’ Osgood “Oz” Perkins is remarkably even-keeled for a filmmaker who’s enjoying the finest reviews of his career. His and Nicolas Cage-led horror-thriller has been the talk of the town for months now, as Neon’s marketing department has put together one of the more inspired promotional campaigns in recent memory. They’ve made Perkins’ fourth feature feel like a buzzy event film à la the work of his friend and collaborator, Jordan Peele, and the creepy procedural about an FBI agent’s (Monroe) self-actualizing pursuit of a Satanic serial killer (Cage) is more than worthy of that treatment.
(Perkins played director Fynn Bachman in Peele’s .) Perkins’ enters into theaters on Friday, joining Ti West’s , which bowed last weekend. The two genre pics share a rather interesting connection in that features a couple sequences involving the set on the Universal Studios backlot.
Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal 1960 horror film turned Perkins’ late father, Anthony, into a cultural icon, and he’s keenly aware of how his father’s legacy as Norman Bates informs his own complicated relationship with genre work all these years later. (West’s film also references 1983’s , in which Oz plays Young Norman Bates.) “My dad [ ] was, on the one hand, a real shining light in the genre space, having created one of the more indelible characters in , nevermind in horror movies or in crime movies and killer movies.
So there was the intense radiating pride around that that was .
