← Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong
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- [00:03]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi Crime House Community, It's Vanessa Richardson. Exciting news. Conspiracy theories, cults and crimes is leveling up starting the week of January 12th, you'll be getting two episodes every week. Wednesdays we unravel the conspiracy or the cult, and on Fridays we look at a corresponding crime. Every week has a theme. Tech, bioterror, power, paranoia, you name it. Follow conspiracy theories, cults and crimes now on your podcast app because you're about to dive deeper, get weirder, and go darker than ever before.
- [00:47]
Heidi Wong
This is crime house, A closely guarded family secret, a history of dark magic, and a strange doll at the center of one of the world's most famous unsolved murders. These three elements combine to form one of the most unsettling horror movies in recent memory. And what makes Long Legs especially scary is how much of it is inspired by real life. Welcome to Twisted, a Crime House original. I'm Heidi Wong. Every week I'll take you deep into the true stories behind horror's biggest legends. From vengeful ghosts to bloody slashers to alien encounters and more, these real life accounts are guaranteed to keep you up at night, but scary stories aren't any fun if you're telling them alone. If you've ever had a haunted moment or a twisted tale of your own, I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments. The creepier the better. Crime House is made possible by you. Follow Twisted Tales and subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts for an ad free early access. And if you're into true crime as well as horror, go search and follow Crime House daily. Our team's twice a day show bringing you break breaking cases, updates and unbelievable stories from the world of crime that are happening right now. Today I'm digging Into Osgood Perkins 2024 horror film Long Legs. It stars Maika Monroe as Lee Harker, an FBI agent with a tortured past, and Nicolas Cage as the disturbed serial killer she's hunting who only goes by the name Long Legs. This movie is downright creepy, and what makes it even more chilling is that Osgood Perkins pulled all sorts of real world stories for inspiration from from one of America's most infamous unsolved murders and his own childhood. No, young Osgood wasn't tormented by a serial killer, but just like Lee Harker and Long Legs, the Perkins family had their share of secrets. And in this episode, I'll tell you all about them. If you haven't seen Long Legs yet, I highly recommend it. But in case you haven't seen it, here's some basics and warnings. There are a few spoilers ahead. Long Legs follows FBI agent Lee Harker, who's investigating a string of horrifying murder suicides. In each case, a father brutally kills his entire family before turning the weapon on himself. At one of the crime scenes, Lee finds a strange handmade doll, a clue that seems to hint at something ritualistic, maybe even supernatural. She suspects that the killings are somehow being orchestrated by a killer known as Longlegs, even though there's no evidence tying him to any of the crime scenes. But the closer Lee gets to uncovering the truth, the more the case seems to lead back to her own life. And soon, she starts to suspect that her own mother might not be telling her everything. Now, on paper, that doesn't exactly scream autobiographical. But make no mistake, writer director Osgood Perkins actually drew from his real life to create Long Legs, taking his family's secrets and weaving them into a psychological horror story, which, in my opinion, is what a real artist does. When you guys see my movie, you'll see I do it too. Now, just to clear this up. No, Osgood Perkins was never chased by a deranged killer, but he is related to an actor who played one. Osgood Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins, who played one of the most famous horror movie villains in history, Psycho's Norman Bates. In this movie, Norman is the seemingly pleasant owner of the Bates Motel. But unbeknownst to the people staying under his roof, he's a murderer with a split personality. In a way, you could say that horror ran in the Perkins family. Anthony was born in New York City in 1932. His father was a famous actor. But Anthony's early life wasn't easy. When Anthony was just five years old, his dad suddenly died from a heart attack. That left Anthony alone with his mother, Janet. Growing up after that, Anthony struggled to deal with all the big feelings he had about his father's death. One source refers to his childhood as tortured and troubled. But by his teens, he decided to follow his father's footsteps and become an actor himself. At 15, he started doing stage plays. By 21, he landed his first big feature film role in the Actress, acting along Hollywood's heavyweights Gene Simmons and Spencer Tracy. From there, things only went up. By 