A lot of horror movies nowadays try to build up hype with critics claiming that they’re “one the scariest movies ever” or “the scariest movie since The Exorcist.” And while that buzz is similarly surrounding Longlegs, the marketing for the film alone is certainly making an impression that sets it apart from the others. In the review from our own Chris Bumbray, he explains that the film lives up to a lot of the claims, “Once the credits rolled, I found myself surprisingly shaken up by what I’d just seen, and it’s a film I’ll need to chew on in the coming weeks. Expect this one to make major waves among horror fans when it opens on July 12th. Will it be considered a new classic? Time will tell, but for me, this was a pretty dazzling piece of work.”
Longlegs director Osgood Perkins has close ties with the horror game, as many will point him out to be genre royalty, being the son of Norman Bates himself, Anthony Perkins. (In fact, Osgood even showed up as a young Norman Bates in Psycho II.) According to The Hollywood Reporter, although he joins the ranks of many talented auteurs of modern-day scare maestros, Perkins doesn’t actually watch contemporary horror movies. He explains, “On the one hand, I want to identify or atone with the father by going down the same path and representing the good name in the genre in question, but then I also have a sort of a distaste for it.”
Perkins continued to expound on that, “I wouldn’t say I’m someone who likes or dislikes horror movies. I don’t see new ones. I have no interest. I’ll never see MaXXXine, I’ll never see Pearl. I saw X for reasons; it wasn’t on purpose. I don’t see contemporary things. They don’t interest me at all, and that’s not to say that they aren’t great. I’m sure they are great and make a lot of people happy, which is all that really matters. But I like the horror genre because it’s the genre that permits the most invention and it encourages the most poetry. It’s all guessing and grasping at what is essentially unknowable.”
His history around the genre would be particularly personal as he grew up with one of the most famous faces in cinema history and when Anthony Perkins entered the later part of his career, the drop in the quality of work would provide its own kind of dread with Osgood, “When I was coming into my 12- to-15-year-old self and getting into movies, my father was making very bad horror movies. He was being paid well to go to Europe and do shit. And it was obvious that this stuff was shit; it used to upset my mom [Berry Berenson] quite a lot. So the disparity between the zenith of things, which was Psycho, and the basin of things, which was, for instance, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie [Edge of Sanity] that he made when I was a kid, has always planted in me an uneasiness around the horror genre.”
Next up for Osgood Perkins is The Monkey, based on a Stephen King short story.