‘Longlegs’ Is Inspired by a True Story, but Not the One You Think It Is

Director Osgood Perkins’ new horror film, Longlegs, has been generating quite a lot of buzz from critics and audiences. As it is hailed as one of the year’s best horror films, viewers may be curious if it’s based on a true story.

Longlegs follows FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she is assigned to the case of the elusive serial killer nicknamed Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). The case grows increasingly complicated and dangerous when she starts to find ties to the occult. Soon, she must navigate both the clues and her past to prevent another family from becoming victims of Longlegs.

The movie has received rave reviews from critics, who praise its nightmarish premise, as well as Cage’s and Monroe’s mesmerizing performances. Steeped in Satan worship and playing out like an unsettling nightmare, some viewers will question if Longlegs is based on a real story. At the very least, one would guess a true crime case inspires it.

After all, set in the 1990s, it strongly seems to draw inspiration from the Satanic panic that swept across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Other elements, such as the serial killer’s tendency to write coded messages that baffle detectives, are reminiscent of true-crime cases like the Zodiac Killer. Hence, some viewers may be eager to know if there are any real-life cases behind Longlegs.

Is Longlegs based in truth?

Longlegs is not based on a real criminal case. In fact, Perkins has denied directly drawing inspiration from any real-life cases. In an interview with GamesRadar+, he explained that he simply finds real-life cases too disturbing to look at. As a result, he never went looking for true-crime cases while making Longlegs, instead choosing to make up everything, including how the FBI operates. It ensures that there’s some lightness to the story and keeps from giving a spotlight to actual murderers.

He said,

I can’t look at real things. I don’t like them. They don’t sit well with me. I don’t want to know. All this stuff couldn’t be more fictionalized and totally made up. That’s part of the fun of it [for] me. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s how FBI people probably talk. Oh, that’s how they would probably come into a room. I don’t know, maybe it’s something like this‘. It’s part of what keeps it light for me, honestly. I’m not interested in what these sickos do. To me, this is a different kind of poem, you know, and it’s totally just make believe.

However, there were elements from the real world that drove Perkins to create Longlegs, as he considers it an ode to his family’s tragic past. Osgood is the son of Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson; Anthony was an actor best known for starring in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. For the vast majority of his life, he kept his AIDS diagnosis a secret. His wife, Berry, who was also an actor, kept his diagnosis a secret from their children for many years, before she was killed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Hence, Perkins got a bit personal with Longlegs, which includes a story about family secrets and a mother-daughter bond. He considers it an ode to the secrets his mother kept and the impact it would ultimately have on his family.

He told IndieWire that he tries to make films about his own experiences, and they naturally tend to be about his experiences with his parents. Although he initially intended Gretel & Hansel to contain this personal element, it was ultimately Longlegs that included his experiences of how a parent can lie out of love. He said,

My father was a gay man who was closeted, and in the world that we lived in, it wasn’t acceptable. And it still isn’t, as insane as that is. My mother made this decision that that wasn’t going to be true for our family. I wanted ‘Gretel & Hansel’ to be more about that, and I didn’t get there with it because it wasn’t my script and for a hundred other reasons. [When] I set into ‘Longlegs,’ that was the core truth: A mother can lie, and she can lie out of love.

So, while Longlegs may not be based on a true crime case, it was inspired by an arguably more powerful and relatable story about the complicated legacy of one family’s secrets.