‘Long Legs’ ending, explained | TIME

Warning: This post contains spoilers Long legs.

When a horror film generates as much excitement as Long legs, is sure to inspire some polarizing reactions. Ahead of its July 12 release, writer-director Osgood Perkins’ new feature film (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I’m the pretty thing that lives in the house) has been alternately called “the scariest film of the decade” It is “failing bullshit.”

Still, the highly anticipated thriller currently boasts a 91% recent rating on Rotten tomatoes and thanks to the buzz generated by a viral marketing campaign and strategic advance screenings, it’s heading towards what could be a $10-15 million opening weekend. On TikTok, videos related to Long legs have racked up more than 51 million views, setting up the Satanic Panic-fueled genre film to cement itself in horror history or fall victim to the dreaded “overrated” label.

Giving an otherworldly twist to elements from a variety of iconic genre predecessors – from The Silence of the Lambs for Se7en for Zodiac–Long legs stars Follow the escape Maika Monroe as Lee Harker, a psychically gifted FBI agent who is drawn into the hunt for an elusive serial killer (Nicolas Cage) known only by the film’s titular nickname. Teaming up with her superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), Lee begins to slowly uncover the means and motive behind the grotesquely invented Longlegs—ultimately discovering an insidious connection to her own past.

The film’s final act – which reveals how Lee’s mother, the possessed dolls, and the devil himself played a role in Long Legs’ reign of terror – seems designed to be ambiguous, leaving the ending up to the viewer’s interpretation. But according to Monroe, there is a clear conclusion. “Evil isn’t going anywhere,” she told TIME. “That’s just the reality. There really is no end.”

See more information: Maika Monroe on her obsession with Long legs‘Sinister World

What Long legs‘ final means?

After Longlegs – or Dale Cobble, as his real name is – is arrested and kills himself by repeatedly slamming his face into the FBI interrogation table, Lee is left to piece together the final pieces of the hidden puzzle surrounding his crimes. She finally understands that her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), is the accomplice who worked with Longlegs to deliver the dolls to their targets’ homes. It is revealed that Ruth made the deliveries disguised as a nun and pretended to have been sent by the church with a gift for her daughters’ birthdays (always on the 14th of each month). She would then sit and watch as the evil orb inside the dolls’ heads, imbued with Longlegs’ hypnotic power, compelled the parents of the families to violently kill their loved ones and themselves.

Of course, Longlegs himself was apparently simply a pawn of Satan, aka “the man down there” – hence all the references to the Book of Revelations and glimpses of demonic ghosts. “[Longlegs is] someone who was a person and is a person, and whose life was kind of hijacked by the devil,” said Perkins Geek’s Lair. “You’re going to serve this and it sucks, and you do your best to be mean through it, with it, as a result of it, but in the end you’re also a person who gets fed up.”

When Lee returns to his mother’s house, Ruth shoots Lee’s fellow agent (Michelle Choi-Lee) before finally telling the truth: Lee was supposed to be one of Longlegs’ victims on his ninth birthday (which we saw in the opening flashback from the film), but Ruth avoided this by agreeing to help Longlegs carry out his horrors and letting him use her basement as a workshop. She also shoots Lee’s own doppelgänger doll, rendering Lee unconscious and severing the psychic bridge that connected her to Longlegs, while also leaving her blind to the truth all these years.

According to Perkins, this twist was born out of the relationship he had with his parents, horror icon Anthony Perkins and actor Berry Berenson, as a child. “I try not to tell any protective lies to my children, having grown up in a family where certain truths were healed, not in a malicious way and with any kind of cruelty or contempt, but rather as a move to support the family and keep things together.” , he said to Hollywood news reporter. “So the idea that a mother, in this case, can create a story, a lie, a narrative, a version and dress her children in that as a hazmat suit, is definitely where the film came from. started the process.”

‘As bad as it could have been’

When Lee wakes up, she realizes that her mother intends to continue Longlegs’ work to fulfill her end of the bargain and keep Lee safe from the devil. Lee rushes to Agent Carter’s house for her daughter Ruby’s (Ava Kelders) ninth birthday party and discovers that Ruth has already arrived with Ruby’s doll and allowed the Carter family to fall under her spell. Agent Carter kills his wife before Lee shoots him and then his own mother. But when she tries to shoot Ruby’s doll and free it from her influence, the gun empties.

Some viewers took this ending to mean that Lee is now possessed and will take on the mantle of Long Legs. Whether that’s the case or not, according to Perkins, the moment is meant to serve as a metaphor for the all-consuming nature of evil and how people are often complicit in their own destruction.

“The ending for her is as bad as it could have been,” he said Geek’s Lair. “Like shooting your mother in the head, that’s the worst day a person can have. So I think ultimately you could say that the whole movement of the film – or the whole movement of all of Longlegs’ crimes, starting from crime number one all the way to the Carter family – is all about getting this poor girl to a place where she shoots her mother in the head like that’s some kind of flourish, the devil ‘Yes, I did that.’