Longlegs Revisited: The Devil Wants to Be Seen, and He Is Using the FBI to Do It

The hidden devil sightings in Longlegs are not just a gimmick for spooking audiences or selling the film. I think there is a narrative and thematic reason for them that many of us missed: the devil in Osgood Perkins' film wants to be seen, and he is manipulating humanity's power structures to craft a bloody piece of pop art.

If I seem a little off, it might be because analysing background details in movies for the past 10 years has broken me. I cannot see any film without staring at the dark corners. What scares me most about scary movies is not the jump scares or the blood but the great big nothing, the inky abyss beyond the frame where our minds start playing make believe, because the alternative to a demon lurking there is the even more frightening thought that perhaps we are actually just alone.

Longlegs is a 2024 Neon horror built on Osgood Perkins' own influences

Longlegs is the 2024 Neon horror directed by Osgood Perkins, son of Psycho actor Anthony Perkins. I love it not because of Nicolas Cage's unhinged performance or the mystery structure, but because of the hidden devil sightings. The film follows murder suicides in Oregon coordinated by a figure who calls himself Longlegs and serves what he calls the man downstairs. FBI agent Lee Harker uses a kind of clairvoyance to decode his encryptions, but she has a personal connection to him through her mother Ruth, who delivered birthday dolls with mysterious spheres in their heads that drove fathers to kill their families, leaving daughters behind as witnesses.

Perkins has said the doll device was partly inspired by a theory about the death of JonBenét Ramsey, recalling a life size replica doll of her "in a cardboard box in the basement, 15 ft from where she was killed." That influence, along with what some have called Cage's queer coded performance, reminding many of Ted Levine's Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, colours the film with a pop psychology clearly aware of the art that preceded it. But as with many modern horror films since The Blair Witch Project, the marketing and the film's general aura overtake the narrative, and for many people that aura is the devil sightings.

Neon promised more than 15 devil appearances, but I can only find 10

Throughout the film, Perkins inserts subtle appearances by a tall, cloaked devil with the long curved horns and protruding ears of a goat, fading in and out of the shadows for a few seconds at a time. In the year and a half after release, people online had spotted exactly 10. Oddly, a promo Neon released on July 22nd, 2024 teased that the director hid more than 15. I set out to find the missing five, and even after our editor, Joshua Steven Hurd, made a super brightened cut I went through several times, I can confirm there are only 10.

My belief is that someone in marketing asked Perkins how many shots had devil VFX work, and he reported the total, combining the 10 horned sightings with roughly five shots where the devil's face is superimposed over the black veiled doll heads. Those are the creepiest to me, because the wide open snake eyes evoke the demonic faces William Friedkin spliced into The Exorcist. Some of the 10 were also added in post production, so there may have been others considered and dropped. Some say there must be exactly 10 as a nod to the Revelation passage Harker quotes about a beast with seven heads and 10 horns.

Why would a master manipulator use a glam rocker sloppy enough to get caught?

My search raised a different question. If the devil is an ancient evil who has outsmarted generations of clever mortals, why use a goofy glam rocker in 1990s Oregon to do work sloppy enough for FBI agents to catch? I would understand Longlegs as a red herring, so authorities would assume he worked alone and dismiss "The devil made me do it." But the plan includes Longlegs openly talking about the devil on FBI tapes, leaving a trustworthy witness in Harker, the medical examiner finding the sphere inside the Camera family doll, and the frequency that drove a daughter to jump from a window.

Is this just another implausible story where a demonic plan boils down to revealing itself? Is the devil only there as an aesthetic choice to stir paranoia, or to give Neon's marketing something to sell? Both could be true. But this is not a devil who pulled the greatest trick by making the world believe he does not exist. This is a devil who proudly declares, "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair," and who openly mocks the feds.

The first sighting puts the devil beside the American flag as Harker's chaperone

About 16 minutes in, as Harker goes through the evidence in the FBI office, the devil fades into view to the left of the American flag. Perkins told Vulture that her analytical mind was being switched on, so "it made sense that the devil would be with her as her chaperone, as her coach, as her date." On the flag, he said "probably not much more needs to be said about that."

I read this as the devil presenting himself to Harker's periphery, entering the mortal plane to influence her investigation. He wants her to solve the case, which is odd, since most demonic forces in horror hide from law enforcement and appear to the isolated, the vulnerable and the young, people who could be dismissed. And leading with him hugging the flag forms a rather unambiguous statement about deals our country and its leaders have made with the man downstairs. The film is set in the 1990s and Bill Clinton's photo is on the walls, so maybe it is a bit about him too.

The second and third sightings frame Longlegs' threats to Ruth

About 27 minutes in, Harker looks into the mist at home and sees Longlegs in the present day for the first time, with the horned devil hovering over his head. A few minutes earlier Perkins shows an empty shot of the grounds as a baseline, so our eye senses something odd, then gives us two things to look at so we miss the second one. He uses this composition nearly every time. Perkins described the devil's presence as "Kind of an I'll come, too, sort of vibe," which I take to mean the devil does not want Longlegs getting all the credit for his master plan. He is an egomaniac.

Then Harker turns to see Longlegs sauntering through her house delivering a birthday card, and as she realises it is a threat about her mother, the devil appears for a second in the darkened doorway, a space earlier shots showed lit. Perkins said it is "like the devil is there to indicate crossing a threshold." Both sightings centre on threats to Ruth, who calls during the scene, a clue she has been an active participant for years. Keep in mind Perkins framing the devil as encouragement to Harker.

