There’s a secret reason Nicolas Cage looks so damn weird in Longlegs
Oz Perkins’ oddball movie Longlegs does a lot of genre-hopping: It’s part police procedural, part serial-killer thriller, part supernatural horror movie, with a lot of little detours down lanes that shuffle it further into various subgenres. And it raises a lot of questions it never answers. In particular, the killer — an isolated oddball who styles himself as “Longlegs” in cryptic messages he leaves for law enforcement — has such an odd appearance that it raises the question of whether there’s a supernatural element to that, as well.
Longlegs’ look isn’t addressed during the movie, apart from a scene where a hardware-store employee (played by Perkins’ daughter Bea) calls Longlegs a weirdo. People don’t even seem to acknowledge that he looks like someone slapped wet, greasy, white modeling clay all over his face, then walked away. While the prosthetics job could be seen as just a way to hide Nicolas Cage’s face out of a fear that the iconic actor is too familiar and his presence might be distracting, the press notes for the movie have a different explanation that the movie doesn’t even hint at.
[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Longlegs.]
As viewers eventually learn, Longlegs, as he styles himself, is a Satanist who’s been busily gathering souls for the devil by making evil dolls and sending them to families under the guise that they’ve won some sort of contest. Once the doll enters each household, the father of the family succumbs to a form of possession and murders everyone in the house, then kills himself. When Longlegs is caught, he makes it clear to protagonist Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) that he expects Satan to lavishly reward him for these deeds — he isn’t afraid of his impending death, because (something like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope), he expects to be “everywhere” after he dies.
This fervent dedication to Satan, as it turns out, actually explains his pale, lumpy, plasticky appearance. According to the movie’s press notes, Longlegs’ face is a
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