Some toys age poorly. Not in the way that one should never leave a Stretch Armstrong out in the sun, or how the sliding lightsabers of original Star Wars figures always got lost. These are the playthings that make you wonder what manufacturers and parents were ever thinking. Case in point: those old wind-up cymbal-clashing circus monkeys, their glassy-eyed grins and percussive, soulless motions seemingly designed to generate childhood trauma.
Stephen King laid that terror out on paper in his 1980 short story “The Monkey,” and now Longlegs writer/director Osgood Perkins illuminates it in his hilariously horrifying and bloodily creative adaptation, The Monkey.
The original short story centered on Hal Shelburn, a typical Kingian ordinary guy who inherits one of those monkeys, only to discover that the cacophony of its crashing augurs – or possibly brings on – a random death. Perkins takes the gist of the story and throws out any normalcy. Hal is now Hal and his twin brother Bill (both brilliantly and distinctly played by James as adults and Convery as children). Raised by their wild-eyed single mother (Maslany), they find the sinister simian in their absent father’s closet. Which is strange, since when the audience sees Daddy dearest (Scott) before he absconded, he’s doing his best to destroy it. He may be gone, but the cursed monkey, now graduated from cymbals to drums, is back, and it’s definitely no plaything.
Maybe it’s worth remembering that, before he wrote and directed captivating yet coldly esoteric movies like February (aka The Blackcoat’s Daughter) and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Perkins was the star of OTT schlockfest Dead & Breakfast. The cerebral excellence of his earlier work overshadows his mainstream storytelling instincts, leaving him incorrectly labeled an arthouse horror director. Yet while Gretel & Hansel was gorgeous and devious, it still hewed closely to the kid-friendly intentions of the Brothers Grimm. Meanwhile, Perkins himself has referred to his satanic serial killer smash hit Longlegs as “pop horror.”
Like fellow horror filmmakers Don Coscarelli and Stuart Gordon, Perkins has an intellectual heft to his work. It manifests in themes of parenthood, alienation, and how to navigate an arbitrary, nihilistic universe – themes that recur throughout his work and are at their most overt here. At the same time, The Monkey is his silliest and most audacious popcorn flick yet. It’s a gutbusting display of Grand Guignol hijinks that is perfectly designed to unleash barking gales of laughter from the audience as the monkey’s clanging rhythm sets another Rube Goldberg death machine in motion. In some ways, this is Perkins’ answer to the Final Destination movies, with every decapitation, immolation, and dismemberment exquisitely designed and executed.
But it’s Perkins that makes the difference. There are endless directors who can make you cackle at a ghoulish chain of events, but Perkins has a knack for a certain macabre weirdness. That’s what really separates him from other popcorn filmmakers: a cunning intellect that seeps and bubbles through every line of the script. It’s akin to watching how Coscarelli used dream logic in the Phantasm movies, or the way that Gordon brought his background in era-defining Chicago theatre to raise Re-Animator above its splatter peers (indeed, The Monkey has a memorable scene with Elijah Wood as an author of New Age parenting books that resonates with Gordon’s giddy sense of humor). No one else could have made this version of The Monkey because of all those indefinable, immutable yet ethereal elements that make Perkins’ movies not just popcorn flicks but gourmet popcorn.
This article appears in February 21 • 2025.
