Hollywood has its share of bloodline dynasties, but no family tree blooms as broadly in the horror genre as that of Osgood Perkins. Named after his paternal grandfather, who starred in numerous Broadway productions and early films of the 1920s and ’30s, Oz the second is better known for his more direct ancestor: Anthony Perkins, whose breakout role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho secured both actor and director as horror royalty. Of course, Psycho’s success had many dimensions – a box office record-breaker, it blasted cinematic conventions (by killing off leading lady Janet Leigh by the end of the first act) as well as industry taboos (by being the first feature film in history to show a toilet bowl). But while Anthony Perkins, who went on to reprise the role of Norman Bates three times over, became a genre icon to horror fans, things appeared differently at home.
“In the horror genre, I felt like my dad was one of the gods of it,” says Perkins, reflecting on his father’s career. “That was way before I was born. My experience of my dad was not that at all. At that point, he had been relegated to doing bad movies to, you know, keep the lights on, like people do, like dads do. And so, I think my feelings about the horror genre were mixed.”
Indeed, Anthony Perkins’ own relationship with his career in showbiz was similarly complicated. From an edgy Broadway debut as a queer man who is “fixed” by the love of the right woman to several years as a teen pop idol before hitting it big in serious cinema in the late 1950s, Perkins quickly learned that playing pretend is a permanent gig for gay men in that era of Hollywood. Perkins then starred in Psycho as a man whose abuse at the hands of his overbearing mother leads him to commit murder in her dress and a wig – a brilliant film, but one that nonetheless introduced many Americans to a narrow idea of a criminogenic relationship between childhood abuse and so-called “deviant” sexual proclivities. It couldn’t have been easy for Perkins to be the poster boy of such a problematic depiction of sexual confusion, particularly when he was dealing with his own demons – including a stint of conversion therapy prior to marrying Oz’s mom, model/actress Berry Berenson.
“I lived in a certain way with public parents,” says Perkins. “My father was a gay man, but no one could know that; that was not allowed to be known. [Homophobia] isn’t as crazy as it is [now], but that wasn’t permitted. And so, in my interpretation of it, that sort of reality of his was not part of our lives as a family, and therefore had to be papered over.”
This was perhaps why Perkins senior never pressured Oz to follow in the family footsteps. Still, the young man found his own way to cinema and the opportunities for creative expression therein.
“I never got the man-to-man [talk] from my dad being like, ‘I really hope you do this,’” says Perkins. “If anything, I think it was sort of by omission; it was almost like ‘I kind of hope you don’t do this,’ in a way. My dad’s life in the spotlight or life as an actor or life as an artist was like a lot of people’s: good and not good, freeing and imprisoning, joyful and grief-stricken, hopeful and trodden.”
But that which is repressed always surfaces one way or another, and Oz admits that the disconnect between Longlegs leading lady Lee and her hoarder of an aging mom (played by Alicia Witt) has some autobiographical elements to it.
“Lee’s relationship with her mom is basically that,” he agrees, “For me, anything that I do has to start with that thing that’s real and true for me, as small as it might be, or as opaque or as oblique as it might end up being in the movie. But that’s the truth that I thought was worth making a movie about: the fact that mothers can lie.”
And while all this makes Longlegs seem deeply personal to Perkins, the writer/director was fortunate to discover a kindred spirit in his lead monster, another heir to a powerful Hollywood family dynasty, who resonated with the story just as deeply.
“When I first spoke to Nick [Cage], I said, ‘Just so you know, man, I think this movie is about my mom,’” recalls Perkins. “He was like, ‘That’s funny, because I think it’s about my mom.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think we’re gonna do fine, Nick. I think this is all going to work out.”
-Osgood Perkins
