Here’s the thing: I kind of love his work. I just feel his work goes so strongly against the recent development of horror that it won’t work for everyone.

My parasocial relationship with Osgood Perkins is weird. I can’t help but think of him as the son of Anthony Perkins and I can’t help but think of Anthony Perkins as the star of Psycho. I understand on a rational level that I shouldn’t conflate actors with their roles and I have seen him in other movies as well (Catch-22 and The Trial come to mind), but often our emotions just bypass that rational side. So, somewhere in the back of my mind Oz Perkins is a son of murderer (even if thinking that is stupid and quite wrong).

Perkins has had a varied career in Hollywood, but in the last 10 years or so, he has become a director of relatively small budgeted horror movies. And he is great at it. Well, not one of the true greats, but I have liked all his movies. None of them have risen to a status of being a personal favorite, but to me it’s great that there is a director like this out there.

Thusfar he has directed four movies: February (2015, known as Blackcoat’s Daughter in some markets), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016, this was a Netflix release, so it should be available on Netflix in all markets), Gretel & Hansel (2020) and, just earlier this summer, Longlegs (2024).

All of these have a pretty wide margin between the critic score and the audience score on RottenTomatoes. Digging deeper, it seems that in each case the top critics have been more positive about the movies than the critics in general, although the margin is not nearly as big.

The thing is that Perkins makes atmospheric horror. He is not interested in jumpscares or gore. He builds a world, often quite intimate one, and let’s you wallow in the knowledge that there is something lurking out there just outside of your view. Or the view of the characters.

I can best explain this by looking at the movies, which I’m not going to do chronologically, as I’ll leave February for later. So, I’m starting with I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Now, this is the kind of movie that is a hard sell. For some fun copied from Red Letter Media, let’s look at some of the negative reviews on LetterBox’d. And yes, these are full reviews.

naptime horror

That was still worth two and half stars. Wow.

more like Osbad Perkins

Siis aivan paska ja tylsä ja älkää kattoko.
Not worth it, use your time for something better

My translation for the first line: “It’s complete shit and boring and don’t watch.”

worst most boring horror movie that i’ve ever seen. narration and nothing. she wasn’t even pretty.

Misogyny is not helpful here as most of the movie is just women.

Why was this movie made?

Indeed. Why are any movies made?

I hope it’s not just me but I didn’t understand anything that was happening in the movie.

Okay, this one I don’t really understand, as the movie is not hard to get, because there isn’t much happening.

Kummitustarinoiden rakastajana pettymykseni on mittaamaton ja yöni on pilalla.

Again, my translation, although the idiom here feels like this was originally in English and translated to Finnish before publishing: “As a lover of ghost stories, my disappointment is immesurable and my night is ruined.”

I guess that’s enough. You get the point. I don’t mind slow movies. Quite the opposite. If it’s done well, I’m all for it. This is definitely done well. The movie is just build up until something happens. Most of the movie happens within this house where the main character is pretty much trapped in the sense that she works there as a nurse for an older woman, whom she can’t leave behind.

Things happen and sometimes, as is the Perkins trademark of sorts, there’s the feeling that something is going to happen, but never does. I get why this is least liked of his movies. We just have the old house and everything that makes those houses creepy. I do admit the ending is not very satisfying, but it doesn’t really matter, as it is about the ambience rather than a plot. Sure, that is not what we are used to with feature films, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.

Next let’s talk about Gretel & Hansel. While the previous movie (I’m not going to write the whole name very many times) was based on creepy silence in an old house, this one is quite different. It isn’t only creepy, but tries to keep us off-balance through camera work. The angles are often tilted (you know, Dutch angles), but there is also camera movement, which can be disorienting. The witch is also truly creepy (sorry to use that word so much, but what can you do).

For funsies, some reviews again…

On a day in which we had a lot of content from Taylor Swift (plus a fucking album announcement) and a new episode of House of the Dragon, I decided to watch this shit, probably the only bad decision I made today.

Well, if Swift and HotD are your things, why did you decide to watch a weird horror movie from an obscure (at the time) director?

arthouse cinema for people who think disney’s live action remakes are good

That’s a… strong take.

The writer of this movie took one (1) women’s studies class and the director watched one (1) cinematography compilation on youtube and they decided to make a movie.

Throws every stylistic trick in the book at you (narrow aspect ratio, shallow depth of field, idiosyncratic framing), but it’s all completely incoherent.

Almost feels like a parody of A24 movies.

Anyone who likes this movie is added to my Pay No Mind list (a mental list of people to whose opinions I will pay no mind).

I guess I should note that of these movies, this is the Perkins did not write (Grimm brothers are actually credited). There are actually good points of sort here. All four of Perkins’ movies are actually quite female-centric and the name of the movie betrays what this one is about. Only Longlegs has males in major roles and we’ll get to that. You could argue the cinematography is “basic”, but it’s not what you do, it’s when you do it. I guess I’m now on someone’s Pay No Mind list.

And finally…

i’m sitting here trying to remember anything from this movie and I cannot

Well, not remembering details is not necessarily a bad thing, as the movie is not about them. Did this person remember feeling something during the movie? I would hope so as that’s the much more important part.

Actually, this is my least favorite of Perkins’ movies, but the margin is not wide, so you should not take that as a negative.

