Osgood Perkins

The Legacy of Norman Bates

Osgood Perkins was never going to be a stranger in Hollywood. His father was Anthony Perkins, and that surname shapes any analysis of his work from the very first second. Before stepping behind the camera, he spent years playing supporting roles in comedies such as Just Looking or Not Another Teen Movie.

Because Perkins' films have always been a conversation with the ghosts of his own home.

His big-screen debut came in 1990, playing a young version of his own father in Psycho II. That decision felt like a macabre mirror game that shaped his relationship with the industry. But his acting career never took off into massive stardom, and he preferred to turn to screenwriting during a decade of relative silence.

And then he decided his place was in the director's chair.

In 2015, he premiered The Monkey at the Toronto International Film Festival. That was the exact moment the industry realized Perkins wasn't chasing cheap carnival scares. His approach centered on prolonged dread and the use of negative space to create real physical tension in the audience's seats.

The Horror That Never Blinks

His style moved away from the conventions of commercial genre filmmaking with unusual speed. In I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, shot in 2016 for Netflix, the director embraced a pace that many called unbearable. The film worked as an aesthetic manifesto on stillness and Gothic literature applied to the visual language of the twenty-first century.

In 2020, he directed Gretel & Hansel with a bigger budget than his previous films. He used symmetrical framing and a highly aggressive color palette reminiscent of German Expressionism. Critics were divided over a film that prioritized atmosphere over the logical storytelling of major studios.

He didn't care about consensus.

Perkins writes his scripts with sound in mind before dialogue. His characters often inhabit houses that seem like living organisms, and family trauma is the engine driving each of his stories. This fixation with the domestic and the sinister reached its peak of exposure in the next stage of his career.

The Eight-Figure Phenomenon

His definitive commercial breakthrough came in 2024 with the release of Longlegs. Distributed by Neon, the film became a massive box-office hit, grossing more than $100 million worldwide. Its initial budget barely exceeded $10 million.

He designed a cryptic promotional campaign that hid the face of Nicolas Cage until the day of the theatrical release. The result was a collective frenzy over a horror film that draws directly from The Silence of the Lambs, but with a much dirtier and less polished satanic component. The industry looked at Perkins once again as the architect of a new kind of commercial horror.

In 2025, production wrapped on The Monkey, an adaptation of a short story by Stephen King produced by James Wan. The project confirmed his place in the front rank of directors able to attract major stars without giving up his signature visual obsessions.

Filming for his next movie, Keeper, was scheduled with a small crew and a shooting schedule of just 30 days.