How Osgood Perkins Gave a Jolt to ‘Longlegs’

Many directors fall in love with scary movies through late-night cable binges or with friends at a drive-in. Osgood Perkins had a leg up: His father was the actor Anthony Perkins, a Hollywood heavyweight and the star of “Psycho,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror movie game changer.

“My father was absent, more oblique and abstract but a movie star, a public figure, an icon,” said Perkins, 50, in a recent interview over video. “Something very big lived with me.”

The younger Perkins said his father, who died of AIDS at 60 in 1992, was a spirit guide as he made his new horror movie “Longlegs,” starring Nicolas Cage as a fiendish clown-looking evildoer who vexes a green F.B.I. agent, played by Maika Monroe, via handmade evil-summoning dolls.

What would Perkins’s father have thought of the film, now in theaters?

“He probably would have really dug it,” he said.

Perkins talked about what inspired “Longlegs” and working with the chameleonic Cage. The interview has been edited and condensed.