The real-life crime that inspired Nicolas Cage's long legs

Osgood Perkins' 2024 horror thriller Longlegs is like watching three or four episodes of The X-Files at once. The film's protagonist, FBI agent Lee Harker (Mike Monroe), has mysterious psychic abilities that she uses to apprehend a mysterious serial killer. The killer nicknamed Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) has a very peculiar MO. Each time a local family is violently murdered by one of its members, the killer will take his own life. A note written in Longlegs' handwriting will then be found at the crime scene, confessing to the murder. Long legs also seem to be for families with nine-year-old girls born on or around the 14th of the month.

As the film progresses, other scary threads emerge. Harker finds a life-sized baby doll in the attic, with a mysterious metal orb hidden inside. What's going on? The audience will later learn that Harker has a strange personal connection with Longlegs. The doll will also have a special, satanic function in the Longlegs murders, as it is somehow used to channel dark spiritual energy into the victims' homes. It's never explained very clearly, but it's all spooky and scary. Many critics loved “Longlegs” for its free-floating weirdness and Perkins' nightmarish sense of style. Never mind that the story doesn't make much sense.

The life-size dolls seem to be inspired by a well-known murder case from the 90s. In an interview with InversePerkins admitted to investigating the infamous murder of Jon Bennet Ramsey, a six-year-old contestant who was found dead in her home on December 26, 1996. The detail of the case seemed the strangest to him: Ramsey was murdered in her basement. , just 15 feet away from the life-size doll itself.

At the time, many people believed that JonBenét Ramsay was murdered by her family, and there was evidence of some pretty gruesome abuse and sexual assault. As the investigation continued over the next several years, DNA evidence exonerated all family members. However, all reports said that Ramsey had engaged in the notorious, arguably unethical behavior of “pageant parenting” that raised public suspicion. Meanwhile, the doll was considered by many to be a strange and creepy detail. One of the Christmas presents Ramsay's parents wanted to give her that year was a life-size duplicate of her, dressed in the iconic pageant outfit Ramsay actually wore.

Perkins caught that detail and kept it in mind. When he wrote Long Legs, he remembered this detail quite keenly. Perkins decided to incorporate it into his tale of serial killers in an indescribably magical way. Perkins didn't repeat any other details of Ramsey's murder, but this doll just didn't leave his imagination. He said:

“With voodoo dolls, if you want to activate someone's power, you make a doll out of them and stab them. (…) Dolls, effigies, sculptures, statues, dolls—it was all in the magic of the world. I wanted to create (Ramsey's) murder was approaching For Christmas, the one gift JonBenet received from her parents was a life-size doll of her wearing one of her pageant dresses in a box in the basement, 15 feet from where she was killed, and it contained something so insane that I stashed it.

To this day, Ramsey's murder remains officially unsolved, although there have been many theories. If she had lived, Ramsey would have turned 35 this year. her death as we see from “Long Legs”, still lingers in the American consciousness.