In the library and the basement, the devil reveals his blueprint and his failed artist

About 37 minutes in, Harker traces the murder dates in occult books and decodes Longlegs' inverted triangle. Some argue shapes on those books form another devil sighting, but I do not buy it. She feels eyes on her, and one random light at the end of an otherwise dark aisle invites her to look out a window, where she sees the devil clearly. Where he once hid behind Harker or above Longlegs, now he wants to be seen, triggered by the most important discovery yet: the blueprint of his plan.

The fifth sighting, about 55 minutes in, has no Harker. Dale Kobble, Longlegs himself, sits in the basement reading The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, and from his point of view the devil fades in with a hint of a growl. Perkins wanted Dale Kobble's home to feel like Buffalo Bill's, hinting Dale Kobble was a failed glam rock musician who disfigured himself with plastic surgery and still wears makeup. That the devil chose a failed artist, who moves from music to doll making, is an important clue.

At Ruth's house, the devil monitors Harker's progress

When Harker visits her mother, a bug crawls from the basement door, she flashes on snakes, and the devil appears framed in the door outside. Perkins said this one was not scripted but added in the edit, describing another layer being pulled off as she glimpses a deeper understanding, with the devil there to monitor her progress and encourage her. Since Longlegs lives in that basement, the bug means things are decrepit down there. The devil is saying that just as he is outside that door looking in, she is on the other side of the door she must go through.

Minutes later, in her childhood bedroom, she flashes back to being a girl and the devil stands in the shadows to the left. Perkins noted a little red piano was originally a bigger motif before being cut. I believe it was going to connect to artistic expression, Dale Kobble's past as a musician and perhaps songs young Lee would have sung.

The eighth and ninth sightings show a proud devil with a parental presence

At Ruth's house with Browning, Ruth blends into a green background and blows his head off with a shotgun. As Harker steps right at the sound, the devil appears in the distance. He is particularly proud here, because his flashy puppet has killed himself in federal custody shouting "Hail Satan" for everyone to hear, and his real operator is activated to complete the triangle's final day.

The ninth is the most obvious, as all is revealed: the workshop where dolls are built for Ruth to deliver as gifts from the church, and a shot of young Lee with the devil fading in behind her. Perkins said it was one of the few in the original script, possibly the first they built: "It's just showing up in a picture." The film gives the devil an almost parental presence in her room.

The final sighting is the devil's punctuation, and Harker loses

Like John Doe's plan in Seven, the final stroke gets violently personal with an investigator's family. I am haunted by Agent Carter looking past the camera with a hint of a smile before shutting the door, nodding to the devil standing where we are. Practically, the devil hides the camera's reflection in the window glass, like Morpheus' jacket on a doorknob in The Matrix. Perkins considers it his best, telling Vulture, "It's fun. It's scary. It's punctuation," a willful cameo "ushering in the last movement of his opera that he staged."

That opera centres on Harker, selected young and, one could argue, blessed or cursed with the ability to see uncanny connections that fast tracked her FBI career. And she does not win. Left behind while Ruth reached the Carters, she arrives too late: Carter kills his wife Anna, Harker kills Carter, daughter Ruby witnesses it, and Harker must kill her mother. Perkins said the devil "wants the worst possible thing to happen to an individual."

Osgood Perkins' family history shapes the core emotional truth

In a 2024 People interview, Perkins said, "I grew up in a household with a very famous, visible father who was living two lives, at least, and was a closeted homosexual or bisexual man," and that his mother, Berry Berenson, tried to shield the children from it. "Your mother can protect you from a truth that she thinks is unsavory, and then you just build out a crazy movie around that." Anthony Perkins died in 1992, and Berenson died on September 11th, 2001 aboard American Airlines Flight 11.

Longlegs is not a one to one confessional allegory, but this offers insight into the emotional truth beneath the supernatural layer. The devil wanted to torture one of God's angels: Longlegs calls young Lee an angel, and later Dale Kobble's ramblings imply a link between Harker's surname and Hark the Herald Angels Sing. At the end, when Harker runs out of bullets, the shot that would free Ruby from the doll's spell does not happen, and we do not know if she ever finishes the task. She glares at the doll as Longlegs' Happy Birthday song plays, and we get no gunshot, only "Hail Satan."

I think the devil is a narcissistic artist humiliating mid 1990s America

The devil here is not spreading chaos; his evil lies in how precisely his plan is carried out. The mid 1990s setting was, for Perkins, a reference to JonBenét Ramsey's death at Christmas 1996, but I believe another shift informs it. Many historians credit FBI agent John E. Douglas with transformative behavioral science work in the 1970s and 80s, interviewing killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Charles Manson, work that partly led to Wayne Williams' arrest in the 1979 to 1981 Atlanta child murders. Jonathan Groff's Holden Ford in Mindhunter is based on him. Douglas retired in 1995, and I think that inspired the setting.

The devil is saying, "Oh, mid-'90s America, you think you cracked the code of evil? Think again." His goal is to humiliate the FBI with irrefutable proof of a real evil that behavioral science cannot explain away, a work the bureau would be too proud and too fearful to release. He appears so that in future, when evildoers say the devil made them do it, the powers that be will believe it. I believe Longlegs and films like it are cursed.

So is the devil's very public plan a narrative masterstroke, or simply an aesthetic and marketing choice dressed up as one?