Longlegs Ending Explained - 10 things you didn't know

longlegs is being called the scariest movie of the last 10 years and in this video I will explain the ending the meaning of the movie The Truth About who longlegs is and was and what happens next after the movie ends I also have answers to some of the biggest questions like what do the dolls mean what are the metal balls and what is the meaning of the title and the name long legs did you know that there are lots of hidden messages in this movie including literal hidden messages in the audio I've got all of

this covered and more in the ultimate longlegs explained if you're new here I'm madm for content creator and this is my channel where I talk about movies and TV so like And subscribe for more the opening scene to the actual film is super creepy a car pulls up to the house and a girl comes out to investigate as she looks around it's the first time we hear long legs calling cuckoo from behind she turns around and we see him duck behind the house quickly this cuckoo call that he does is really important and I don't

think I've heard anyone talk about the significance of it I'll get into it at the end she finds him and he drops one of the creepiest opening lines ever there she is the almost birthday girl it seems I wore my long legs today he Ducks down into the frame and it cuts quickly to the opening credits they've created this real sense of anticipation around what Nick Cage's character is going to look like in this film the marketing around the movie is A+ anyway it's been amazing and this whole thing with his face is reminding me

of the what is the Matrix trailers and also some of the very scary marketing surrounding the Blair Witch we cut to M Monroe as ancient Hara out with her partner going door too and looking for a killer it's our first glimpse of what appears to be psychic powers for the main character an Intuition or a spidey sense if you will she looks at a house and says he's in there she knows which house this person is in just with a feeling she wants to call in for backup but the partner kind of doesn't believe her

and says I'm not doing that on a hunch and goes and Knocks on the door and gets blown away this introduces us to one of the big themes in the movie of self-destruction that we Dam ourselves with some of the decisions we make she heads inside and finds this dangerous suspect now readily giving himself up to be apprehended by Lee it's important to note and the question is why is he now giving himself up when he just blew an agent away in the briefing before this scene the FBI agents are being told this person will

be armed and dangerous and will not come quietly so why does he Blast One agent but give him self up to Lee we'll answer this later for now all we know is that this is the incident that gets her assigned to the longlegs case after they do a little test for her for psychic abilities she gets eight right and eight wrong but her boss says half a psychic is better than none they want her to take a look at this case and see if she has some intuition on it she gets familiar with the case

and we're told that there's been 10 families killed and there is no evidence that anybody else is ever in the house the fathers are the ones doing this and ending their entire family and then themselves what ties them together is that there is a coded letter at every scene and it is signed longlegs she meets her boss's family and is invited to his daughter's birthday party she agrees to go it's worth noting that through all of this agent Harker is very autistically coded like a lot of the profilers and Kookie serial killer catchers in movies

in TV so we don't really question it she has this robotic way of speaking long pondering looks and a stilted delivery we kind of just assume it's a character Quirk but we'll come back to this Lee is at home talking to her mom on the phone and this entire scene is so unsettling the framing of Lee on the phone and the empty space with the open door behind her had me watching the whole thing through my fingers she's lured outside by knocks at the door while longleg sneaks into the house behind her and leaves a

letter behind inside is a ninth birthday card and inside that is a key for the coded letters she looks over her shoulder like she's being told or receiving something and then immediately goes to work decoding the rest of the car her birthday card reads tell them how you got this how it came into your head and I'll and threatens her mom in a way that if I say it on here the video won't last Lee looks deeper into the case and we get another glimpse of this psychic ability when she's in what seems to be

a library she looks over her shoulder like she's hearing something and then immediately picks up a book called Nine Circles of hell what she finds in there leads her to sort of aggregate her data to create an algorithm for the killings that results in an inverted triangle she decodes all of the letters and finds that they all have reference to something called the camera Family Farm And she also finds out that all of the daughters had birthdays falling on the 14th of the month so the camera Family Farm is the only longlegs case that has

