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Heidi Wong (11:46)

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.

Vanessa Richardson (27:10)

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.