‘Longlegs’ haunting ending, explained

How are you feeling after seeing Longlegs? Unsettled? Spooked? Like you’ve got the teeth of the hydra upon you?

That’s more than understandable. The latest film from writer/director Osgood Perkins is packed with eerie atmosphere, Silence of the Lambs–style serial killer investigations, Satan worship, and a surprising number of references to the glam rock band T. Rex. All this leads to an ending that crawls under your skin — and may leave you with some questions along the way. From killer nuns to satanic symbols, let’s break down Longlegs and its ending.

What’s the main mystery of Longlegs?

Maika Monroe in “Longlegs.”
Credit: Courtesy of Neon

Longlegs centers on the FBI’s investigation of a decades-long serial killing spree in Oregon. The victims are always families who have died by murder-suicide, but there are common threads between each incident that suggest there’s an evil mastermind at work. First, the deceased families all have daughters whose birthdays fall on the 14th of the month. And second, the killer always leaves messages written in cryptic code at the crime scene, signed with the name “Longlegs.”

Since there’s no other evidence of Longlegs’ (Nicolas Cage) presence at the crime scene, the FBI wants to find out how he’s able to apparently orchestrate killings from afar — or who his accomplice may be. Enter Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a “half-psychic” FBI Agent.

Lee cracks Longlegs’ cipher using a Bible verse from a birthday card he left at her house. She also realizes that the dates of the killings, when placed on a calendar grid, form a satanic pattern. The only date needed to finish the image is the 13th, so the race is on to find Longlegs before he strikes again.

The investigation takes a doll-centric turn.

Maika Monroe in “Longlegs.”
Credit: Courtesy of Neon

Longlegs’ decoded letters direct Lee and her supervisor, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), to the Camera family farm, the site of the first Longlegs murder. There, they find a life-size doll that looks disturbingly like the Cameras’ daughter, Carrie Anne (Kiernan Shipka), who is the sole survivor of the attack. The doll seems mostly normal, apart from a black orb in its brain that seems to whisper to Lee.

Lee and Carter visit Carrie Anne in a psychiatric hospital, where she’s been catatonic for years. Yet on the day Lee and Carter discovered the doll, she woke up — and received a strange visitor who used Lee’s name to sign in for visitation. Lee’s ensuing discussion with Carrie Anne reveals that Carrie Anne is still very devoted to Longlegs, and that she’d do anything he told her to do.

Mother knows best.

Lauren Acala and Alicia Witt in “Longlegs.”
Credit: Courtesy of Neon

Lee visits her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), who always encourages Lee to say her prayers for protection and who has kept all of Lee’s things. Among these things is a stack of Polaroids Lee took that includes an image of Longlegs himself. Turns out, the young girl Longlegs spoke to in the film’s chilling prologue was Lee, whose own birthday falls on Jan. 14. But how did she and her mother survive his intrusion?

The truth comes to light not long after the FBI uses Lee’s photo to capture Longlegs. In an interrogation with Lee, he tells her to ask her mother about possible accomplices. He then smashes his head open on the table and dies. We also learn that Carrie Anne Camera has died by suicide at the psychiatric hospital. Since it’s the 13th of the month, her death completes Longlegs’ pattern, explains what he must have directed her to do when he visited her, and closes up one of the only leads the FBI still had on the murders.

Now that Ruth is well and truly the FBI’s last lead on the case, Lee and Agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) head back to see her. But what’s this? It’s a nun with a shotgun!

Ruth, dressed in a full nun’s habit, kills Browning. Then she turns her gun on a lifelike doll that looks just like a young Lee, shattering the ball within. Black smoke dissipates from the real Lee’s head, and she faints. Now that Lee’s free from the doll’s spell, Ruth recounts her relationship with Longlegs in the form of a warped fairy tale.

Lee’s mother has been working with Longlegs all along.

Lauren Acala in “Longlegs.”
Credit: Courtesy of Neon

As Ruth tells Lee, the day Longlegs visited their house, Ruth begged him to spare Lee’s life. In return, she promised to help him carry out the rest of his satanic mission.

Longlegs — actually named Dale Cobble — is a twisted dollmaker whose Satan-possessed dolls drive people to murder one another. However, they also distract the daughters of each family, entrancing them so they don’t know what’s coming until it’s too late.