But let’s get to the other two.

February happens in two timelines. We have the past where two girls need to stay behind at boarding school during the winter break where one of them seems to be acting more and more strangely, and we have the present, where a young woman has escaped from a mental hospital and is invited to travel along with them by an elderly couple. Longlegs is about a young FBI agent, Lee, who is attached to a team investigating a unique series of family patriarchs killing their families.

So, spoilers…

Both of these are about Satan lurking in the shadows and people finding connection to it. There’s actually even a hint that the movies could be connected, but while there is some credibility to it (the moment I thought they might be was Kiernan Shipka’s cameo in Longlegs, as she was one of the younger women in February). Also, the design of Satan (or lack thereof) is similar.

In February’s past timeline the older of the two girls, Rose, is put in charge of the younger one, Kat, but the Rose finds that Kat seems to be out of it. At one point Rose finds Kat apparently worshipping the furnace in the basement. It turns out that Kat has indeed been recruited by Satan to do it’s bidding. Part of that is murdering Rose.

The twist is that they changed the actor for Kat in the present. So, it’s a surprise when it turns out that Emma is actually Kat and the older couple are actually Rose’s parents. Emma/Kat murders them as well, but finds that this doesn’t bring Satan back.

That’s actually interesting. Satan has left her, but she is still longing for it’s attention, so she is doing it’s bidding without it actually having to participate in any way. There is only one moment where we clearly see Satan and it’s half-hidden in the corner of Kat’s room where it just disappears into the shadows never to be seen again. That is also the only clear momoent where there is anything supernatural.

Longlegs takes a very different approach. Longlegs is a longterm servant of Satan. He is performing a long ritual by using magic to manipulate men to kill their families. Here the supernatural elements are much more prominent. Longlegs and his accomplice are using magic to force men to do this and Longlegs seems to have a much deeper understanding of Satan’s nature than Kat.

These movies have much better narratives than the other two movies, but they are still carried by the atmosphere. There a lot of scenes where there is tension from just the camera sitting there, possibly zooming on something, but as these aren’t nearly as slow as the other two. So, understandably these are much more liked by both critics and audiences.

Now, all of these movies have female leads. In February, the most important male character is Rose’s father, in I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, the three most important characters are women, in Gretel & Hansel we have Hansel, who there to be saved by Gretel, and in Longlegs we have a female lead.

What’s also noteworthy is that the more important male characters tend to be males because they kind of have to. Rose’s father needs to be male in February, in the I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, the most important male character is the ghost’s husband, who is seen in a vision of the past, Hansel is a traditionally named character so it’s hard to change that, but besides him, there’s “father” and some other authority figures, who are males, and in Longlegs Lee’s boss is male, because, well, he is going to be one of the men, who are going to be victimized by Longlegs. Now, that basically leaves only Longlegs as the only male character who doesn’t need to be one. Why is that? Of course, because of Nicolas Cage. It is much easier to find funding if you have a big name attached and Cage also produced the movie through his production company, Saturn Films.

I like this approach. There is a long history of assuming being male is the default, so why not just flip that? That can easily make your movies more interesting. Female stories have been explored so much less than male-stories especially in movies. Of course, these have all been written by men, so there is a limitation on what they know and understand.

There could be another reason, but this is just pure speculation and I’m not blaming Perkins of anything. I recently saw a clip of Jessica Chastain discussing her experiences regarding salaries. She mentioned a situation where she had been outright told by the producers that she had been picked for a role, but could not be made an offer yet, because they didn’t know who would be the male star, so they didn’t know how much they would have left after that. So, you can often get women cheaper…

Let’s finally get to the point, shall we.

The war between critics and the people who see arguing against critics has long traditions. It’s not just something that happened after Rotten Tomatoes became a thing. Partly I understand it. There seems to have always been critics, who like what they should like as critics, some who always choose to like what they think will be popular (so they are basically guessing what will make money), and those who just seem to go against one or both of the those on principle. The first one is the most common stereotype, which means that a lot of critics get blamed for being exactly that.

What people don’t get is that when you watch movies for a living and use a lot of time to think about them, you will experience movies differently. Does that mean that critics might not be able to serve your specific needs? Probably, but anyone with a real interest in movies and a genuine interest in communicating about them will reach this point naturally and their tastes will not coincide with those of the public.

This is where directors like Perkins come in. They can provide people, who have become jaded regarding mainstream movies with something different. Again, all of his four movies are good. They are not for everyone. Based on the audience scores, they are not for most. That doesn’t mean there is no value in the movies, but it does mean that the value of sources such as Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb or Letterbox’d is lessened. The value of finding critics who can provide you a service is much higher.

This has changed from my childhood, when we only had access to critics in the local paper, so basically one person, whereas now in the age of Internet we can pick and choose. But if we don’t and choose to just stay with the aggregates instead, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Often those movies that are most meaningful for us might not be a big deal for the larger public, especially if they concern minorities (like Daughters of the Dust) in some way or perhaps have strong sexual themes (like Cronenberg’s Crash) or are postmodern meditations on the artform (like Wavelength).

Perkins’ legacy might not be or ever will be equal to someone like John Waters as a cult-ish director, but he has his own unique style which I can personally appreciate.