a Survivor the daughter was at school at the time and she is now institutionalized they want to talk to her but first they investigate the farm and this is where things get weird up to this point this could have been a sort of serial killer true crime investigation story like zodiac or seven but now things take a turn into some unfamiliar territory under the floorboards of the barn they find a handmade doll the dolls have metal balls inside their head the coroner says he could have sworn he heard it whispering his ex-wife's name over and

over but puts it down to working late he also notes that the doll has human hair creepy we then get a scene of Nick Cage as long legs on the road driving along and going into a hardware store and doing this weird little move to the young cashier girl saying this scene was great I get why they used him so sparingly but I would have loved more Nick Cage in this you can never have too much niit cage Le and heras go to the institution to speak to the only Survivor they're told she's been catatonic

the entire time slumped in a chair for 8 years that is until yesterday when she got a visitor I wonder who that could have been but the first thing she says to Lee is I've seen you before you've been to my house or someone who looks looks a lot like you anyway and then she recounts the story of what happened to her family she also says she'd do anything for the man who visited her and the man down the stair even if they asked her to throw herself out of a window Harker thinks it's weird

that Kian came out of her Catatonia the day that they found the doll the boss says it's coincidence we opened that ball up and nothing was in it this will be important later he then brings up that he looked in Lee's file and found a report that her mother called in a day before Lee's 9th birth day which is January 14th giving a description of someone trespassing at their house and that he was tall and pale Lee doesn't remember anything about this happening so her boss tells her to go and talk to her mother and

find out she visits her mom and her mom seems to be pretty cooky she's also a hoarder living in a house filled with things when in the kitchen to make her some food Lee finds a bag of teeth marked Lee 10 years her mom really doesn't get rid of anything she notices a closed door and like a cockroach or some kind of bug crawls out from underneath and then she asks her mom if she remembers her 9th birthday she says I don't remember anything do you she asks who visited and she says nobody ever came

to visit us she says to Lee I may have forgotten for both of our sakes but I never threw anything away all of your things are in your room I think this is an important moment that will become more clear later cuz it seems like the mother goes into a bit of a trance when she says she doesn't remember she sort of closes her eyes and it feels feels like she either can't or she isn't allowed to say anything more but instead she says all of your things in your room it's like she has been

hoarding everything in the hopes that one day Lee can see things for herself Lee goes up to her bedroom and finds a photograph that she took of long legs when she was a kid we then flash back to the beginning of the film and we understand that it is a young Lee Harker as longlegs comes over to talk to her when he's asked what he's doing there by Lee's mom he sings in just the most Nick Cage and unhinged way possible let me in now and it can be nice make me go now and I

have to come back not not tce many times not once not twice but as many times as I like it's one of those scenes that anybody who sees this film is going to talk about and remember for a very long time because it is so bizarre it's funny it's creepy it's scary it's Nick Cage they use the photo to start a man hunt for long legs but he's easily found waiting at a bus stop that's weird considering he's got a car we can deduce that he has very much planned this and he has two suitcases

just standing there waiting for them to pull up on him like someone's divorced dad the director has come out and said this is very much a lift or a borrowing from Seven this scene and what follows the idea of limiting the Killer's appearance and then having them turn themselves in as a kind of flourish or play longlegs is interviewed and says that he wants to speak to Lee meanwhile Lee thinks longlegs has an accomplice and is trying to convince her superiors of this and that it's not over that some other family is going to be

hit in the next few days she asks where long legs is now and is told he's downstairs right under your feet this unlocks a memory F who remembers longle saying that he's a friend of a friend who lives downstairs that his friend lives in the downstairs of everywhere you can even call him Mr downstairs so Lee wants to talk to longlegs and try to find out who his accomplice is when she enters the interrogation room he says once again H she is the almost birthday girl the exact line he greeted her with when she was

