Maika Monroe plays an FBI agent and Nicolas Cage the Satanic killer she hunts in a 1990s-set horror film that hid its villain’s face for months, then grossed $128 million worldwide and now has a follow-up dated for 2028.

Longlegs is a 2024 American psychological horror and mystery film written and directed by Osgood Perkins, who also signs as Oz Perkins, with Maika Monroe, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt and Nicolas Cage in the lead roles. Neon released it in American cinemas on 12 July 2024, four days after a premiere at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. It was made for less than $10 million and grossed about $128 million worldwide, which made it Neon’s highest-grossing film in the domestic market, the highest-grossing independent film of 2024 and the biggest commercial result of Perkins’s career.

A case that points back at the agent

The story is set in Oregon in the 1990s. A prologue in 1974 shows a young girl with a Polaroid camera meeting a strange man in pale makeup. Twenty years later, FBI agent Lee Harker, played by Maika Monroe, is put on an unsolved case by her supervisor, Agent William Carter, played by Blair Underwood: a series of murder-suicides in which a father kills his family and then himself. Each house holds a letter written in a Satanic cipher and signed “Longlegs”, in handwriting that matches nobody who lived there.

Lee, who appears to have something close to clairvoyance, manages to decode the letters. The pattern that emerges is precise. Every family had a nine-year-old daughter born on the 14th day of a month, every killing happened within six days of that birthday, and when the dates are marked on a calendar they form an occult triangle with one point still missing. Then Lee receives a coded birthday card from the killer himself, with a warning that her mother, Ruth, played by Alicia Witt, will be murdered if Lee reveals where it came from.

From there the case begins to drift toward Lee’s own past. A visit to a psychiatric hospital to question Carrie Anne Camera, played by Kiernan Shipka, the only known survivor of the killings, raises the question of why somebody using Lee’s name has already been there, and Carter starts to suspect that his agent has a personal link to the man she is hunting. The final act, which explains how the murders were carried out without the killer ever setting foot in the houses, is best left unspoiled. It turns on dolls, a basement and what a parent is willing to hide from a child.

Where the idea came from

Perkins has been open about his sources. The dolls at the centre of the plot were loosely inspired by the killing of JonBenét Ramsey in Colorado in 1996. He has recalled that among the Christmas presents her parents had bought for her was a life-size replica doll of the girl, wearing one of her pageant dresses, kept in a cardboard box in the basement about 15 feet (some four and a half metres) from where she was killed, a detail he said he had “cataloged away” for years.

The other source is personal. Perkins is the son of the actor Anthony Perkins, Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho, and of the actress and photographer Berry Berenson. He told People magazine that the film grew out of the way his mother shielded her children and the public from his father’s sexuality and his relationships with men. “Your mother can protect you from a truth that she thinks is unsavory,” he said, “and then you just build out a crazy movie around that.” He has summed up the theme behind the screenplay in one line: it is possible for parents to lie to their children and tell them stories.

A director who started out as the young Norman Bates

Osgood Perkins was born in New York in 1974, and his first screen role was a brief appearance as the 12-year-old Norman Bates in Psycho II (1983), the younger version of his father’s character. He went on to act in Six Degrees of Separation, Legally Blonde, Secretary, the 2009 Star Trek and Jordan Peele‘s Nope. He has said that, as a teenager, he felt his father had been relegated to “bad horror movies”, and that this left him with a “love-hate” relationship with the genre he would later work in.

His directing career began well before Longlegs. The Blackcoat’s Daughter, his debut, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 and was released by A24 in 2017; Kiernan Shipka, who plays Carrie Anne in Longlegs, was one of its leads. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House followed in 2016 and Gretel & Hansel in 2020. Those were modest releases. Longlegs was the first of his films to reach a mass audience, and it changed the scale of what came next: The Monkey and Keeper both opened in 2025, and in May 2025 Perkins co-founded the production company Phobos with the producer Chris Ferguson, with a first-look deal at Neon.

The cast and the team behind the camera

Maika Monroe had her breakthrough in the independent horror film It Follows (2014) and has worked in horror and thrillers ever since, with The Guest, Greta and Watcher among her credits. Alicia Witt was discovered as a child by David Lynch, who cast her in Dune (1984) and Twin Peaks, and she later appeared in the slasher Urban Legend (1998). Blair Underwood, who spent seven years as the attorney Jonathan Rollins in L.A. Law, plays the senior agent who brings Lee onto the case.

Nicolas Cage plays the title role and is also one of the film’s producers, through his company Saturn Films. He and Monroe joined the project in February 2023, a few months after it was announced, and Witt and Underwood were confirmed the following month. Dave Caplan’s C2 Motion Picture Group financed the production, which was scheduled to shoot in Vancouver between 16 January and 23 February 2023, and Neon bought the North American rights at the European Film Market that February. Andrés Arochi Tinajero was the director of photography, Greg Ng and Graham Fortin edited the film, and the score is credited to Zilgi, a pseudonym for the director’s younger brother, the musician Elvis Perkins.

A campaign built on hiding the villain

The marketing is the most thoroughly documented part of the Longlegs story. Neon took a page from the campaign that turned The Blair Witch Project into a hit in 1999. Eleven promotional videos went up on YouTube from January 2024, without naming the film until February, and together they drew some 30 million views. Cage’s appearance was kept out of every image. A billboard in Los Angeles gave only a phone number that played recorded messages from the killer, and on 14 June a paid cipher in The Seattle Times, a nod to the Zodiac Killer, led readers to an in-world website about the murders.

In the week of release, Neon put out a clip presented as a recording of Monroe’s heartbeat the first time she saw Cage in character, and after the premiere it pointed viewers to the figures of the devil hidden in the backgrounds of the film; Perkins has said there are 15 of them. The whole marketing budget stayed under $10 million, mostly spent on digital content rather than television advertising, and the campaign won five Clio Entertainment Awards in November 2024. Perkins later credited the distributor for it, recalling that Neon had asked him early on for permission “to kind of go nuts”.

The box office run

Projections had the film opening at $7–9 million from 2,510 cinemas in the United States and Canada. It took $10 million on its first day alone, including $3 million from Thursday previews, both records for Neon, and finished its first weekend with $22.4 million, second only to Despicable Me 4. That was the best opening in Neon’s history, the biggest for an original horror film in 2024 and Cage’s first live-action opening above $20 million since Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance in 2012.

By its third weekend Longlegs had overtaken Parasite as Neon’s highest-grossing film in North America, and on 16 August 2024 it passed $100 million worldwide. It ended with $74.3 million in the United States and Canada and $53.6 million in other territories, and trade estimates put its net profit at around $48 million. It reached video on demand on 23 August 2024 and came out on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on 24 September. In awards season, Perkins won the Saturn Award for best film screenwriting in February 2025, and Cage won best supporting performance at the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards that October.

A second Longlegs film at Paramount

The film now has a follow-up. In April 2026, Paramount Pictures acquired the rights to a new feature set in the Longlegs universe, with Perkins writing, directing and producing and Cage returning as star and producer, alongside the producers Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Chris Ferguson and Dave Caplan. Neon, which released the original, is not involved. Paramount has dated the film for 14 January 2028 and is calling it neither a sequel nor a spinoff, and no plot details have been released.

On paper, the ingredients of Longlegs are familiar ones: a young FBI agent, a serial killer, a coded letter, a supervisor with doubts. What set it apart commercially was the combination of a director drawing on his own family history and a distributor willing to turn its villain into a rumour for six months before anyone saw his face. The new Paramount film will have to work without that second advantage, since the audience now knows exactly who Longlegs is.

Tags: horror, Nicolas Cage