The latest film by writer/director Osgood Perkins is filled with a creepy atmosphere, serial killer investigations like those in Silence of the Lambs, Satan worship, and surprising mentions of the glam rock band T. Rex. All these elements lead to an ending that is unsettling and might leave you with some questions. From killer nuns to satanic symbols, let’s break down Longlegs and its ending.
Longlegs is about the FBI investigating a serial killing spree that has been going on for decades in Oregon. The victims are always families who die in a murder-suicide, but there are certain similarities between each case that suggest there is a person controlling the murders. First, the families all have daughters whose birthdays fall on the 14th of the month. Second, the killer always leaves a message in a secret code at the crime scene, signed with the name “Longlegs.”
Since there is no direct evidence of Longlegs’ (Nicolas Cage) presence at the crime scenes, the FBI is trying to figure out how he’s able to seem like he’s causing the killings from a distance — or if he has a partner. Enter Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a “half-psychic” FBI Agent.
Lee solves Longlegs’ code using a Bible verse from a birthday card he left at her house. She also realizes that when the dates of the murders are put on a calendar, they form a satanic pattern. The only date missing to complete the pattern is the 13th, so the FBI is racing to find Longlegs before he strikes again.
The decoded letters from Longlegs lead Lee and her supervisor, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), to the Camera family farm, where the first Longlegs murder took place. There, they find a life-size doll that looks eerily like the Cameras’ daughter, Carrie Anne (Kiernan Shipka), who is the only survivor of the attack. The doll appears mostly normal, except for a black orb in its head that seems to whisper to Lee.
Lee and Carter then visit Carrie Anne in a psychiatric hospital, where she has been in a catatonic state for years. However, on the same day Lee and Carter found the doll, Carrie Anne suddenly woke up — and was visited by someone who signed in using Lee’s name. During their conversation, Carrie Anne reveals that she is still very loyal to Longlegs and would do anything he told her to do.
Mother knows best
Lee visits her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), who has always encouraged her to pray for protection and has kept all of Lee’s belongings. Among these belongings is a stack of Polaroids Lee took, which includes one photo of Longlegs himself. It turns out that the young girl Longlegs spoke to in the film’s eerie opening was Lee, and her birthday is on January 14. But how did she and her mother survive his intrusion?
Longlegs scary ending explainedThe truth is revealed after the FBI uses Lee’s photo to capture Longlegs. During an interrogation with Lee, he tells her to ask her mother about any possible accomplices. He then smashes his head on the table and dies. It is also revealed that Carrie Anne Camera has died by suicide in the psychiatric hospital. Since it is the 13th of the month, her death completes Longlegs’ pattern and explains what he must have told her to do when he visited her, closing off one of the few leads the FBI still had in the case.
Now that Ruth is the FBI’s last lead, Lee and Agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) return to visit her. But when they arrive, they find a nun with a shotgun!
Ruth, dressed in a full nun’s habit, shoots Browning. She then aims her gun at a life-like doll that looks like a young Lee and shatters the ball inside it. Black smoke pours out from the real Lee’s head, causing her to faint. Now that Lee is free from the doll’s hold, Ruth tells the story of her relationship with Longlegs as a twisted fairy tale.
Ending Explained
Longlegs leaves Lee’s fate uncertain: Will she be able to overcome the evil presence in the doll and destroy it in another way? Or will she fall under its control and become part of Longlegs, Ruth, and Satan’s final plan? Longlegs’ last joyful “Hail Satan!” makes it seem more likely that the evil is still present.
But Longlegs’ ending has more meaning than that. Think back to Longlegs’ cruel version of “Happy Birthday,” to how important birthdays are in his plan, and to the fact that all the daughters of the murdered families were so young. The film’s focus on young girls growing up and aging is central to its darkness.
When Lee first meets Ruby, she asks about a swing in Ruby’s room filled with stuffed animals. Ruby laughs at it, saying Carter keeps it so Ruby won’t grow up too fast. There’s a similar feeling in Ruth’s hoarding of all of Lee’s old belongings: If you keep your children’s past with you, their childhood will never truly go away, right?
Longlegs scary ending explainedLonglegs’ dolls take this idea further. Not only are they a symbol of childhood, but they’re also twisted representations of the victims as children. By distracting the daughters from their parents’ violence, the dolls keep them stuck in childlike innocence until the end of their lives.
So, what happens when one of the doll’s victims survives? You get Lee, who isn’t completely unaware of the world’s evils — remember the first serial killer? — but who is blind to the evil in her own home. Only when Ruth shoots Lee’s doll does Lee see that evil.
In that moment, she begins to understand why her mother was so overprotective and so adamant about her praying. This sudden burst of understanding feels like a late coming-of-age for Lee, a final shedding of the layers from her troubled childhood.
With that in mind, think of Longlegs’ last “Happy Birthday” as an acknowledgment of Lee’s new, “grown-up” understanding of her life up to that point. There’s probably no worse birthday gift than discovering that your mom has been working with the literal devil.