When Perkins initially approached special makeup effects artist Harlow MacFarlane about creating the face of Longlegs, MacFarlane says, “From the beginning, Oz always had this glam rock vibe in his head.” The big hair, the garish makeup, the superficial aesthetic fixation that might lead a person to go under the knife so they could remain forever young. But more than being driven by style, Longlegs would be a man driven by obsessive devotion. “His jam is really that he’s trying to make himself beautiful for the Devil,” explains MacFarlane. “He’s in love with the Devil, and he’s trying to impress the Devil, so he’s gone through all these plastic surgery botch jobs to make himself look as pretty as he can for the Devil. Every thing he does is for this evil force that he’s trying to impress.”
In talking with Perkins for Fangoria, Cage added this about his inspiration for the character: “I wanted Longlegs to be very androgynous. I was thinking about the androgynous prophet in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, and the prophet was going, ‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’ You told me to sort of plump my hair. So I did that, and then I started saying to Maika, ‘Do you find me beautiful?’” To begin, MacFarlane started working up concepts for the face of Longlegs that were more obviously and exaggeratedly nipped and tucked, but with Cage behind the character, the makeup couldn’t overcompensate. At one point, a mutilated visage reminiscent of Gary Oldman’s Mason Verger from the movie Hannibal was under consideration, but that wasn’t quite right. Besides, an actor capable of performances that reach the magnitudes of Vampire’s Kiss and Color Out Of Space would not necessarily be served by makeup that got just as loud.
“We don’t want things to get ridiculous,” as MacFarlane puts it. And besides, the face of Longlegs needed to be grounded enough to feel passable on the street, even if it set you on edge to look at him. One key character touchpoint became F. Murray Abraham’s scheming royal courtier Antonio Salieri in Amadeus, who endeavored to dismantle his rival Mozart through a years-long scheme of betrayal and manipulation. The true terror of Longlegs is that he could be real, and that an ordinary person could be capable of unspeakable horrors. Getting the faded glam sadist look just right meant researching the state of elective surgery in the late 70s and early 80s — with characters living in semi-rural Oregon, no less — and then building from a foundation of bad work marked by overfilling and visible scarring. There would be layers of pain atop layers of pain. “You can just imagine it’s some hack job of a doctor in a strip mall somewhere,” says MacFarlane, who worked closely with Perkins and Cage to hone the final product.
As a fan of classic monster icon Lon Chaney’s work, Cage saw in Longlegs a chance to play his own great Chaney creation — his own Phantom of the opera — complete with the upturned nose. MacFarlane was initially hesitant to go full Phantom with the Longlegs nose, fearing it would present as too over the top. However, after testing out two designs on Cage’s face, one that the makeup artist was lobbying for and one that aligned more closely to the actor’s preferences, Perkins went with Cage’s instincts for the version that would appear in the film. The final iteration was still more restrained than one of the actor’s suggestions, however, which was to have Longlegs fully pull his nose off at one point during the movie.
Once the face of Longlegs was settled on, Cage had the last piece in place to create and inhabit the movie’s titular terror. “I thought, ‘What can I do with Oz’s invention of Longlegs that can give him some vulnerability?’” the actor said in Fangoria. “What I liked about Lon Chaney’s monsters is that they always had a heart, and I always felt bad for them. And for me, that was a way of saying, ‘I want to make Longlegs about my mom.’ Yes, I turned my mother into a serial killer; you can do that when you’re feeling artistic. My dad was my model for Dracula; my mother was my model for Longlegs.”
As a director, Perkins viewed having Cage in the film as a kind of force of nature he was there to bear witness to. “I’m just lucky and humbled that he wants to be a part of it. That’s just trying to grab the tail of a comet,” says Perkins, who counts Cage as one of his all-time favorite performers, and one with such singular power and instincts that a heavy guiding hand would feel counter-productive to having Cage at all. “That’s like bringing a tiger into your movie. The tiger is going to do what a tiger does, and I’m not going to get in the way of it because it’s a fucking tiger.”
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