The key cause Nicolas Cage appears to be like so bizarre in Longlegs

Oz Perkins’ oddball film Longlegs does a variety of genre-hopping: It’s half police procedural, half serial-killer thriller, half supernatural horror film, with a variety of little detours down lanes that shuffle it additional into varied subgenres. And it raises a variety of questions it by no means solutions. Particularly, the killer — an remoted oddball who types himself as “Longlegs” in cryptic messages he leaves for legislation enforcement — has such an odd look that it raises the query of whether or not there’s a supernatural aspect to that, as nicely.

Picture: Neon

Longlegs’ look isn’t addressed through the film, aside from a scene the place a hardware-store worker (performed by Perkins’ daughter Bea) calls Longlegs a weirdo. Individuals don’t even appear to acknowledge that he appears to be like like somebody slapped moist, greasy, white modeling clay throughout his face, then walked away. Whereas the prosthetics job could possibly be seen as only a solution to cover Nicolas Cage’s face out of a worry that the long-lasting actor is simply too acquainted and his presence is likely to be distracting, the press notes for the film have a unique clarification that the film doesn’t even trace at.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Longlegs.]

As viewers ultimately be taught, Longlegs, as he types himself, is a Satanist who’s been busily gathering souls for the satan by making evil dolls and sending them to households below the guise that they’ve gained some kind of contest. As soon as the doll enters every family, the daddy of the household succumbs to a type of possession and murders everybody in the home, then kills himself. When Longlegs is caught, he makes it clear to protagonist Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) that he expects Devil to lavishly reward him for these deeds — he isn’t afraid of his impending demise, as a result of (one thing like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope), he expects to be “all over the place” after he dies.

This fervent dedication to Devil, because it seems, really explains his pale, lumpy, plasticky look. In keeping with the film’s press notes, Longlegs’ face is a results of repeated plastic surgical procedures gone improper:

When Perkins initially approached particular make-up results artist Harlow MacFarlane about creating the face of Longlegs, MacFarlane says, “From the start, Oz at all times had this glam rock vibe in his head.” The large hair, the garish make-up, the superficial aesthetic fixation which may lead an individual to go below the knife so they might stay ceaselessly younger. However greater than being pushed by type, Longlegs can be a person pushed by obsessive devotion.

“His jam is actually that he’s making an attempt to make himself lovely for the Satan,” explains MacFarlane. “He’s in love with the Satan, and he’s making an attempt to impress the Satan, so he’s gone by all these cosmetic surgery botch jobs to make himself look as fairly as he can for the Satan. Each factor he does is for this evil power that he’s making an attempt to impress.” […]

Getting the pale glam sadist look excellent meant researching the state of elective surgical procedure within the late 70s and early 80s — with characters residing in semi-rural Oregon, no much less — after which constructing from a basis of dangerous work marked by overfilling and visual scarring. There can be layers of ache atop layers of ache. “You’ll be able to simply think about it’s some hack job of a physician in a strip mall someplace,” says MacFarlane, who labored intently with Perkins and Cage to hone the ultimate product.

In keeping with the identical notes, MacFarlane checked out Gary Oldman’s make-up as Mason Verger within the film Hannibal as one potential supply of inspiration. Within the 2001 sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, Mason was a rapist and pedophile who Hannibal Lecter drugged and satisfied to slice off his personal face, leading to great mutilation that might solely be partially repaired with surgical procedure.

Cage additionally instructed an strategy just like Lon Chaney’s make-up within the 1925 Phantom of the Opera. Each inspirations have been finally thought-about over-the-top for Perkins’ film, however each are considerably mirrored within the remaining outcomes. A notice on the finish of that part additionally reveals one thing Cage hoped to see on display screen that by no means occurred: He wished Longlegs to “absolutely pull his nostril off at one level through the film.”

Picture: Common/Everett Assortment

There isn’t any phrase within the film or the press notes about how Devil feels about Longlegs’ present face.

One other fascinating piece of trivia does come up within the notes: Perkins hid the character’s remaining look from Monroe till he shot the scene the place they first come face-to-face in an FBI interrogation room, as a result of he wished her unnerved response to be genuine within the second.

“On horror units, so many individuals ask if it’s scary or is it spooky. And it actually isn’t! You see all of the gags. You see the pretend blood,” Monroe says within the press notes. “However for the primary time, I used to be actually capable of expertise this real feeling of being very uncomfortable and nervous and scared and terrified of opening that door, of what I used to be going to see. […] Oz didn’t let me see any images or something. I knew [Cage] was sitting within the hair and make-up chair for a number of hours, however I had no thought! It was a fairly surreal expertise that I’ll positively always remember.”