How son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins came up with horror hit of the year

The plot of Longlegs, a low-budget horror film that has become one of the breakout hits of the year, owes plenty to the Book of Revelation. But its success is as much about what is not shown as what is.

Written and directed by Osgood “Oz” Perkins, son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins, the movie reportedly cost under $US10 million to make and market. In its first weekend in the US it took $US22 million; by the end of its first week, that had risen to almost $US33 million, to be bettered only by Despicable Me 4.

It opened in Australia on Thursday, and by the end of the weekend had clocked up almost $2 million, a remarkable result for both a horror movie and an indie release.

“It’s once in a long time that something breaks through like this,” says a delighted Perkins, who likens its success to that of The Blair Witch Project 25 years ago, a film that “got into the bloodstream in this way where it was almost mandatory viewing, not only for horror people but for moviegoers [generally].”

Longlegs stars an unrecognisable Nicolas Cage as a serial killer, his face bloated and blotched by botched cosmetic surgery, his work dedicated to Satan, and his stylistic influences drawn from Transformer-era Lou Reed and glam rock god Marc Bolan of T-Rex.

It’s a shocking look, but in a stroke of marketing genius distributor Neon crafted a series of ads that tease without revealing much at all. And those ads have been credited with driving the desire to see the film in cinemas – and in turn, with reminding Hollywood at large of the power of a savvy campaign.

As important as the fact Neon built a sense of mystery around the film, says Perkins, is that they did so without distorting the film itself.

“They didn’t try to pretend it was something else. They’ve honoured the piece and they’ve created this intensity, where you’re uncool if you don’t see it.”

Longlegs is no dud. But it’s not a straightforward genre play either. Perkins makes no bones about the influences on his story of a female FBI agent (played by former professional wind-kiter Maika Monroe) hunting a gender-blurring serial killer.

“I just said, ‘What if it was Silence of the Lambs?’ There hasn’t been a great thing like that in a long time,” he says. “All the FBI stuff to me is the invitation to the audience: ‘Come on in. You remember this, you like this, you feel comfortable with this.’ But I knew I wasn’t going to do a straight procedural. The Silence of the Lambs thing was going to end, it was going to take the audience about halfway and then drop them off.”

There are hints of Twin Peaks, of Se7en, of Zodiac, of any number of movies about demonic possession. And, perhaps inevitably, there’s a hint of Psycho too.

Perkins likens his creative process to the infinite chimpanzee theorem (given enough of them, enough typewriters, and enough time, they will eventually produce any given text, including the work of Shakespeare). “The 1000 chimps in your brain are all the things that go in,” he says. “Everybody I admire – Bob Dylan being top of the mountain – will tell you you’re not doing the thing, the thing is doing you. The job of the artist or the creator is just to be loose, to let that stuff filter through. You just take dictation.”

One key input is Perkins’ somewhat complicated relationship with his parents, the actor Anthony Perkins, who died of an AIDS-related illness when Oz was 18, and the actress/model/photographer Berry Berenson, who was a passenger on board one of the planes that was hijacked and flown into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001.

Oz and his brother Elvis grew up ignorant of the fact their father was queer, though everyone in his parents’ circle knew and accepted it. “I think my mom elected to construct a narrative or a cover, and my brother and I were on one side of the cover, and everybody else was on the other side,” he says.

Though it’s a million miles from autobiographical, Longlegs is, he says, an instance of a writer writing the truth of what he knows – namely, “that a parent can lie to a kid. These themes, these truths, whatever you want to call them, are not complex, they’re not complicated, they’re elemental. A parent can lie. It’s as simple as that.”

And that, he feels, is why his film has resonated.

“When you connect to a simple truth that means something to you, you’re giving yourself a real opportunity to make something that is honest, isn’t a lie, and isn’t phoney,” he says. “You can make a bunch of crazy stuff, but it’s never phoney.”

Longlegs is in cinemas now.

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and Twitter at @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.