The genre of horror is such that it takes inspiration from a legion of sources; while there are classics like The Conjuring and Texas Chainsaw Massacre based on real-life events, a cornucopia of paranormal films – like the ones predicated on the Latin American folklore of La Llorana – are also weaved using cultural, mythical fables and urban legends. And then there’s Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs.
Cage, who stars as the eponymous serial killer in Longlegs – which perhaps marks the most petrifying outing of his career – used his late mother’s spooky skincare routine while prepping for his gruesome role in the newly released movie. What a genius.
Nicolas Cage’s Peculiar Source of Inspiration For Longlegs
While some critics have extolled Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs as “the most terrifying horror movie of 2024,” others have deemed it a cross between gory cinematic masterpieces like The Silence of the Lambs and Hereditary.
It’s amusing then that Nicolas Cage – who stars as the elusive Satanic villain in the horror/thriller – took inspiration from an eerie childhood memory of his mother, the late Joy Vogelsang, and her face cream for his role as Longlegs (via Entertainment Weekly). But that’s not to say that it makes it any less terrifying.
My mom put on Noxzema cold cream. I was 2 years old, and I opened the bathroom door [to see] what she was doing. For no reason, she turned her face really fast and stared at me after [putting on] the cold cream. The whiteness of the cold cream just really spooked me.
This vivid memory of a ghostly-looking cream on his mother’s face helped Cage, 60, during his transformation into the sinister character in Longlegs who happens to have a freakishly white complexion in the film. “He has a strange connection to the color white,” the Renfield star said. “I don’t really know what it is. He says it’s just a force he’s aware of.”
His Role in Longlegs Holds A Personal Significance
Vogelsang’s skincare routine wasn’t the only thing that aided Cage to truly get into the character he’s portraying in Longlegs; his mother helped him with a lot more than just nailing the “androgynous” killer’s ghoulish appearance.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the National Treasure star – whose mother had battled schizophrenia and severe depression when he was a child – remarked how he channeled the agony of Vogelsang’s illness into Longlegs, who, at the end of the day, is just “a tragic entity.”
I was coming at it from, what exactly was it that drove my mother insane? It was a deeply personal kind of performance for me because I grew up trying to cope with what she was going through. She would talk in terms that were kind of poetry…I tried to put that in the Longlegs character because he’s really a tragic entity. He’s at the mercy of these voices that are talking to him and getting him to do these things.
Meanwhile, for the director, the film is not too different from an obscure epiphany that’s just slightly out of reach in your consciousness. “Sometimes you don’t know what lives there with you,” Perkins said in the same conversation with EW. “So Longlegs, at its core, is about that. The things that are under your feet are sometimes the hardest things to see.”
Longlegs is currently playing in theatres.
