Longlegs (2024): Ending Explained

By Luna Sterling

In the dim, rain-slicked shadows of 1990s Oregon, Longlegs weaves a chilling tapestry of occult dread and fractured psyches. Directed by Osgood Perkins, this horror thriller pulses with an undercurrent of unease, where every creak of floorboards and whisper of coded letters feels like a cold breath on the neck. Starring Maika Monroe as the haunted FBI agent Lee Harker, Nicolas Cage as the grotesque Longlegs, and Alicia Witt as the enigmatic Ruth Harker, the film builds to a finale that shatters illusions of safety, leaving viewers adrift in a fog of psychological torment. If you've just emerged from the theater—or binged it late into the night—our Longlegs ending explained dives deep into the visceral climax, unpacking its literal events, symbolic layers, and lingering ambiguities. Spoilers ahead: this is the nightmare you can't unsee.

Quick Recap

The film opens in 1974 Oregon with a young girl clutching a Polaroid camera, drawn by a disembodied voice through misty woods to an encounter with an erratic man in garish pale makeup—his voice a jagged rasp that lingers like frost on skin. Flash forward to the 1990s, where rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), possessing an uncanny, almost clairvoyant intuition, is thrust into a cold case by her supervisor, William Carter (Blair Underwood). The crimes are ritualistic murder-suicides: fathers slaughtering their families before turning the blade—or gun—on themselves, each scene marked by a cryptic letter in Satanic code, signed by the elusive "Longlegs."

Lee's breakthrough comes in decoding the letters, revealing a pattern tied to innocence corrupted—each victim family harbors a 9-year-old daughter born on the 14th of the month, with killings timed within days of her birthday. These dates etch an occult triangle on the calendar, one vertex ominously absent. Paranoia seeps in as Lee receives her own coded birthday card from Longlegs, a veiled threat against her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt). Clues lead to eerie dolls hiding high-energy metal orbs, suggesting supernatural possession, and a visit to Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka), the lone survivor of a Longlegs attack, who mutters of a visitor using Lee's name. Suspicions mount: Ruth's old police report of an intruder near Lee's ninth birthday, a hidden Polaroid exposing Longlegs as the pale-faced intruder from her childhood. Lee's submission of the photo triggers Longlegs' arrest, but the missing calendar date aligns with the present, hinting at an unseen accomplice. As interrogation unfolds, Longlegs rants of serving "the man downstairs" and drops a bombshell about Ruth's role, before smashing his skull in a suicide that echoes with wet, final thuds. Carrie follows suit, her death a spectral ripple. The tension coils tighter as Agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) drives Lee to confront Ruth, the air thick with unspoken betrayals.

What Happens in the Ending

The finale unfolds with a suffocating intimacy, the camera lingering on rain-streaked windows and the faint metallic tang of fear in the air. After Longlegs' grotesque self-demise—his head colliding with the interrogation table in rhythmic, bone-crunching impacts—and Carrie's reported suicide, the weight of the missing calendar date presses like an invisible hand. Lee, her face pale and drawn under the dim dashboard glow, is driven by Agent Browning to her mother's remote home. The house looms like a forgotten crypt, its silence broken only by the patter of rain on the roof.

Browning remains in the car, engine idling with a low, ominous hum, while Lee steps inside, her footsteps echoing hollowly as she searches the shadowed rooms for answers—or threats. The air grows heavy, laced with the faint, acrid scent of old incense and something sharper, like gun oil. Outside, Ruth emerges from the gloom, her movements deliberate, eyes hollow with a fanatic's zeal. Without a word, she levels a shotgun at the car and fires, the blast shattering the night with a visceral roar. Browning slumps, blood blooming dark against the upholstery, her final gasp lost in the downpour.

Lee, alerted by the gunshot's thunder, rushes out to witness the aftermath—Ruth standing over the body, unyielding. In a fevered confrontation, Ruth reveals her complicity: she is the accomplice, the hidden hand delivering the cursed dolls to families, embedding the orbs that twist fathers into killers. The dolls, those porcelain-eyed abominations, channel "the man downstairs"—a demonic force that possesses the unwitting. Ruth destroys a doll eerily resembling a young Lee, smashing it with frantic, splintering force, perhaps to sever the final ritual link or exorcise her own guilt. The screen fades on Lee's shattered realization, the rain mingling with tears, as the occult triangle completes itself in blood and betrayal. No tidy arrests or exorcisms here—just the raw, echoing void of inherited evil.

The Meaning Behind the Ending

At its core, the ending of Longlegs is a descent into the abyss of maternal sacrifice and demonic inheritance, where the line between protector and perpetrator blurs into a visceral smear. Ruth's reveal as the accomplice isn't mere plot twist; it's a metaphorical gut-punch, symbolizing how evil perpetuates through the very bonds meant to shield us. The dolls, with their orbs pulsing like forbidden hearts, represent corrupted innocence—vehicles for possession that mirror how trauma embeds in the psyche, turning love into lethality. Longlegs' suicide and Carrie's echo it as a contagion, the "man downstairs" (Satanic shorthand for infernal influence) spreading not through claws, but through subtle, insidious whispers.

