From Walter Chaw's long review of Longlegs for Film Freak Central:
Perkins’s best film as writer-director is still his first, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Called February on the festival circuit, it’s set in a snowbound boarding school for girls over winter break, where young Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) is stranded because her parents haven’t picked her up. They aren’t neglectful, though. Possibly, they’ve been murdered. Moody, terrifying, the picture has the feeling of a day spent playing in the cold–sledding, building, trudging–and then coming inside and sitting by the fire as your vision goes dim. Perkins’s father, actor Anthony Perkins, died in 1992 from complications of AIDS. His mother, model turned actor and photographer Berry Berenson, was on one of the airplanes that flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. There is a phone call in The Blackcoat’s Daughter to Katherine we can only hear her side of, but in the encroaching black at the edges of the screen, we know the news she’s getting. If you’ve lost a parent unexpectedly and learned of it by telephone, the scene captures how, no matter how old you are, you are in that moment a child whose parent has forgotten to pick you up from school. When this happens, it’s your first glimpse of what the world will be like now that you’re alone.
(Anthony Perkins's Wikipedia page is packed.)