24, Anthony starred in Friendly Persuasion, and his role earned him an Academy Award nomination. And then just a few Years later, in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock came calling, offering Anthony the role of Norman Bates. You know, the. The shower, the knife, the screaming. It's one of the most iconic horror films of all time. And after Psycho came out, Anthony became a bonafide Hollywood leading man. He had a bright future and career ahead of him. But he had a secret that threatened everything. Anthony Perkins was the picture of mid century masculinity. He was handsome, charming and the exact kind of guy Hollywood loved to market as the romantic lead. But he also secretly liked men. And in the 1960s that was a problem, especially for a leading man like himself. If anyone found out, it could have ended his career. Anthony had known the truth about his sexuality since college, but he buried it deep. He couldn't risk being honest. So he lived a kind of double life. For more than a decade he shared a home with a woman named Helen Merrill, who was 14 years his senior. Helen was this outspoken, demanding photographer with a thick German accent. They met when Anthony was one of her tenants. Once his acting career took off, he helped her open an art gallery. They had a symbiotic relationship and an arrangement of sorts. They lived together platonically. She helped him keep his secret and he quietly saw men on the side. But their relationship eventually ran its course. Anthony moved out while Helen went on to become a theatrical agent. But then, in the early 1970s, Anthony met someone who would change everything. Her name was Bari Berenson, an actress, model and photographer. She was creative and beautiful and fun. Fact, she had a crush on Anthony ever since she saw him in a movie when she was 12. So when she got a chance to interview him for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine in 1972, she jumped on it. Berry was 24 when she met 40 year old Anthony at his New York townhouse. She had her list of questions for him, but she was so nervous she could barely make her way through them. Anthony found it charming and helped her along, giving her the answers she needed for her piece. Not exactly the world's best interview, and Berry would admit that herself. But it all worked out for her because Anthony walked away intrigued. He thought she was cute, if a little scattered, but that didn't bother him. He really liked Berry, and if there was ever a woman for him to be with, he thought it had to be her. Soon the two started dating and within a year Berry was pregnant. They got married in 1973 in a small private ceremony in Cape cod. Anthony was 41, Barry was 25. Six months later, their first son, Osgood, was born. Two years later came another son named Elvis. Anthony adored his boys and Barry. He had a few friends who knew the truth about him and even they could see the love between the Perkins. They doubted that Anthony had completely given up relationships with men, but there was no denying that he was genuinely happy with his family. Osgood loved his dad, too. They shared a dark, quirky sense of humor. When Osgood was nine, he even acted alongside Anthony, playing the young Norman Bates in flashbacks throughout Psycho ii. Osgood later said he was terrified on that set. It felt all too real to him. The sense of familiarity turning horrifying would stay with him for years. He kept acting here and there. He had some small parts in Secretary, Not Another Teen Movie, and Legally Blonde. Seriously, he was David Kidney, Elle's dorky classmate. That's the crossover we never thought we needed, but we really did. But his dad never got to see any of that. In the late 80s, Anthony started having health problems. In 1990, he experienced facial palsy, which is when you start to lose feeling in your face. He went to the hospital to get some tests done. While he was there, someone at the hospital secretly stole his blood and tested it for hiv, then leaked the results to the National Enquirer. Anthony found out from the tabloids that he was HIV positive. When he went to confirm the diagnosis, he was tested for aids, and that test came back positive. Anthony only told one person, Barry. She was devastated when she heard the news and confused. She didn't understand the disease and how it worked, or she simply didn't want to. The implications were too much for her to bear and she would rather stay in blissful ignorance. She did want to tell their friends that he was sick, but Anthony refused. He wanted to keep it quiet for the sake of his career. Eventually, when people started to notice his health declining, she begged to confide in a few close friends just so she wouldn't have to carry it alone. By that point, Barry knew everything about Anthony's illness and his sexuality. But she agreed that they should keep those secrets to themselves as much as they could, to protect themselves, but also, and most importantly, their children.