How do the dolls get to each family? That’s where Ruth comes in. She poses as a nun from the local church and tells the eventual victims that they’ve won the doll in a contest. (Let this always be a reminder to look a gift doll in the mouth.) Once the doll is inside the home, its satanic work begins.

Since Lee didn’t die, her doll served a different purpose throughout her childhood. It kept her from seeing Longlegs and her mother’s involvement with him, to the point that she missed him living and crafting his dolls in their basement. Earlier in the film, Longlegs says he works for “the man downstairs,” aka Satan. But for Lee, he becomes “the man downstairs” in his own right.

The doll’s influence is likely the reason Lee has psychic intuition in the first place. Plus, we’ve seen it haunting her throughout the movie in the form of a dark, horned figure reminiscent of Satan himself. Its shadowy form calls to mind the dark smoke we see leave Lee’s head once her doll’s orb is destroyed, suggesting it’s the manifestation of the powers within the doll.

Longlegs has one last birthday trick up his sleeve.

Blair Underwood in “Longlegs.”
Credit: Courtesy of Neon

Longlegs may be dead, but he and Ruth aren’t finished with Lee just yet. Upon receiving a call that she’s “late to the party,” Lee realizes Carter’s daughter, Ruby (Ava Kelders), was born on the 14th, and is Longlegs’ last target. Ruby invited Lee to her birthday party toward the start of the movie, so Longlegs has been building up to this for a long time. Still, the realization takes the film’s dread into overdrive — and it doesn’t let up for the rest of its runtime.

At the Carters’ house, we see that Ruth has already gifted them the doll, and its effects are kicking in. Lee watches, helpless, as Carter grows cold and irritable, right on the edge of snapping. He invites his wife, Anna (Carmel Amit) to the kitchen to help cut the cake. Sounds of violence ring out as he murders her offscreen, but Ruby is too entranced by the doll to notice her parents’ demise.

Lee shoots a still-homicidal Carter as well as her mother, but her gun runs empty just before she can shoot the doll. A simple coincidence? Or an act of satanic intervention? Either way, Lee cannot bring herself to destroy the doll. We linger on her horrified face before cutting to a flashback of Longlegs in his interrogation room, where he sings his own threatening take on “Happy Birthday,” buttoned up with a “Hail Satan!” for good measure.

What does Longlegs‘ ending mean?

Maika Monroe in “Longlegs.”
Credit: Courtesy of Neon

Longlegs leaves Lee’s actual fate up in the air: Will she overcome the demonic presence within the doll and destroy it some other way? Or will she succumb to its powers and become a pawn in Longlegs, Ruth, and Satan’s last ploy? Longlegs’ final, gleeful “Hail Satan!” suggests the latter is more likely, that the evil lingers on.

But there’s more to Longlegs‘ ending than that. Think back to Longlegs’ nasty rendition of “Happy Birthday,” to the key role birthdays play in his plan, to the fact that all the daughters of the murdered families were so young. The film’s preoccupation with young girls aging and growing up is key to its darkness.

When Lee first meets Ruby, she asks about a stuffed animal-filled swing in Ruby’s room. Ruby expresses derision for it, saying Carter keeps it around so Ruby won’t grow up too fast. There’s a similar sense of parental intervention with Ruth’s hoarding of all of Lee’s old things: If you keep the remnants of your children’s youth around, that youth won’t ever truly leave, right?

Longlegs’ dolls take that up a notch. Not only are they a symbol of childhood, they’re also twisted effigies of the victims as children. And in distracting the daughters from their parents’ violence, the dolls also keep them locked in childlike ignorance until the end of their lives.

So what happens when one of the dolls’ victims remains alive? You get Lee, who isn’t totally blinded to the evils of the world — remember that first serial killer? — but who is certainly blinded to the evil within her own home. Only when Ruth shoots Lee’s doll do her eyes open to that evil. In that moment, she gains a better understanding of why her mom was so smothering and so insistent on her saying her prayers. The sudden burst of context feels like a belated coming-of-age for Lee, a final stripping away of the veneers of a 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 to that point. I can think of no worse birthday present than finding out my mom has been in league with the literal devil.

Longlegs is now in theaters.