How Nicolas Cage Became Our Unlikely Scream King

It’s scarcely an exaggeration to say horror is in Nicolas Cage’s blood. In 1963, months before the actor was born, his uncle Francis Ford Coppola made his feature directorial debut with the horror cheapie Dementia 13. Widely regarded as a shameless Psycho knockoff, which it is, Dementia 13 nonetheless displays a flair for the macabre, which Coppola later and better developed in Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Cage, meanwhile, grew up under the tutelage of his father, eccentric literary professor August Coppola, who raised his sons on a steady diet of foreign films, many of the horror variety. “This was before video, so he would take us to the art-house cinemas,” Cage once told Playboy. “I saw Citizen Kane, and that’s when I discovered [1920s screen legend] Max Schreck and Nosferatu and Dr. Caligari, which gave me nightmares.”

Now, in his fifth decade as a Hollywood star, Cage—who plays the sadistic serial killer Longlegs in the thriller of the same name—is suddenly putting that horror pedigree to use. Or not so suddenly. Recall that this is the same Cage who gobbled a cockroach (for real) and took a bite out of a clubgoer’s neck (not real) in 1989’s cult favorite Vampire’s Kiss, became an unwitting human beehive in 2006’s misbegotten The Wicker Man remake, and more recently revitalized his career with a revelatory turn in 2018’s psychedelic revenge flick Mandy.

It’s telling, perhaps, that it took a blood-splattered horror gem like Mandy to revive Cage’s reputation during a decade spent pumping out straight-to-VOD movies to pay off well-publicized IRS debts. While plenty of late-era Cage movies seem desperate to reverse-engineer cult status, Panos Cosmatos’s retro-haze nightmare is the real thing, with Cage alternately soulful and hell-bent as an early ’80s lumberjack exacting vengeance on the evil cult that murdered his girlfriend. Its defining image—a blood-soaked Cage grinning at the wheel at the film’s climax—provided the first truly iconic shot of Cage in a film since, let’s say, Bad Lieutenant?

Mandy didn’t just redeem Cage’s critical reputation; it also steered his filmography into more macabre territory. In retrospect, you could view it as the first in a loose trilogy of psychedelic, visually resplendent horror flicks starring Cage, though its successors—2020’s Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space and 2021’s animatronic nightmare Willy’s Wonderland—offered diminishing returns.

The latter proved particularly disappointing, stunting Cage’s performance by having him play a fully silent protagonist battling a bunch of homicidal mascots. (This is a man who gives line readings like no other earthling. Why put him in your movie if you won’t let him speak??)

Alternately goofy and unnerving, Color Out of Space has its moments, at least, bathing Cage in an orgy of phantasmagoric color and letting him freak out at his kids, his car, and—most disturbingly—a barn full of possessed alpacas. “There’s an aspect of what he does that makes me think he should lean further into gothic character roles,” Color director Richard Stanley told The Ringer in 2020. “He can be the next Vincent Price.”

Indeed, like Price, Cage is unfailingly prolific, commands a legendary voice, and has a way of mingling comedy and horror until it is not clear where one begins and the other ends.

But it was his childhood hero Christopher Lee, not Price, whom Cage was channeling when, after solidifying his career revival with the unexpectedly moving Pig (2021), he portrayed literature’s most famous vampire in last year’s Renfield. Cage had openly coveted the role of Dracula for decades. “Much of my lifestyle is modeled after him,” he told Playboy in 1996, griping that his uncle didn’t cast him in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “I don’t drink blood, but otherwise—”

Unfortunately, Renfield—which paired him with Nicholas Hoult as a modernized version of the eponymous servant—proved unworthy of Cage’s flamboyant, velvet-clad villainy. It’s the kind of “horror comedy” that undermines both horror and comedy, beset by hacky jokes and CGI-stilted gore. It can’t hold a molten candle to Coppola’s 1992 film.

Cage deserved a horror script worthy of his depraved instincts. Now, he’s found one.

With Longlegs, Cage joins forces with a fellow horror lifer: director Osgood “Oz” Perkins (Gretel & Hansel).

Here’s another guy with horror in his blood. Perkins, the son of Anthony Perkins, grew up in the shadow of Psycho and, as an actor, made his film debut playing young Norman Bates in Psycho II (1983). His and Cage’s destinies were perhaps both shaped, strangely enough, by scary movies that came out before they were born.

Longlegs, however, is not a slasher movie so much as a white-knuckle descendant of hunting-a-killer classics like The Silence of the Lambs and Zodiac. It’s the gruesomely detailed tale of FBI agent Lee Harker’s (Maika Monroe) obsessive pursuit of Longlegs (Cage), an occult-obsessed murderer with a strange fixation on his victims’ birthdays. (His victims were all born on the 14th of the month.) Longlegs has been targeting young girls for decades and, we gradually learn, may have a mysterious history with Harker. A bizarre cat-and-mouse pursuit ensues, during which it is not always clear who is stalking whom.