- [10:38]
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- [11:46]
Heidi Wong
Two years later, in 1992, Anthony passed away from AIDS complications. He was 60 years old. Osgood was just 18 at the time. As a teenager, Osgood had realized his parents were keeping things from him, but he never confronted them about it. So the truth remained in the shadows, hidden just out of sight. That changed as he got older and started unraveling his family secrets. He knew his mom had done what she thought she had to in order to protect him and his brother. But her choices left Osgood with questions. Big ones. Had his mother done the right thing by keeping those secrets? Should she have told her sons everything? If he was in her shoes, what would he have done? Those questions would haunt him for years until nearly three decades later when he finally confronted them when he wrote and directed Long Legs. But by then, Osgood wasn't just reckoning with his family's ghosts. He had been inspired by a few other things along the way. There was another story, a real one that had gripped America just a few years after his father's death. A story about a six year old beauty pageant girl whose body was found in her family's basement. And a mystery that would never be solved. Despite Long Legs being Osgood Perkins fourth horror film, and the movie being about a truly disturbed serial killer, Osgood said he wasn't really a true crime guy. He wasn't reading articles or binging documentaries the way a lot of us do. For something to actually reach him, it had to cut deep. But there was one crime that did one of America's most infamous unsolved cases. The murder of JonBenet Ramsey. If you've never heard of her story, here's a quick refresher. In December 1996, the day after Christmas, six year old JonBenet disappeared from her home in Boulder, Colorado. Her parents, John and Patsy, reported her missing. They handed over a ransom note they found in the house. Now this wasn't your typical cut and paste ransom note from the movies. It was almost three pages long, all handwritten, rambling and full of strange details. And it had one very specific demand, $118,000. Weirdly, it was almost the exact amount of John Ramsey's Christmas bonuses that year. A huge search began for JonBenet. Police, neighbors, reporters, everyone in Boulder seemed to be involved. But then, just a few hours later, JonBenet was found in her own home. Her father discovered her body in the basement. She'd been strangled after enduring some kind of head trauma. The investigation that followed became national news. The country was horrified. And almost immediately, suspicion turned on the Ramses themselves. For years people debated whether JonBenet's parents or even her older brother might have had something to do with her death. Eventually the family was cleared. But public opinion was harder to shake. Even today, people still argue about what really happened in that house. But Osgood Perkins wasn't obsessed with who did it. He wasn't trying to play armchair detective to solve the case. What stuck with him was one detail. Something small but bone chilling. There's one thing everyone seems to remember the most about JonBenet Ramsey. She was a six year old beauty pageant queen. Her mother Patsy had been in pageants herself and she'd passed that world down to her daughter. Patsy would paint full glam makeup on JonBenet's face, dress her in outfits that seemed better suited for a grown woman and send her out to perform routines. Patsy was so proud of JonBenet. And for Christmas of 1996, Patsy wanted to give her daughter something special. So she ordered a custom doll from a company called My Twin. Apparently their dolls were all the rage. Basically, if you send a company a photo of your child, they would make a life size doll that looked exactly like them. So Patsy went through the whole thing and a few weeks before Christmas the doll arrived at the Ramseys house. Patsy put it away in the basement on a high shelf in the laundry room somewhere. JonBenet wouldn't find it and spoil her surprise. Then on Christmas Eve, when unwrapping presents, Patsy went to the basement to get the doll. She took the box down, set it on the washing machine and lifted the lid. Inside the doll lay perfectly still, Eyes closed, face painted, hair styled exactly like a tiny person lying in a coffin. Just for a second, Patsy's stomach dropped. She blinked and shook her head, forcing herself to breathe. It wasn't real. It was just a doll. JonBenet was upstairs, alive and well. But within 24 hours that image would become real. JonBenet would be dead and her body would be found mere feet away from where the doll had been stored. When Osgood Perkins heard that detail about the doll, it stopped him cold. It was one of the creepiest, most haunting things he'd ever read. He kept hurting it over and over in his head. The idea that a replica of a little girl had almost predicted her fate