most vigorously analysed films of all time, it may be surprising that Psycho still remains the more mysterious. While Longlegs and Ruth’s work begins under duress, where Norma ends and Norman begins is something Psycho never really confirms; there is a suggestion of an almost Oedipal relationship between mother and son that shatters Norman’s mind, a love so terrible and a hatred so pure that it transcends death itself. Norma’s voice haunts Norman’s mind, yet it’s deeply uncertain whether her soul is still tied to her body or if Norman has internalised his mother’s personality entirely. Either way, the result is the murder of Janet Leigh’s petty criminal Marion Crane, a crime of repression that expels sexual urges from Norman’s life by washing away her blood and submerging her remains in a swamp. Like Longlegs and Ruth, the power comes from beneath, the ghoulish revenant pulling the strings through threat of obliteration, and whatever atrocities are committed are done so under duress from an unknowable horror lurking off-screen.
Perhaps Osgood’s more clear-cut treatment of a serial killer chain of command is a deliberate evolution of the question posed by his father’s most iconic film. The puppet and the puppet master are defined well in Longlegs, and the sanding of the edges of Hitchcock’s thorny film are perhaps a conscious choice for a 2024 release, one less willing to wade into the murky waters of gendered violence and looking at the more common manipulation of a woman by a man instead of a man by a woman. But Osgood is Anthony’s son, born and raised by one of Hollywood’s most complex leading men, so it’s tough to not see a son grappling with his father’s legacy, and perhaps more pointedly, his personal life.
Osgood has stated recently in an interview with People recently that his perception of his father is complicated. He pithily remarked that Longlegs is “the most baroque horror version of, ‘What’s going on in my household?’”, stating too that “I grew up in a household with a very famous, visible father who was living two lives, at least, and was a closeted homosexual or bisexual man making bad horror movies.[…] He was relegated to having to do s[hit] for money. So there’s a weird sort of love-hate, push-pull, respect-degrading quality to the horror genre, which…I think it’s lent itself to me making some off-balance, off-center things.” It’s clear that Anthony exists (at least in part) in Osgood’s mind as a complex boogeyman who had to be a real-life father and also the monster under the bed for millions. It could be easy to see Anthony Perkins playing Longlegs himself at some point in his career, despite the role being given the distinct buckwild flavour of a locked-in Nicolas Cage scream-a-thon. Perkins Sr. was no stranger to decrepit looks; in his late period, the Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde riff of Edge of Sanity saw him go post-punk and as pale as Longlegs himself whenever the beast was unleashed.
Perhaps more pertinent, however, is Osgood’s admission that the perception of his father’s sexuality was one obfuscated by social prejudice; Anthony’s heavily-rumoured homosexuality was a matter of much controversy, which was in part deepened by another side to his personal life. Perkins Jr.’s People interview also saw him talk about his mother, Berry Berenson, and the pivotal role she played in his upbringing. On the public perception of his father’s speculative sexuality, Osgood states “Your mother can protect you from a truth that she thinks is unsavory […] And then you just build out a crazy movie around that.” The lynchpin of this particular crazy movie centres around mother Ruth making a literal deal with the devil in order to protect daughter Lee. Lee knows nothing of the man in her basement or her mother’s culpability in the deaths of dozens of families; this mental shielding is achieved through a combination of Satanic magic from a replica doll tailor-made for her and by her mother’s steadfast commitment to upholding her daughter’s safety. From this angle, there’s a fair amount of Berenson that can be found in Ruth: an arbiter of a fake reality to protect a child from the hard truth about the eerie pale-faced man living in a windowless box in the same house.
In that respect, the autobiographical lines that can be drawn between Longlegs and Psycho’s legacy are rich yet troubling. The parallel of Anthony Perkins the father and Anthony Perkins the monster is disturbing, especially given the storm of prejudice surrounding his rumoured sexuality and the mentally-ill portrait of transness cultivated by Psycho’s twist. Add to that a deeply damning view of Berenson hiding her husband’s secret from her children through the parallel of Ruth Harker’s version of preserving her daughter’s innocence, an argument can be made that Osgood’s family allegory equates marital troubles to serial murder, and a Satanic conspiracy to the deconstruction of a child’s heteronormative view of the world.
However, there’s a cheekiness to Osgood’s delivery of his disturbing family allegory that suggests all is well and at peace in his head; a vein of black humour and slapstick cruelty runs throughout the film that brings a strange relief and sly silliness to the film’s otherwise oppressive atmosphere. Ending with a wink, a smooch and a campy delivery of the film’s most bald-faced line (“Hail Satan!”), Longlegs functions brilliantly as a heightened, hysterical view of America’s eerie present (represented ironically by its near past) where the devil is let in by the imperious righteousness of religion, and had it been directed by Ari Aster or any other of Perkins’ ‘elevated horror’ peers, it may have been viewed as simply that. Yet Perkins is of a rare pedigree; the inheritor of a horror bloodline, the son of Norman Bates himself, leafing through the family Polaroids and parsing meaning from memories of the personal and pop cultural kind. These snaps range from tender moments of a father at a distance, hidden in a closet or buried in a basement, sometimes caught through the prism of psychosis: a skull superimposed over a kindly face, or a long-legged man wishing you a happy birthday.
