Making Sense of Longlegs‘ Terrifyingly Ambiguous Ending

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Longlegs.

When a horror movie generates as much hype as Longlegs, it’s bound to inspire some polarizing reactions. Leading up to its July 12 release, the new feature from writer-director Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) has alternately been called “the scariest film of the decade” and “misfiring hokum.”

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Still, the hotly-anticipated thriller currently boasts a 91 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and, thanks to buzz drummed up by a viral marketing campaign and strategic advance screenings, is headed for what could be a $10-15 million opening weekend. On TikTok, videos related to Longlegs have racked up over 51 million views, setting the Satanic Panic-fueled genre film up to either cement itself in horror history or fall victim to the dreaded “overrated” label.

Putting a supernatural spin on elements of a variety of iconic genre predecessors—from The Silence of the Lambs to Se7en to Zodiac—Longlegs stars It Follows breakout Maika Monroe as Lee Harker, a psychically-gifted FBI agent who’s drawn into the hunt for an elusive serial killer (Nicolas Cage) known only by the film’s titular moniker. Teaming with her superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), Lee begins to slowly uncover the means and motive of the grotesquely made-up Longlegs—ultimately discovering an insidious connection to her own past.

The movie’s final act—which reveals how Lee’s mother, possessed dolls, and the devil himself all played a role in Longlegs’ reign of terror—seems designed to be ambiguous, leaving the ending up to viewer interpretation. But according to Monroe, there’s one clear takeaway. “Evil isn’t going anywhere,” she told TIME. “That’s just the reality. There really is no end.”

Read More: Maika Monroe on Her Obsession With Longlegs‘ Sinister World

What does Longlegs‘ ending mean?

After Longlegs—or Dale Cobble, as his real name turns out to be—is arrested and kills himself by repeatedly smashing his face into the FBI’s interrogation table, Lee is left to put together the final pieces of the occult puzzle surrounding his crimes. She finally comes to understand that her mom, Ruth (Alicia Witt), is the accomplice who was working with Longlegs to deliver the dolls to his targets’ houses. It’s revealed that Ruth would make the drops disguised as a nun and pretend she had been sent by the church with a gift for their daughters’ birthdays (always the 14th of the month). She would then sit and watch as the evil orb inside the dolls’ heads, imbued with Longlegs’ hypnotic power, compelled the families’ fathers to violently kill their loved ones and themselves.

Of course, Longlegs himself was apparently simply a pawn of Satan, a.k.a. “the man downstairs”—hence all the references to the Book of Revelations and glimpses of demonic phantoms. “[Longlegs is] someone who was a person and is a person, and whose life was sort of hijacked by the devil,” Perkins told Den of Geek. “You go into the service of that and it sucks, and you do your best to sort of be evil through it, with it, as a result of it, but in the end you’re also a person who gets tired.”

When Lee returns to her mom’s house, Ruth shoots Lee’s fellow agent (Michelle Choi-Lee) before finally telling her the truth: Lee was intended to be one of Longlegs’ victims on her ninth birthday (what we saw in the film’s opening flashback), but Ruth prevented it by agreeing to help Longlegs carry out his horrors and letting him use her basement as his workshop. She also shoots Lee’s own doppelgänger doll, causing Lee to fall unconscious and severing the psychic bridge that connected her to Longlegs while making her blind to the truth all those years.

According to Perkins, this twist was born from the relationship he had with his parents, horror icon Anthony Perkins and actor Berry Berenson, as a kid. “I try not to tell my children any protective lies, having 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,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “So 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, is definitely where the movie came from. That’s the kernel of truth that started the process.”

‘As bad as it could have turned out’

When Lee wakes up, she realizes that her mom intends to continue Longlegs’ work in order to uphold her end of the bargain and keep Lee safe from the devil. Lee rushes over to Agent Carter’s house for the ninth birthday party of his daughter, Ruby (Ava Kelders), and finds that Ruth has already arrived with Ruby’s doll and allowed the Carter family to fall under its spell. Agent Carter kills his wife before Lee shoots him, and then, her own mother. But when she attempts to shoot Ruby’s doll and free her from its influence, the gun clicks empty.

Some viewers have taken this ending to mean that Lee is now possessed and will take up Longlegs’ mantle. Whether or not that’s the case, according to Perkins, the moment is intended to serve as metaphor for the consuming nature of evil and how people are often complicit in their own destruction.

“The ending for her is about as bad as it could have turned out,” he told Den of Geek. “Like shooting her mom in the head, that’s about as bad a day as a person can have. So I think that ultimately one could say that the entire movement of the movie—or the entire movement of all of Longlegs’ crimes, starting from crime number one all the way to the Carter family—it’s all about getting this poor girl to a place where she shoots her mom in the head. Like that’s kind of the flourish, the devil’s ‘Yep, I did that.'”