9 years old almost some of the best bits of this fantastic interrogation scene are him saying Lee was 20 when she decided to go into La enforcement that we had a big laugh about it though I was the only one that laughed not she he gets asked who she is and he says the seventh she given the same choice that they've all been given everyone has been given the choice of crimson or Clover accept the gift or destroy it and destroy yourself Lee asks who is helping you he says ask your mommy she says who

is the man downstairs and he says hail Satan he smashes his own head off the table over and over again and again to end himself an absolutely fantastic interrogation scen every serial killer thing needs one but it could have gone on for longer Nick Cage is on fire in this scene and it left me wanting more of his glorious weirdness I would love to see some extended and maybe deleted scenes of this in a longer cut so now things start to spiral out of control as Lee returns home to ask her mom what's up she's

driven by another FBI agent and when Lee goes inside mama harka has a gun and blows the agent in the car away twice Lee runs outside to confront her mom and finds her pointing a shotgun at a doll that looks a lot like young Lee her mom says you got him now he's free Lee says he's dead it's done her mom says and you're free too be a good girl and blasts the doll's head apart at the same time as this happens a puff of black smoke emits out the back of Lee's very real head

we see the same black stuff coming out of the dolls now destroyed head whatever was in the balls that was in the metal doll brains is sort of dissipating out into the sky this makes Lee dizzy and she passes out we flash back to her in bed being hugged by her mother as she tells her a story of how one day a man came to the house a doll maker he started his work his terrible magic the work of the devil the doll made the girl forget where to look what not to see the devil

wanted the little girl but her mother could never let that happen it's revealed that when longleg showed up all that time ago he took the mum hostage and that she begged for her daughter's life agreeing to help longlegs as long as Lee was spared it's revealed that her mom has been the one visiting the homes delivering the weird dolls saying that they were gifts from the church while dressed as a nun she says all she had to do was get the dolls inside and then watch to make sure that things went the way that he

wanted them to basically the devil and longlegs influence is hiding inside these dolls and once it's inside the house it slowly drives the family and particularly the father crazy until he does what the devil wants him to do Lee wakes up in the lair of long legs and hears a phone ringing she comes upstairs to reveal that long leg's Lair is in the basement of her childhood home he's been right under her feet all along just like earlier when she asked the agent where is he now and she said right under your feet he's been

there since she was 9 years old the whole time quite literally and every time she's visited her mother since creepy she answers the ringing phone and is told told by a demonic voice that she is late for the birthday party she finds long leg's car hidden under a tarp outside her mother's house and drives to the boss's daughter's birthday party but she's a bit too late they're already acting weird and clearly under the influence of whatever the devil magic is and Ruby is sat there playing with the doll and what's worse is that her mother

is here sat looking creepy on the sofa ready to watch what's about to happen Carter takes his wife to the kitchen to cut the birthday cake but we hear him cutting wifey instead while Lee asks why her mom is doing this and the mom says that unless all of the family die we'll twist and burn in hell forever I'm doing this for you like I've always done that I'll do it again and again till I see a beast rise up out of the sea hail Satan Carter comes back with the knife to try and get

to the child and Lee shoots him Lee's mom stands up and takes a weapon out of her bag and I think she's going to attack the child rather than Lee as she says get away from the child and Lee says mom please her mom shouts don't call me that and as she does each word becomes increasingly more distorted and angry and demonic I'm also pretty sure when the mom stands up all angry and says that there is a split second before the camera Cuts away where her face literally becomes that of a demon really hammering

home the fact that it's kind of no longer her mom especially with it shouting don't call me that as it stands up in the split second before Lee blows it and her mother away with a single shot to the Head and then Harker points her gun at the doll head looking to take out that metal ball inside and when she pulls the trigger the gun clicks she tries to pull the trigger like three or four times and every time it does not go off there's some creepy sound design where we can hear long legs singing

the Happy Birthday song in the background and Lee says let's go to the kid the film finishes with a clip of long legs in the interrogation room saying hail Satan and blowing a kiss to the audience while bangagong by T-Rex starts to play the credits seem to roll in Reverse going from top to bottom the opposite direction to what they usually do which is even more satanic symbolism the idea of playing songs in Reverse so what exactly is going on what is this movie about why is it called long legs and what's with the psychic

