This summer’s runaway horror hit,Longlegs, opens not with a quote from the Bible or anything so mundane. Instead, the livid-red title card reads, “Well you’re slim and you’re weak/You’ve got the teeth of the hydra upon you/You’re dirty, sweet, and you’re my girl” — lyrics from glam-rock band T. Rex’s classic 1971 hit “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” And that’s not the only evocation of Marc Bolan’s influential Seventies project: T. Rex’s music and style are woven into the movie’s very fabric.
“Think of it like playing a piano: If the left hand is playing the plot, the right hand is playing the soul,” director Oz Perkins tells Rolling Stone. “The right hand is playing the spirit. The right hand is playing the art, the mystery, the wonder, the curiosity, the beauty, the glamor. So I’d say that the T. Rex stuff had nothing to do with the plot — but everything to do with the vibe.”
Longlegs has become a box-office behemoth since it premiered on July 12, perhaps due to pre-buzz that promised that it would shock, terrify, and haunt you for days after viewing. As Rolling Stone’s own David Fear writes: “It’s an unabashedly style-over-substance take on a particular type of modern horror story. This is less a serial-killer thriller than a feature-length nightmare vibe.”
Without getting too spoiler-y, the film follows rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she hunts a serial killer named Longlegs who has a penchant for ciphers and an uncanny ability to leave no trace. Families all over the country are dying at the hands of their patriarchs — who also mysteriously kill themselves — and Longlegs, Zodiac-style, takes credit.
In addition to writing in code, the serial killer (played by a deliciously creepy and campy Nicolas Cage) also has an affinity for T. Rex. He blares their music from the speakers of his car and sleeps under a poster of Marc Bolan, whom he also dresses like, in an off-kilter kind of way. According to Perkins, he was writing the script for Longlegs when he got into T. Rex. He’d heard of the band before, but after seeing a documentary about that era, he fell in love with the band’s 1970 single “Ride a White Swan.”
“It was one of those things was like, ‘Where’s this been all my life?’ So I started listening to it on pretty heavy rotation right as I was writing Longlegs,” he says. “When I’m writing something or creating something or developing something, I’m really trying to keep my ears open. I’m listening to T. Rex, and it’s just coming really loud and clear on that frequency. It didn’t feel like instantly a perfect match. But that’s the kind of weird mismatch that made it even more appealing to me.”
When he heard “Bang a Gong” — specifically the lyrics that appear at the beginning of the movie — he locked in. As those who have seen the film will know, it echoes a Bible verse that plays a big role in the plot, which (spoiler alert!) wanders into the realm of Devil worship: “And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”
“It just became this weird synergetic thing that I leaned into,” Perkins says. “It was the perfect blend of Biblical, demonic poetry and glam rock.”
When he brought it all to Cage, the actor locked in immediately. “I said to him, ‘Look, Nick, I don’t know what this means to you. But I think it’s T. Rex.’ I didn’t even know what that sentence was. The music is T. Rex? That guy is T. Rex? I wasn’t sure what I meant by it,” Perkins says. “And he said, ‘That’s so crazy because yesterday, my oldest son who is learning to play the guitar, I played for him Marc Bolan’s backward guitar solo on “Cosmic Dancer.”‘ So totally apropos of nothing, he was listening to the same thing that I was listening to. It was like further proof from the universe that I was making the right choice.”
From there, the vibe of T. Rex and the ill-fated Marc Bolan — who died in a car crash in 1977 — took on a major role in the film. (More spoilers ahead, if you’re still concerned about that.) “It just ended up making sense that I would make [Longlegs] into this glam guy who had sort of had his life disrupted in the Seventies,” Perkins says. “He just wanted to be a glam-rock guy. He maybe plays a guitar kind of badly in his mom’s basement. And one day, his life changed, and he had to go to work for the Devil.”
As for what kind of work Cage’s Bolan-loving beast does? I won’t spoil that for you. Longlegs is currently in theaters.