Thematically, the finale underscores the film's psychological horror: Lee's clairvoyance, once a gift, becomes a curse, forcing her to confront the evil birthed in her own home. Ruth's act of destroying the Lee-doll evokes a twisted baptism, attempting to break the cycle but dooming it instead—symbolizing futile rebellion against predestined darkness. The rain-soaked isolation amplifies this, a sensory shroud that drowns out redemption, leaving the audience with the metallic aftertaste of irreversible loss. It's not about vanquishing the monster; it's about becoming entangled in its web, where every birthday candle flickers with potential doom.

Character Arcs and Resolution

Lee Harker's journey arcs from detached investigator to unwilling heir of horror, her buttoned-up facade cracking under the weight of suppressed memories. The ending resolves her quest not with triumph, but with a hollow epiphany: her childhood encounter with Longlegs wasn't random, but a seed planted by Ruth's pact with the occult. Monroe's performance peaks in wide-eyed devastation, her arc culminating in isolation—surviving, yet forever marked, the clairvoyant burden now a scar that whispers of more shadows to come.

Ruth evolves from distant matriarch to fanatic destroyer, her arc a chilling inversion of maternal instinct. Witt infuses her with a brittle fervor, revealing Ruth's complicity as a desperate bid to protect Lee by diverting the demon's gaze—delivering dolls to other families as sacrificial proxies. Yet, her shotgun blast and doll-smashing seal her as irredeemable, resolving in tragic fanaticism. Longlegs (Cage's manic, makeup-smeared tour de force) arcs to self-annihilation, his hints exposing the conspiracy before his visceral exit underscores his role as demonic mouthpiece. Carter and Browning's arcs truncate abruptly—Carter's skepticism dies with his suspicions, Browning's loyalty ends in spilled blood—highlighting how the supernatural devours the rational. No one emerges unscathed; resolution is denial, the cycle poised to repeat in Lee's haunted gaze.

Alternate Interpretations

Longlegs thrives on ambiguity, its ending a misty veil inviting multiple lenses. One reading casts the events as Lee's psychological unraveling: her "clairvoyance" a hallucination born of repressed trauma, Ruth's shooting a manifestation of guilt-fueled paranoia rather than literal occult conspiracy. The dolls? Metaphors for childhood dolls twisted by abuse, the orbs symbolic of internalized rage. Carrie's suicide and Longlegs' hints could be projections of Lee's fractured mind, the "man downstairs" her subconscious dread of inheriting Ruth's instability.

Alternatively, a supernatural literalist view sees the ending as apocalyptic prophecy—the triangle's completion unleashing the demon fully, with Ruth's doll destruction failing to contain it, priming Lee as the next vessel. Was Longlegs truly arrested, or a pawn in a larger ritual? The cutoff finality suggests endless recurrence, ambiguities that mirror the film's coded letters: solvable, yet eternally elusive, leaving viewers to decode their own fears.

Themes and Symbolism

The ending reinforces Longlegs' core themes of inherited evil and the occult's subversion of the domestic idyll, subverting horror tropes by making the home—not the woods or asylum—the true lair of terror. Birthdays, symbols of joy, twist into harbingers of death, the 14th a numerological nod to infernal pacts (1+4=5, evoking pentagrams). The Polaroid camera symbolizes frozen trauma, capturing innocence's theft, while the orbs in dolls embody possession's intimacy—evil as a hidden core, pulsing beneath porcelain smiles.

Psychologically, it explores clairvoyance as double-edged blade: Lee's intuition unravels her world, subverting the "final girl" archetype into a vessel of doubt. Sensory motifs—the rain's relentless drum, the orb's implied hum, blood's warm stickiness—heighten tension, symbolizing emotional deluge and the inescapability of the psyche's underbelly. Ultimately, it subverts redemption, positing evil as generational, a whisper that outlives screams.

Final Thoughts

Longlegs' ending is a masterstroke of atmospheric dread, working its magic through restraint rather than spectacle—Perkins crafts a finale that lingers like a half-remembered nightmare, its ambiguities ensuring it haunts long after the credits. For general audiences, it's accessible terror: no need for occult expertise to feel the chill of betrayal's embrace. Yet, its psychological depth rewards rewatches, probing how close we skirt our own abysses. If it falters, it's in the abruptness—Ruth's full backstory feels tantalizingly veiled—but that's the point: some evils defy explanation, leaving us in the rain, questioning the shadows at our door. A triumph of moody horror, Longlegs ends not with closure, but with the exquisite ache of the unknown.