powers the dolls and what happens next what does this ending mean is it over or does Lee now work for the man downstairs let's get into it before we get into the first thing if you've made it to this point please do remember to hit like And subscribe subcribe if you're new here to help support this video and the channel if you want to see more videos like it first the significance of the cuckoo Co cucko there's no way that this is a coincidence but I haven't seen anyone else talk about it yet but the

long legs literally CUO the haers there is a crime called cucking where people take over another person's home and use the property to facilitate exploitation it's named after cuckoo birds who lay their eggs in other birds nests when the cuckoo bird hatches it automatically and on Instinct pushes the other eggs and siblings out of the nest it then sits in the nest pretending to be the baby of whatever bird that Nest belongs to who will continue to feed it and take care of it not only is this what longlegs does to the Harkers but also

in some way it's what they are doing to the other families with the dolls the dolls that resemble the children in the home in a way they are cing Satan into these people's homes lives and ultimately leading to their destruction whilst we're talking about the dolls let's talk about how they had human hair and how her mother keeps everything including bits of Lee I think not only are Parts ofely utilized in the making of the dolls but the fact that her mother was a nurse would also mean she might have access to these kids in

the community probably drawing blood taking samples and getting strands of hair that long legs can use in his doll making which will help him cast this evil magic on the children we're all familiar with voodoo dolls and it having like a sort of lock of that person's hair in movies and these are quite literally life-size voodoo dolls we also know that throughout the movie Lee is under the effects of her own doll which is being kept at her home part of the effect of that is this kind of like invisibility cloak that it puts over

her memories of long legs that she can't access them but it's also the reason for her psychic ability all of those looks over the shoulder are this entity or the devil literally talking to her and giving her the clues of where to look I think a lot of her delivery and weirdness throughout the movie and the way that she is socially is to do with this almost trans-like State and the power of the doll albeit not as strong as the sort of Catatonia that kianne goes under until her doll is destroyed so what is longlegs

about this is from the writer and director himself who has said that is about the relationship that he had with his parents his father being Anthony Perkins and the actor Barry Baron the writer said I try not to tell my children any protective lies having grown grown up in a family where certain truths were curated not maliciously and with any kind of Cruelty or dismissiveness but rather as a move to sustain the family and keep things together the idea that a mom in this case can create a story a lie a narrative a version and

dress their children in it like a hazmat suit it's definitely where the idea for the movie came from the writer and director's father is Anthony Perkins who played Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho he was secretly gay and died of AIDS related complications his mother was Barry baronson and she died in the September 11th attacks she was actually a passenger on American Airlines flight 11 I mean talk about trauma and holding on to things which also seems to be a massive theme when it comes to the families in this film so what can we make

of the ending and where does it go next I've seen quite a few people suggest that the ending is kind of pointing towards Lee now having to work for the man downstairs the same way that her mom did but this is simply not true writer and director osgard said it's about as bad a day as a person can have the entire movement of all of long legg's crimes starting from crime number one all the way to the Carter family is about getting this poor girl referring to Lee to a place where she shoots her mom

in the head that's the flourish the Devils yep I did that he goes on to suggest that this is the end of it for Lee like this is the closing of the circle and everything that has happened up to this point but when asked if that also applied to the kid in that final scene Ruby Carter's daughter he said not my problem so quite what it means that her doll is left there with the metal ball not destroyed and what it means for her going forward in life is left up to us to decide there's

a lot of glamrock references in this movie and part of the character of longlegs is that he was formerly a Glam rocker hence the singing the way that he dresses and his eccentricities Oz Perkins said he had never heard T-Rex before and discovered them whilst writing the movie they became like angels to him as he called them his Muse whilst writing and the white makeup that longlegs wears is taken from Bob Dylan during his Rolling Thunder review tour another thing people might not realize is that a lot of the sound in the film is actually

