“The world is getting pretty dark and serious, and a little bit of relief getting served up as a horror movie feels like good medicine. We tried for an adorable horror movie. Everything is sort of ironic or dystopian or negative, and this felt more adorable than that,” says writer-director Osgood Perkins of The Monkey, based on the 1980 short story of the same name by Stephen King.

The Monkey is the latest genre experience from writer and director Osgood Perkins, most recently
famous for helming the staggeringly successful Longlegs of 2024, but known for years as a singular,
uncompromising stylist in the horror genre. With horror as his canvas, Perkins paints scenes of dread
replete with terrible places and haunting characters that feel like shared hallucinations experienced by
audiences. While Perkins’ films are notably often quiet, he knows how to puncture the silence with a
blade as sharp as the devil himself.

With The Monkey, longtime fans of the filmmaker will be treated to a Perkins work unlike any other that
has preceded it. This master of subtle conveyance comes out of the shadows with a cartoon hammer
in his latest film, and while the writer-director has always had a sense of humour in his work, The
Monkey is as much an absurdist comedy as it is a blood-soaked thrill ride following the travails of one
cursed family.

The Monkey is based on the 1980 short story of the same name by Stephen King. It follows a man named
Hal Shelburn, who is terrorized by a cymbal-banging monkey that rains misfortune down on whoever
possesses it. Hal first found the object among his father’s belongings in a storage closet, and after the
discovery he started losing loved ones to tragic accidents. Believing the monkey is connected to the
catastrophes, Hal throws it in a dry well, but it resurfaces somehow decades later to haunt Hal again. In
order to break the curse, Hal teams up with his son to try and dispose of it once and for all.

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Adapting King’s work and crafting the screenplay

The idea for adapting King’s work came to Perkins from James Wan’s Atomic Monster and The Safran
Company, headed by Peter Safran. The two parties presented Perkins with the short story and a draft of the script. His interest was piqued, and he agreed to come on and start a screenplay from scratch. After reading through the source material once he didn’t consult with it again. This was meant to be a jumping off point for Perkins, and the producers weren’t interested in a “copy paste” job.

The adaptation that arose from Perkins’ new take kept the broad strokes of the King’s short story in place
with details added that personalised it to the writer-director.

The most significant change is that Hal became one of two with a twin named Bill; Perkins wanted a brotherly dynamic at the centre of the film since that’s how he grew up. “In developing it early on, you’re always tasked with figuring out what the mythology is or what the monster is and why it works or how it works, and it’s tricky because this is an inert character,” says Perkins. “It’s not like Chucky or Gremlins or M3gan. It plays its drum and people around it die, so I had to figure out what made sense to me. Because I’m always trying to, in the movies I make, to make it about me.” The dynamic of Bill and Hal, their history together and their reconciliation, was like a biographical insert for the filmmaker.

“It’s pretty well known that I have experienced some pretty shocking stuff in my life, the loss of both of my parents being pretty wild events,” says Perkins. “I was eager to use this property as a key to sort of healing those experiences by applying a comic and absurdist touch to it. It just felt like the image of the monkey being this sort of iconic indicator of bad things to come, but also kind of approachable and bizarre and surreal in its own right. It just seemed like all those things went together.”

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So what is this monkey? That’s a tough question

It’s not a toy; never call it a toy. But what the monkey contains is vast. On the one hand it is an emotionless merchant of death that seems to function like a bingo ball hopper when it comes to picking victims.

The monkey himself — or is it a her? Or is it no gender at all? Probably the latter,” says Theo James,
who plays the grown versions of Hal and Bill. “This monkey has a Malvolian force behind it, a kind of
ability to cause death and carnage around it at any turn. It also has a strange and opaque way of
granting wishes, wishes of death. The monkey is a parable for mortality, and death is chasing or looming
over us at all times. We can’t outrun it. We all kind of get there in the end, but the thing about humanity
— perhaps it’s a blessing or is it a curse? — we think for most of our relative youth that death doesn’t
exist in our zeitgeist, but it’s been there since the day we were born. So, it’s how you deal with the
specter of death and what that does to a person.”

James even questions whether the monkey is literally there at all, or if it’s just a manifestation of the Shelburn family trauma, a symbol for the cycle of pain or dysfunction they’re too immobilized by to break, no matter what further damage it perpetuates in the process.

There is also special attention paid to the relationship between the Shelburn boys and their single mother, Lois, played by Tatiana Maslany, who offers another possibility that fits neatly within Perkins’ recurring theme of what’s passed from parent to child, and how our histories inform our futures. “The monkey is a lot of things,” she says. “It’s what do we inherit from the parents we didn’t know, or the parents that we did know? What’s the legacy that’s passed down to us, the things that we can’t help but be or the bad luck we can’t help but carry with us? What is the stuff that people leave us, both emotionally and physically?”

