The true-life crime that inspired Nicolas Cage’s Long Legs

Osgood Perkins’ 2024 horror-thriller Longlegs is like watching three or four episodes of The X-Files at once. The film’s heroine, FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), has mysterious psychic powers that she uses to catch a mysterious serial killer. The killer, nicknamed Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), has a very strange way. Every now and then, a local family is violently murdered by one of their own, and the killer then commits suicide. A note would then be found at the crime scene, written in Longlegs’ handwriting, taking credit for the murder. Longlegs also appears to target families with nine-year-old girls born on or around the 14th of the month.

As the film progresses, other strange clues emerge. Harker finds a life-sized baby doll in the attic, which has a mysterious metal object hidden inside. what is going on? Later, viewers will learn that Harker has a strange personal connection to Longlegs. The doll would also end up playing a certain demonic role in the Long-Legged Murders, being used in some way to channel dark mental energies into the victims’ homes. It’s never clearly explained, but it’s all ghostly and terrifying. Many critics loved “Longlegs” for its free-floating strangeness, and for Perkins’ nightmarish sense of style. Not to mention, the story doesn’t make much sense.

The life-sized dolls appear to be inspired by a well-known murder case from the 1990s. In an interview with InversePerkins admitted that he had researched the infamous murder of JonBenet Ramsay, the six-year-old beauty pageant contestant who was found dead in her home on December 26, 1996. Details of the case he found strangest: Ramsay was murdered in the basement of her home. , just 15 feet away from her life-sized doll.

At the time, many people assumed that JonBenet Ramsay was murdered by her family, and there was evidence of rather horrific violence and sexual assaults. As the investigation continued over the next several years, DNA evidence exonerated the entire family. All reports stated that the Ramsay family engaged in notorious, and arguably unethical, “pageant father” behavior, which aroused public suspicion. At the same time, many considered the doll to be a strange and creepy detail. One of the Christmas gifts Ramsay’s parents intended to give her that year was a life-sized replica of herself, dressed in an impressive pageant outfit that Ramsay had actually worn.

Perkins clung to these details and kept them in his mind. When he was writing Long Legs, he remembered those details very clearly. Perkins decided to incorporate it into the serial killer novel in an unspeakably magical way. Perkins did not recreate any of the other details of Ramsay’s murder, but the doll never left his mind. He said:

“With voodoo dolls, if you want to impose power on someone, you make a doll of them, and then you poke them. (…) Dolls, statues, sculptures, statues, puppets – it was all in the magic of the world. I wanted to create a crime Ramsay was killed as Christmas approached, and one of the gifts the parents got for JonBenet was a life-sized replica doll of her, wearing one of her pageant dresses. A cardboard box in the basement, 15 feet from… “The place where she was killed, and there was something so crazy about that, I cataloged it away.”

To this day, Ramsey’s murder remains officially unsolved, although there are many theories. If Ramsay had lived, she would have turned 35 this year. Her death, As we see from the movie “Longlegs”, It still remains in the American consciousness.