Many directors fall in love with scary movies through late-night cable binges or with friends at a drive-in. Osgood Perkins had a leg up: His father was the actor Anthony Perkins, a Hollywood heavyweight and the star of “Psycho,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror movie game changer.
“My father was absent, more oblique and abstract but a movie star, a public figure, an icon,” said Perkins, 50, in a recent interview over video. “Something very big lived with me.”
The younger Perkins said his father, who died of AIDS at 60 in 1992, was a spirit guide as he made his new horror movie “Longlegs,” starring Nicolas Cage as a fiendish clown-looking evildoer who vexes a green F.B.I. agent, played by Maika Monroe, via handmade evil-summoning dolls.
What would Perkins’s father have thought of the film, now in theaters?
“He probably would have really dug it,” he said.
Perkins talked about what inspired “Longlegs” and working with the chameleonic Cage. The interview has been edited and condensed.
Where did the idea for “Longlegs” originate?
I decided to hitch my star to one of the greatest pictures ever made. The idea became how to play with the left hand a “Silence of the Lambs” movie, while lying in wait with the right hand. It started as a crossword puzzle way of thinking.
At the heart of the film is a mother-daughter relationship.
The real issue in the movie is a mother’s decision to create the ultimate protective womb around her kid. She goes to pretty grisly lengths to maintain it. The question becomes, is it wrong to do everything you can to protect your own child? One of the more exaggerated, brilliant examples of that is Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Dogtooth.” It’s like, you can teach a child whatever version of the world you want.
It’s also an evil doll movie.
The dollness comes from “The Golden Bough,” that huge encyclopedic record of cultures and superstition and ceremony and ritual, and how different cultures have coped. One of the sections that stuck out to me was about sympathetic magic, voodoo dolls, effigies, in the way that in some countries they burn puppets of their leaders. This idea that you can affect a living thing by working the effigy and by some sympathetic transference the object will become messed up. That did feel like a fresh turn on the creepy doll.
Nicolas Cage has done a lot of nutty roles, but this one is particularly nutty.
When Nic read the script and said “I want to do this,” the first thing I said was, you’re Nicolas Cage. You can do whatever you want. He said, no, I want to do all the words as you’ve written them with the punctuation as you’ve done it, because it was really punctuated to give it flavor. Nic is an insanely deliberate and focused artist. There’s nothing vague about Nicolas Cage. A lot of people feel Nic just goes big. But he goes big from an extremely controlled place.
Maika Monroe really underplays her character, a lot like she did in “It Follows.”
Less can be so much more when a camera understands an actor. I had seen her work, and you meet her in person, she’s very kinetic and silly and never stops. The real estate between the person who she is in real life and on camera — that chasm is really charged. She really gets it that you don’t need to be histrionic to be interesting.
There’s a creepy stillness in much of your film, a scarier approach to horror than being all about blood and monsters.
A movie like “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” has a stillness to it that is super captivating. In horror pictures, stillness, silence, waiting is the heart of the matter. Because however much we think about it or not — and hopefully we don’t think about it very much — we’re all waiting for the end.
In the documentary “Queer for Fear,” about queer horror, you said your father “introduced a significant wrinkle into my understanding of how the world works.” How so?
I had a limited window to consciously understand my dad. He died when I was 18. He was away a lot and he was a movie star. A lot of that emanates through the fact that he directed “Psycho 3.” It was sort of porno. It was dirty-funny in a very different way than the second movie was. I think that his willingness to do that in that movie was super interesting to me. It’s always been in my mind as like, wouldn’t it be great to make a horror picture that’s also funny and sort of dirty? “Longlegs” was supposed to be the funny, dirty one.
Read More: How Osgood Perkins Gave a Jolt to ‘Longlegs’
