The secret reason why Nicolas Cage looks so weird in longlegs

The weird film by Oz Perkins Long legs does a lot of genre-hopping: it’s part police crime thriller, part serial killer thriller, part supernatural horror film, with lots of little detours that push it further into different subgenres. And it raises lots of questions that it never answers. In particular, the killer – an isolated oddball who refers to himself as “Longlegs” in cryptic messages he leaves for the police – has such an odd appearance that it raises the question of whether there’s a supernatural element here, too.

Longlegs’ appearance is not addressed in the film, aside from a scene in which a hardware store clerk (played by Perkins’ daughter Bea) calls Longlegs a nutcase. People don’t even seem to notice that he looks like someone smeared wet, greasy, white modeling clay on his face and then walked away. While the prosthetic surgery could be seen as a mere way to hide Nicolas Cage’s face for fear that the iconic actor was too well known and his presence would be distracting, the film’s press notes provide another explanation that the film doesn’t even hint at.

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

As viewers eventually learn, Longlegs, as he calls himself, is a Satanist who zealously collects souls for the devil by making evil dolls and sending them to families under the pretense that they have won some kind of contest. Once the doll gets to each household, the family man succumbs to a form of possession and murders everyone in the house and then commits suicide. When Longlegs is caught, he makes it clear to protagonist Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) that he expects Satan to reward him handsomely for these deeds – he is not afraid of his impending death because (something like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope), he expects to be “everywhere” after his death.

This fervent devotion to Satan, it turns out, actually explains his pale, lumpy, plastic-like appearance. According to the film’s press notes, Longlegs’ face is the result of repeated, botched plastic surgeries:

When Perkins first asked special makeup effects artist Harlow MacFarlane to create Longlegs’ face, MacFarlane said, “From the beginning, Oz always had that glam-rock vibe in mind.” The big hair, the garish makeup, the superficial aesthetic fixation that might make someone go under the knife to stay forever young. But more than style, Longlegs was a man driven by obsessive devotion.

“His thing is actually that he’s trying to make himself beautiful for the devil,” MacFarlane explains. “He’s in love with the devil and he’s trying to impress the devil, so he’s had all this plastic surgery to make himself look as pretty as possible for the devil. Everything he does, he does for this evil force that he wants to impress.” […]

Getting the faded, glamorous sadist look just right required learning about the state of elective surgery in the late ’70s and early ’80s – the characters lived in rural Oregon, no less – and then building on a foundation of shoddy work, marked by overcrowding and visible scarring. There would be layers of pain upon layers of pain. “You can just think of it as a botched job by a doctor in a mall somewhere,” says MacFarlane, who worked closely with Perkins and Cage to refine the final product.

According to the same notes, MacFarlane looked at Gary Oldman’s makeup as Mason Verger in the film. Hannibal as a possible source of inspiration. In the continuation of The silence of the LambsMason was a rapist and pedophile who was drugged by Hannibal Lecter and made to cut off his face, resulting in severe mutilation that could only be partially repaired by surgery.

Cage also suggested an approach similar to Lon Chaney’s makeup in 1925 Phantom of the opera. Both inspirations were ultimately deemed over the top for Perkins’ film, but both are reflected in some ways in the final result. A note at the end of this section also reveals something Cage wanted to see on screen that never happened: he wanted Longlegs to “completely rip his nose off at one point in the film.”

Neither the film nor the press notes mention what Satan thinks about Longlegs’ current face.

There’s another interesting tidbit in the notes: Perkins kept the character’s final appearance a secret from Monroe until he was filming the scene where they first meet face-to-face in an FBI interrogation room because he wanted her exasperated reaction at that moment to seem authentic.

“On horror sets, so many people ask if it’s scary or spooky. And it really isn’t! You see all the gags. You see the fake blood,” Monroe says in the press releases. “But for the first time, I was able to really experience that real feeling of being very uncomfortable and nervous and scared and afraid to open the door and see what I was going to see.” […] Oz didn’t let me see any photos or anything. I knew [Cage] sat in the hair and makeup chair for several hours, but I had no idea! It was a pretty surreal experience that I will definitely never forget.”