Longlegs director has explained how a famous real life murder inspired the film’s doll twist

One of the most shocking and mysterious parts of the hit new horror film Longlegs is the absolutely terrifying dolls that the serial killer Longlegs has been creating, and how they tie in to the horrible family murders he’s been committing for over 30 years. Director of Longlegs Osgood Perkins has just revealed that this twist featuring the dolls was inspired by one of the most famous murders ever – with a detail on that case I didn’t actually know existed before.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

What do the dolls mean in Longlegs?

Longlegs plays out a narrative in its third act about how dolls would be delivered to the families Longlegs wanted to kill by Lee’s own mother who’d be in a trusting nun disguise. The dolls would have been crafted by Longlegs and have a satanic ball inside the head that had the psychic ability to compel the man of the house to murder the rest before taking his own life. Grim stuff, and the true time the film pivots into the full supernatural.

Where did the twist idea for the dolls in Longlegs come from?

Osgood Perkins has revealed the real life crime that inspired the Longlegs dolls twist, and it actually came from the famous murder of JonBenét Ramsay.

Speaking in a recent interview with Inverse, Perkins explained “With voodoo dolls, if you want to inflict power on someone, you make a doll of them, and you poke it. If you want to bring down a regime, you make an effigy of a politician, and you burn it in the streets. Puppets, effigies, sculptures, statues, dolls — that was all in the magic of the world I wanted to create.

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“The murder took place approaching Christmas, and one present that the parents had gotten for JonBenét was a life-size replica doll of herself, wearing one of her pageant dresses. It was in a cardboard box in the basement, 15 feet from where she was killed, and there was something so insane about that, I’d catalogued it away.”

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