Cage clearly relishes playing such a twisted character. (The last time he appeared in a serial killer movie—2013’s mediocre The Frozen Ground—he played the cop.) As Longlegs, he’s androgynous and near unrecognizable, his leering grin protruding from drippy, white makeup and stringy, gray hair. He worships Satan, speaks in sinister riddles (“I know you’re not afraid of a little bit of dark ... because you are the dark”), and taunts children in a high, singsongy voice reminiscent of Cage’s wacko falsetto in the straight-to-VHS obscurity Never on Tuesday.

Unlike most directors who work with latter-day Cage, Perkins understands the power of anticipation. Cage’s full visage has been withheld from the Longlegs trailers and marketing material, and we don’t get a full glimpse of him until nearly halfway through the film. The suspense mounts. Early on, Perkins films the killer at odd angles, obscuring most of his face; an opening scene depicts him only from his knees to his nose. The character’s erratic movements and unnatural voice keep us on edge.

There are subtle callbacks to earlier Cage performances—a made-up song Longlegs sings reminded me of Castor Troy in Face/Off, whose giggly sadism is a reference point here—but Longlegs is a distinctly new creation from the 60-year-old thespian.

As ever, though, Cage is channeling his early horror icons. While in Vampire’s Kiss he modeled his distorted bodily movements after Schreck in Nosferatu, here he takes influence from a different 1920s image of grotesquerie: the great Lon Chaney, an early pioneer of scene-stealing makeup in films such as The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and the apparent inspiration for Longlegs’ upturned nose. (Reportedly, Perkins vetoed one of Cage’s ideas: that the character should fully pull his nose off on-screen.)

“I thought, ‘What can I do with Oz’s invention of Longlegs that can give him some vulnerability?’” Cage says in the film’s press notes. “What I liked about Lon Chaney’s monsters is that they always had a heart, and I always felt bad for them.”

Like many great actors, Nicolas Cage, in his most tormented performances, often exorcises private pain.

When he pleaded with Cher in Moonstruck—describing, in a beloved monologue, the passionate madness of love—he was coping with a breakup of his own; he imagined his ex listening from the other side. Thirty years later, he filmed Mandy in the aftermath of his third divorce, channeling his pain into the character of Red. “Those feelings had to go somewhere,” Cage told The Guardian, “so they went into the performance.”

But the great trauma of Cage’s life was not a breakup. To understand Cage’s approach to horror, we must understand something about his childhood, which was complicated by his mother’s severe mental illness. For long stretches of Cage’s early life, his mother, Joy Vogelsang, was institutionalized with schizophrenia; at one point, she was given shock treatments. She shaped Cage’s formative years.

“I knew there was something wrong with her when she started talking to the wall,” Cage later recalled. “I remember saying, ‘Mom, walls don’t talk.’ And she thought that was really funny. She’s a very gentle person who is quite jolly, but like anybody who goes into these states, what they’re seeing is real.”

In his horror-adjacent performances, Cage often channels memories of his parents, turning childhood trauma into art. Portraying a literary agent losing his grip on reality in Vampire’s Kiss, he used a haughty, faux-British accent modeled after his academic father, but he borrowed elements of the character’s mental deterioration from his mother. What seemed to audiences like wacky antics were in fact attempts by Cage to understand his mother’s pain. “She gave me an awareness of all kinds of expressions and possibilities,” Cage once told Interview magazine, “and I think that as Peter Loew in Vampire’s Kiss I showed a lot of what I had seen her go through.”

In recent years, both Renfield and the manic freak-outs of Color Out of Space found Cage returning to the well of his late father’s vocal style. But Longlegs, the actor has said, is an homage to his mom, who died in 2021. When he first read the script, he heard her voice and decided to bring her vocalizations to the role.

Look, there’s no way around it: Modeling a serial killer after your late mother is an odd way to express familial love. (Cage, to be clear, has never suggested his mother was capable of violence.) But Cage seems to view this as a project of radical empathy; in understanding Longlegs, who does unspeakable things under the command of satanic voices, he seeks to understand his mother’s condition.

“I was coming at it from, what exactly was it that drove my mother insane?” the actor recently told Entertainment Weekly. “It was a deeply personal kind of performance for me because I grew up trying to cope with what she was going through.” In press notes for the film, Cage put it more bluntly: “Yes, I turned my mother into a serial killer; you can do that when you’re feeling artistic.”

If horror is in Cage’s blood, at least he’s working through it—in the same place he’s always reckoned with the agony and ecstasy of being alive: the silver screen.

Zach Schonfeld is a freelance writer, journalist, and critic based in New York. He writes about culture for Pitchfork, Vulture, SPIN, and many other publications. He was formerly a senior writer for Newsweek, where he was on staff for five years. He is the author of How Coppola Became Cage, a book about Nicolas Cage’s early career and rise to fame.