foreshadowed it. It made him think of voodoo dolls. You know, the kind where if you hurt the doll, you hurt the person that it represents. Although, quick side note, that's not really historically accurate. Contrary to popular belief, voodoo dolls generally aren't used for harmful purposes. Throughout history, going back to ancient Mesopotamia, it's way more common for people to use them for healing, protection, or the pursuit of positive goals. Unfortunately, popular culture has cemented a very Hollywood version of the voodoo dolls in our minds. And that was the case for Osgood Perkins, who heard about the doll and thought that maybe, in a twisted way, Patsy Ramsey had unwittingly brought that harm upon her daughter. Not on purpose, of course, but she had created an image of her child. And then, days later, that image became reality. Osgood tucked that idea away, not knowing yet how he'd use it. He just knew it affected him. Years later, when he read a book called the Golden Bough, A Study in Comparative Religion by James George Fraser, the image of JonBenet's doll came back to him. The Golden Bough is a 19th century book about ancient religions and myths. It's all about how humans have always tried to control fate through rituals, sacrifices, and magic. In one section, Frazer writes about something called sympathetic magic. It's the idea that if you create an object that represents someone, whatever you do to that object will somehow affect the person that it represents. You want to bless someone, you make a likeness of them and anoint it. You want to curse someone, you stab it. It's simple, but really, really creepy. That's basically what we thought voodoo dolls were. And for Osgood Perkins, the pieces for his next project were starting to fall into place. There wasn't just one single spark. It was more like a collision of ideas. His father's secrets, the JonBenet doll, the concept of sympathetic magic. It all swirled together in his mind, and he would later begin to shape what would eventually become Long Legs. That's so impressive and so awesome. But there was still one part of the story that he needed to revisit. The other half of his family's shadow. Because if his father had lived a hidden life, it had only been because his mother was willing to keep all of his secrets. But Barry's family had a history of secrets of their own, and maybe even a touch of the supernatural. Osgood Perkins had been just 18 years old when his father died. His mom had done what she thought was necessary, Shielding her kids from Anthony's true identity and protecting them from questions they might not have been ready to face. But Asgood said that he and his brother had always known their parents were keeping secrets, and it just made everything feel more complicated and messed up. As he grew into an adult, Asgood didn't blame his mother for her choices. He wasn't angry or resentful. He knew that she truly believed she'd done the right thing. It was a different time in the 80s and 90s, and the stigma towards both girls, gay people, and people with aids was severe. Telling the truth would have meant outing his father, which not only would have affected Anthony, but would have probably changed the way people treated Osgood and his brother. But as Osgood got older, his mother's decisions stuck in his mind, and he started to question them. Had his mother done the right thing by keeping those secrets? Would he have wanted to know the truth sooner? Or was she right to protect her kids from something that they couldn't understand? The problem was, Osgood never really had the chance to unpack those questions. At least not with his mom. Because nine years after losing his dad, tragedy struck again. On September 11, 2001, Berry boarded a flight home from Cape Cod. She was on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Osgood was 27 years old, and just like that, both of his parents were gone. He was left with memories and questions, but no one to answer them. But once he started making films, he realized he found the perfect outlet to explore all of it. I just became this guy's biggest fan. What a wild upbringing that he completely overcame to become one of the most unique filmmakers that we have today. Osgood's first big break came in 2015, when A24 picked up the Blackcoat's Daughter, a film he wrote and directed. It was about two girls left abandoned at their boarding school by their parents for mysterious reasons. It wasn't exactly autobiographical, but it certainly seemed like Osgood was working through some personal battles. That film went so well, he made a second film, I Am the Pretty Thing that lives in the house. He dedicated that to his father. It tells the story of a hospice nurse caring for an elderly author with dementia, slowly realizing the house might be haunted by the author's own past. But underneath the horror story, there's a more thematic exploration. It's about memory, and it's about how