Like many film directors, Osgood Perkins spent much of his youth making home movies on the family camcorder. “We did a lot of takes on Jason Voorhees,” says the Longlegs filmmaker today, over Zoom, referring to the machete-wielding killer of Friday the 13th. “We’d put a hockey mask on top of a gorilla mask and then he, this character, would lurk around and strangle people.” So far, so teenage boy. “I guess the difference for me was that I’d be filming in the kitchen and the door would open and it’d be my dad.” Dad to Perkins, by the way, is Norman Bates to the rest of us.
The resemblance between Perkins and Anthony, the brooding star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, is undeniable. Perkins shares his father’s square jaw and shelved brow, the jutting cheekbones and deep-set blue eyes. It’s a face so distinctive that it might seem inimitable were I not seeing it copied and pasted here today. For a long time, though, physical attributes were all they shared. “My dad was not the most knowable person,” says Perkins, who was 18 when his father died of Aids-related pneumonia.