And Perkins has his own read on the creature: “It became this almost absurd quality of the monkey that
it doesn’t really do anything. People die all the time. In fact, everybody dies sooner or later, one way or
another, and sometimes it’s totally normal and natural and sometimes it’s totally terrible and crazy.” The
writer-director continues, “In my own personal life I’ve had a share of both. I’ve had some pretty
extreme, tragic deaths in my life. I’ve had some strange things happen. So, I sort of took from there and
said, ‘What if the monkey is kind of just there?’ Of course it’s causing these things to happen, but I
leaned into the universal concept of everybody dies, it’s just a question of when.” In that way it’s just like
the box says right on the top: ORGAN GRINDER MONKEY LIKE LIFE.

And like life, the monkey does not take requests. You turn the key, and then you take a chance on what happens next.

If this all sounds like the height of absurdity, a little monkey with a drum that rains hell down on and
around its chosen stewards, Perkins agrees with you.

And the story elements taken together provided the perfect avenue for the director to change gears when it came to mood. A thing about Perkins is that, even if the bulk of his filmography does not wave this attribute around like a flag, he is very funny. He’s quick on his feet and adept with a witty turn of phrase. The Monkey production designer Danny Vermette says that while working on Longlegs, he and cinematographer Andres Arochi talked about Perkins finally focusing a script on humour, “We were like, Oz needs to write a comedy. He’s just such a funny dude. He holds nothing back and he’s so giving. He just lets you know what he’s thinking and feeling all the time, and it’s just rooted in humour.”

Horror and comedy are also united when it comes to the commentary texture that Perkins is compelled by, and Maslany says she sees these same blended elements in the writings of King.

“There’s so much fun in [Stephen King’s stories], and there’s so much real stuff being talked about in a way that is scary and disturbing, but he always does it with this sense of humour,” says Maslany. “And I think what Oz pulled out of it in such a big way was that sense of humour, that dark humour, which he has in spades.”

While horror and its fans have always been good to Perkins as a filmmaker, his family’s history makes for
something of a path predetermined with the director going into the family business. But as he’s gained
more experience and gotten older, the filmmaker says he feels called by something a little bit different
right now. “I think I kind of started making horror movies — I don’t want to say by default — but sort of
because of my dad and it felt like something I would do. And there were horror movies I really loved, so I
did it a few times, and it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that the honest truth is I don’t go for horror,
especially new ones. I go for old movies, like Eyes Without A Face or Don’t Look Now,” explains Perkins,
who cites madcap moves like Death Becomes Her and Malignant — which the director calls “fucking
funny” and is helmed by his producer Wan — as tonal core texts for The Monkey.

“But horror movies in general make me feel kind of bad. So I have always been aware of that, like, ‘Am I making people feel bad with what I’m potentially doing? I know they like it, but do I like it?’ So, the idea of making something that makes me laugh feels like a natural evolution. I’ll see what I feel like doing next, but it feels like it might be hard to go back to serious.”

Adorable. Spielbergian. A tribute to the first heyday of Robert Zemeckis. A callback to the magic of seeing
Gremlins as a child. These aren’t the most expected descriptors from a filmography like Perkins’, but in
addition to the all-out fun of The Monkey, all that combined is what makes it so exciting as the next step in an established artist’s career. It’s a gift of surprise in a cinematic landscape that can feel like it is serving
up so much of the same sometimes. It’s a movie that understands the darkness we battle while refusing
to give up on keeping a tender heart. Which sounds a lot… like life.

As far as horror goes, which The Monkey has plenty of, Perkins is not leaving it behind even making those
feel-bad kinds of movies isn’t resonating with him right now.

Horror, he says, is probably what will be packed into the time capsule of humanity so that “in a billion years” the aliens can find it and see “what humans couldn’t deal with.” It’s the genre that accepts that our world is filled with things we won’t and can’t understand. It is filled with unimaginable cruelties inflicted for no reason, and it is often defined by the power of the will to survive in the face of such cruelty. It contains terror, but it can also contain magic. It is also free to be purposefully ridiculous and hyperbolic. Realism is not the currency here. Imagination is, and with The Monkey, Perkins is imagining in a more fun way than ever before.

“I think the more movies I make and the more things I work on, the more tangibly aware you are sort of
the artifice of things. None of this is that big a deal,” says Perkins. “Making movies is not that significant,
compared to what most people in the world are faced with on a day to day basis. God forbid. I mean the
ability to mount a movie is like borderline foolishness in the context of the world, so I think that when
one gets to a certain place with that I think you have to just smile more than not, and it feels like this
movie does that.”

Osgood Perkins / Writer, Director

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