reversed the supervising sound editor said that they took a lot of inspiration from the Satanic accusations against music at the time about playing music backwards and hearing subliminal messages so hidden in the soundtracks and the creepy sounds are quite literally subliminal messages in reverse like give long legs a good score on Rotten Tomatoes and then they went deeper into it researching demon summoning and putting a lot of stuff of that in the movie one of the big sounds that plays throughout is a reversal of him stomping up and down his own stairs to play into

the symbolism of the man downstairs and Long Legs literally living in the basement so why is it called longlegs the writer and director said they just liked how it sounded we writers like words how certain words sound and look look the shape and feel and daddyy Long Legs has a creepy crawly aspect to it but also feels 70s to me like a lead Zeppelin song It Doesn't fully fit and it's more alluring to me and creates a curiosity I like that although a little disappointed it doesn't have some super deep meaning but it also kind

of does it's got this creepy connotation of a daddy longlegs in a movie where fathers are committing these crimes and the character of long legs could even be considered like a daddy to Lee downstairs we never hear about Lee's actual father who knows what was going on in that house all those years that he was in the basement what memories there are suppressed by the psychic Bridge connection with the doll the writer also really made a point of saying these families never had to take these dolls in they were invited in they let the devil

inside to do the devil's work the director says that he sees all of this as playful it's the devil trying to do this thing to this person to F with them it's never about world domination it's just Satan getting his kicks once you view this movie through that lens it makes a lot more sense the devil enjoyed making these things happen and he enjoyed forcing mother Harker to sit there and watch whilst dressed as a nun one of the flashbacks that we get we're kind of LED from the cut to believe that we're kind of

seeing things through the eyes of the doll except we're not it's a first clue to who the accomplice is because as the priest comes through the door he looks like he recognizes the person right you wouldn't greet a doll like this if you saw it sat there under a veil it's actually her Mom dressed as a nun and we're seeing things through her eyes a bit like probably how the devil is and when we go right the way all the way back to the beginning where the guy gives himself up to Lee I think the

reason is that that guy is also acting under the sort of command of the devil which then explains why he gives himself up to Lee without a fight because the devil told him to because this sets Lee on the path of getting onto the longlegs case which creates the chain reaction for everything in the movie The Devil is playing with his pieces and having fun it also leaves with the impression that everything that happened only happened because the devil wanted it to ending with longlegs singing Happy Birthday saying Hell Satan and blowing a kiss giving

us the strongest indication that in this case the devil probably won so who was long legs the story of this character is that he was a Glam rocker he's meant to have an androgynous look this was really important to cage who said I wanted longlegs to be very androgynous I was thinking about the androgynous prophet in felin's Juliet of the spirits the look of long legs comes from his backstory of being a guy affected by plastic surgery in the 70s and 80s that's probably why he has this almost Michael Jackson likee quality to his face

at times he's a guy who's gone from one doctor to the next trying to fix these botches after botches upon botches and his skin has become damaged and puffy at one time they were talking about him perhaps having burns but they moved away from that idea the hair and makeup took 2 and 1/2 hours to apply every morning the reason that he wears the white powder is to cover up all of this botched plastic surgery to try to make himself look pretty but who is long legs it's important to note that he is not the

big bad as the writer says he is not the Hydra he is a person who is probably doing something else before the devil tapped him on the shoulder and said it's time you're now my secretary this informs us that longlegs was probably recruited at some point just like Lee's mom was he was a normal guy well maybe never normal but a guy and that he's been now been doing this for a long time it explains why he was happy to be set free and to finally end himself in the interrogation room and that's the truth

about longlegs and the ending explained what did you think of this movie let me know in a comment and if there's anything else that I missed I might do some follow-up videos on this so let me know in the comments as well and be sure to like And subscribe for more videos like this one there are some videos on the screen if you want to check out some more from me and until then