The True Horror of ‘Longlegs’ Lies in What Its Ending Implies

With Dream Scenario last year, and now the horror thriller Longlegs, Nicolas Cage seems fully committed to playing twisted characters that haunt your nightmares to tell you something profound about human behavior. And can I just say? I am seated!

Written and directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter)—son of Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Psycho—Longlegs stars Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, and Kiernan Shipka, among others, with cinematography is by Andrés Arochi, and editing by Greg Ng and Graham Fortin. 

What is Longlegs About?

Spoilers ahead!

Set in the 1990s during the Clinton administration, the film sees the FBI hot on the case of a series of identical family murders, fathers who brutally butcher their spouses and children before killing themselves—except it’s not that straightforward, because someone is clearly making these men do the killing. Each crime scene turns up a birthday card for the family’s daughter, whose birthday falls on the 14th of the month, with a Zodiac-type message written in code and signed with one word: “Longlegs.”

But here’s a twist. There’s no evidence of this killer’s presence in the house when the killings happen. So how is he making them kill?

After her intuitiveness helps the FBI nab another deranged killer, agent Lee Harker (Monroe) is put on the Longlegs case—and good for them, because right after she gets on the case, the slow-moving investigation suddenly picks up speed and pops up leads. She’s even able to decipher his code and find a girl survivor from one of his previous murders.

Harker’s senior, Agent Carter (Underwood), sensing that she might just be the right kind of weird genius who could crack this case open, lets her work on it. The casework starts yielding occult evidence and a direct connection between Harker and Longlegs. She even has these partly dream-like, partly memory-like flashes of Longlegs that make us think she knows a lot more than she realizes. And that’s when a major twist threatens to turn Harker’s world upside down.

What happens at the end of Longlegs?

A few things become evident midway through the film. One, Lee Harker is the girl that we saw with Longlegs in the film’s opening sequence, and there is something special about her that made him keep her alive. Her boss has figured it out too, and he sends her home looking for clues. Two, the leads investigated so far, and the survivor (an impressively eerie Kiernan Shipka) that Harker questions, confirm that these murders involve elements of the occult and Satan worship. And three, Harker’s mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), has a mental disorder that has something to do with the case.

After a picture of Longlegs, snapped by Lee as a child, is made public, he is caught and brought in for questioning. A goosebumps-inducing interrogation ends with Longlegs killing himself, but not before saying things to Harker that deeply unsettle her, like telling her that there’s darkness inside of her. When she asks him to reveal his accomplice, Longlegs taunts her that she should ask her mother Ruth for the answers she seeks.

Lee is accompanied by another agent, who is concerned for her mental health, to her mother’s house. As the agent waiting in the car spots something strange in the garage, she is shot dead. Harker realizes too late that it’s her mother.

Outside, Lee finds her mother pointing a gun at a doll that looks exactly like a young Lee (and similar to the one that Harker and Carter had found buried at the crime scene at Camera family farm). Ruth tells her that now that Longlegs is dead, Lee is also free. Ruth shoots the doll in the head, and Lee collapses. 

Through an expository sequence of Ruth narrating a story to a young Lee, we find out that Longlegs was a doll maker and a Satan worshipper trying to do the devil’s work of proving that even in the most devout, churchgoing families, there was capacity for evil. When Longlegs found Lee, Ruth made a literal deal with the Devil to make sure Longlegs let her daughter live. 

In exchange, Ruth had to be his eyes and instrument. She had to go to people’s homes on Longlegs’ appointed dates, posing as a nurse from the church and telling the families that they had won a doll as a gift. Once invited in, she had to make sure that the murders happened.

When Lee wakes up, she’s in Longlegs’ lair in her own house, with her mother missing. Taking Longlegs’ wagon from the garage, she drives to Agent Carter’s, where her mother is already there with a doll for his daughter, whose birthday is on the same date as Lee’s and those of the other victims. Lee sees firsthand the power of Longlegs working, even after his death, through his doll. She is unable to stop Carter from being forced to kill his wife, and has to kill him to protect the little girl who is in the doll’s trance. When Ruth tries to finish the job, Lee has no option but to kill her mother to end Longlegs’ dirty work for good.

The other theory about the ending of Longlegs

The end is left open to interpretation. It does look like the psychic connection between Longlegs and the girls can be severed by destroying something inside the dolls. However, it’s not a stretch to assume that evil doesn’t just go away completely but finds a way to persist and continue its work, through vulnerable humans that are easy to manipulate because they often fear that which they do not understand.

There’s also the matter of Harker’s own relationship with her mother and the absence of her father and how that could be interpreted. In one of Lee’s visions, she sees Longlegs physically assault her mother and tell her whatever will happen is her fault, and it looks like something an abusive husband would do and say to his wife. In the same sequence, we see a shadow of Satan in the dark behind Lee, as if the devil is watching over her.

Thus, one plausible interpretation could be the subtext of generational trauma passed on from mother to daughter. Possibly, Lee’s father (or maternal grandfather) was violent and abusive, which caused her own mother’s mental distress and made her inclined to violence herself, which played out with fathers murdering their families. She could’ve made Lee block out those scary, abusive parts of her childhood, until the very end when her truth was revealed and Lee’s repressed memories came flooding back.

Is Longlegs worth your time?

Longlegs has been marketed as the scariest horror flick you’ll see this year. From hiding Nic Cage’s character look because it is too terrifying to behold, to sharing footage of lead actor Maika Monroe’s accelerating heartbeat when she first saw Cage in his full Longlegs getup, the hype and buildup around the film has been fantastic.

Whether Longlegs is indeed the scariest depends on what keeps you up at night. Perkins excellently builds the atmospheric horror through cinematography and sound design to elicit eerie discomfort and a great sensory experience. There are nods to some genre greats, too, including Psycho, and the way certain scenes are shot is truly inspired—a scene where two agents enter a pitch dark barn with flashlights and the interrogation scene with Longlegs come to mind.

The opening sequence is one of the best and freshest I’ve seen in a while—from the perspective of a child, the tightly cropped aspect ratio makes us so fixated on the immediate evil we see that we tend to miss the big picture around it. Cage’s androgynous-looking Longlegs is definitely a creepy sight to behold. He can make a chill run down your spine when he screams or ruptures the silence with one of his unexpected loud outbursts. Both Maika Monroe and Alicia Witt are great, too.

It’s the implications of what Longlegs is trying to tell us—not so much about the satanic panic but about the human proclivity for evil—that are what’s truly scary about this horror film.