we try to piece together the truth about people who can no longer speak speak for themselves. Osgood put it plainly saying, quote, it was about how we want to know who our parents are, and sometimes we don't get the desire until they're gone. It can be impossible to learn who someone is when they're not around anymore. That longing became a kind of mission statement for his work. By the time he got into his third film, Gretel and Hansel, Osgood was circling closer to the central question that kept him up at night. What secrets should and shouldn't a parent keep from their kids. But Gretel and Hansel wasn't his own script. He'd just been hired to direct it. So he could only infuse so many autobiographical elements into it. But he did explore the idea of how parents and caretakers can hurt the people they love. Even though Gretel and Hansel was a collaborative project, you can still feel his fingerprints all over it. He had taken a familiar fairy tale and made it into a moody psychological film about survival, power, and what it means to grow up in the shadows of someone else's choices. And also, stylistically, it was just so Oz Perkins, you know what I mean? Like, the dark moodiness and like, the ominous vibes, but also, like, there was a little element of, like, the fairy tale childhood magic, even in, like, the coloring of the films. But still, it wasn't his story. Not fully. Not yet. Then came Long Legs. The script was 100% his, and he was also directing. In other words, he pretty much had complete creative control. And this time, Osgood knew exactly what he wanted to explore. The lengths a parent will go to protect their child and the damage that kind of protection can cause. He took inspiration from both his mother's devotion to her family and the secrets she kept. He wanted to make a movie about how a mother could lie to her child and still believe that she was doing the right thing. And as a father with teenagers himself, at that point, he'd become even more fascinated by the impossible decisions parents make just to keep their kids safe. That became the emotional backbone of Long Legs. But Osgood wasn't working on some indie darling character study. Dramatic. Long Legs was a. What I call a capital horror film. So he wrapped all of those feelings, all those questions inside something terrifying. There was one last piece of his family history. He decided to weave in a more supernatural one. You see, Osgood's mother, Barry, supposedly came from a long line of psychics, and that became the final ingredient in Long Legs. In the movie, FBI agent Lee Harker is investigating a series of ritualistic murders. She's smart, intuitive, unnervingly perceptive. It's as if she has a sixth sense that lets her inside the killer's head. A psychic connection to the killings. As Lee gets closer to the truth, she starts to suspect that she might have a personal connection to the case, that the killer, only known as Long Legs, might somehow be tied to her own family. And that's when things get really dark. Because the deeper Lee digs, the more the investigation points back to her own mother, a deeply religious woman named Ruth. You can see where he's going with this. Repressed moments from Lee's childhood starts to resurface, and Lee slowly realizes the truth she's been running from her entire life. In the end, it's revealed that Ruth has been hiding an unthinkable secret. She's been helping the killer for decades. She agreed to be Longleg's accomplice in order to keep him away from her daughter. Ruth would deliver dolls to the families that he was targeting, giving him power over them. Ruth believed it was the only way to keep her daughter safe. She convinced herself she did what any mother would do. And that leaves us with the final question in Osgood's film. Is that true? Did Lee's mother do what she had to do to protect her child? Or did she go too far? Would Osgood's own mother, Barry, empathize and agree with Ruth, or would she condemn her? And if you were in that position, what would you do? Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a Crime House original. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think about today's stories? Anything you're dying for me to COVID Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. And be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another unbelievable true story. Until then, stay curious and remember, there's no reason to fear the dark unless you try to hide from it.
- [27:11]
Vanessa Richardson
Looking for your next listen. Hi, it's Vanessa Richardson and I have exciting news. Conspiracy theories, cults, and crimes. Crimes is leveling up starting the week of January 12th. You'll be getting two episodes every week. Wednesdays, we unravel the conspiracy or the cult, and on Fridays, we look at a corresponding crime. Follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes now on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen.