Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Longlegs!

Longlegs director Osgood Perkins explains the movie’s ending and how it impacts FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe). Perkins’ latest horror movie Longlegs ends on an unexpected note. While most viewers assume the film is about the titular serial killer portrayed by Nicolas Cage, it is actually a story about deadly family secrets. Lee ultimately succeeds in identifying and tracking down Longlegs, but is shocked to learn he has an accomplice. Meanwhile, the accomplice is her own mother, Ruth Harker (Alicia Witt), a revelation that forces Lee to make an unimaginable decision.

In an interview with Den of Geek, Perkins broke down Longlegs‘ grisly ending and what it means for Lee. Perkins explained that the entire film built up to the moment when Lee killed her mother because this was the devil’s ultimate plan. The movie’s central antagonist is Satan, whose magic Longlegs utilizes to commit his murders. However, the big twist is that the devil’s ultimate plan wasn’t to secure as many victims as possible — it was to force an innocent woman to suffer the worst imaginable fate possible. Check out Perkins’ statement below:

I think the ending for her is about as bad as it could have turned out. Like shooting her mom in the head, that’s about as bad a day as a person can have. So I think that ultimately one could say that the entire movement of the movie—or the entire movement of all of Longlegs’ crimes, starting from crime number one all the way to the Carter family—it’s all about getting this poor girl to a place where she shoots her mom in the head. Like that’s kind of the flourish, the Devil’s ‘Yep, I did that.’

Longlegs’ Ending Showcases The True Nature Of Evil

The Devil Delights In Human Suffering

Longlegs‘ ending drives home what makes the horror movie so chilling: the idea of what evil really looks like. It’s a surprise when Longlegs is caught early in the film because everyone expects him to carry out some grand Satanic plan. However, in another interview with Variety, the director explained that’s not how the devil actually works. Perkins pointed out that, in his mind, the devil’s end goal isn’t “world domination,” as the entity is too playful to take such a direct route to evildoing. The devil is more likely to relish and revel in humans’ pain and suffering.

When one sees the devil from Perkins’ perspective, its actions in Longlegs start to make more sense. Each murder followed a specific pattern. Instead of Longlegs killing his victims, he would use Satanic magic to target families and force the husband/father to murder his family before taking his own life. It was part of the devil’s plan, working in smaller but arguably even more evil ways to torment and destroy one family or even just one person. In this way, viewers will realize the devil actually still wins in the end.

At the end of Longlegs, Lee is forced to kill her mother to stop another murder from occurring. While one can see it as her winning and saving the next would-be murder victim, Perkins’ statements provide another interpretation that Lee was the devil’s primary target and victim all along. Not all viewers will believe in the devil, but the movie is still relevant to real life by demonstrating that sometimes the most palpable evil is the one that operates more intimately than ambitiously. Ultimately, Longlegs‘ loaded ending holds an important and unexpected message about evil’s workings.

Source: Den of Geek, Variety