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Osgood Perkins is on a hot streak after releasing Longlegs and The Monkey for Neon, both of which filmed in Vancouver, and he’s shooting his fourth movie locally with The Young People, after a rare stumble at the box office with Keeper this fall.
“We found success. I found my people and collaborators and we’ve had the success it’s so hard to achieve in anything and in our theatrical movie business,” Perkins told The Hollywood Reporter on Sunday ahead of doing a master class in horror movie making at the Whistler Film Festival.
Perkins has teamed with Vancouver producer Chris Ferguson (Backrooms) of indie banner Oddfellows, and they’re backed by a first-look deal with Neon. That deal has Neon serving as the home for Perkins’ projects that he and Ferguson will produce.
That leaves Hollywood’s latest horrormeister with no plans to return to the U.S. after applying for permanent residence status in Canada to keep himself and his wife and young son living in Vancouver, and he and Ferguson making small-budget horror films locally one after the other.
“Permanent residency is a really nice deal. It gives us some financial perks. It gives my family a sense of roots. I have a young son who’s six, who goes to school in Vancouver, and feeling like you belong here. You’re not just visiting,” Perkins explained. Ferguson added Vancouver has embraced Perkins and the production team he’s amassed around him, much as Toronto has welcomed fellow horrormeister Guillermo del Toro and his family after years of making titles like The Shape of Water and Frankenstein locally.
“It’s been cool to see Vancouver accept Oz the way Toronto accepts and celebrates Guillermo del Toro. Here’s he’s keynoting the Whistler Film Festival. We just need the government to accept him in the same way and give him PR (permanent residency),” Ferguson adds. Perkins calls the production team he and Ferguson have formed around themselves a “family,” which makes dropping roots in Vancouver all the more important.
“I’d like to hug my editor every day, instead of going in and seeing a stranger who’s hired by the studio or something, and that I need to interface with and I don’t know anything about them. I’d rather think that my editors are adorable human beings who I know and are in the office next to me,” he explained.
Perkins has also found success in Canada, as the bottom appears to have fallen out of the U.S. theatrical release market for indie films. “Everybody is failing, and it’s been such a privilege to be able to say, oh, we’re doing things that are breaking through. And so if you’ve got it, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” Perkins insists.
That means he and his family aren’t returning to the U.S. anytime soon, especially as America’s position with the world, including Canada, changes, says Perkins. “It’s funny to have to admit as an American, very early on you’re indoctrinated into a certain sense of America as super great, and everyone else is kind of silly. When you spend time in another country, for most of us, there’s an eye-opening epiphany of, oh man, that’s actually a bunch of bullshit. The world is huge and beautiful and varied,” he argued.
Perkins will continue to produce projects with Brian Kavanaugh-Jones of Range, who introduced him to Ferguson. Settling in Vancouver has also seen Perkins partner with Mike Flanagan, Oscar winners Sean Baker and Samantha Quan, Zach Lipovsky (Final Destination Bloodlines, Freaks) and Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things, It), among a group of private investors backing the rescue of Vancouver’s historic Park Theatre on Cambie Street.
“It’s a very vibrant, liberal, expansive artistic city that cares about its people,” Perkins insisted. His journey to Canada began in late 2022 when he came north with a script for Longlegs.
“At the time, I didn’t really have a lot going on. I had made some movies, and the business had been slow. And then there was Covid. As the industry contracts, people are getting sloughed off, and I was sort of in danger of being sloughed off,” Perkins recounted. But making Longlegs with Nicolas Cage and as a tense FBI procedural steeped in occult horror and nightmarish visions got Perkins onto winning ways.
Longlegs, released by Neon, earned strong reviews and $128 million globally on a $10 million budget. A $75 million domestic haul made it the top grossing indie film of the year. So rather than return to the U.S., Perkins decided to stay in Vancouver “and keep the party going.”
His punch bowl overflowed again with The Monkey, which opened to $14 million domestically, Neon’s second-highest opening of all time, only behind Longlegs, and earned $68.7 million globally. But before that, Perkins and Ferguson quickly made Keeper.
“We were just, we could make another movie. Let’s make a movie. So, we formed the movie in our minds, and got all the department heads working at the same time, figured out a movie and then finished that,” Perkins recalled. But before he set about cutting Keeper in the edit suite, Perkins and Ferguson went into pre-production on The Monkey, ahead of its production and successful release.
Perkins hit a speed bump with Keeper, his third collaboration with Neon, which has only pulled in $4.8 million to date globally, according to Box Office Mojo. But that hasn’t phased the horror director. “Every movie has its purpose, every movie has its flavor, every movie has its value and its content. And Keeper from the get-go was just a smaller movie. The specific intention was not to blow the doors off the box office. The fact that Keeper has had a life is great,” Perkins said.
“And Keeper made enough money for its crew. We’re all participating,” Ferguson adds. The duo also produces other filmmakers’ movies for Neon, which releases these projects theatrically in the U.S. and represent international rights.
The horror meister also dismisses outright any talk online about slowing his filmmaking pace after the box office disappointment for Keeper.
“The train is going, and the opening through which the train is travelling is closing. The theatrical window is closing on all of us. So the more we’re able to output and slip through this really tricky gauntlet of a time for the industry, where everything’s being killed and compacted and turned into some corporate thing, that’s a good thing,” Perkins added.
The Whistler Film Festival wraps on Sunday.
