As a means of spoiler-avoidance, I do my best to avoid watching trailers before seeing a new movie – but conversely, I like to go back and check them out post-screening to see how the film is being marketed. When I recently did this with Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, something caught my eye, and I felt compelled to ask the writer/director about it earlier this month when I had the chance to interview him during the new Stephen King adaptation’s virtual press day.
In the trailer, there is a brief shot of a massive scorpion crawling into a mug, and I realized that it’s not featured in the final cut of the film. Sitting alongside with The Monkey star Theo James (as featured in the video at the top of this article), Perkins explained that the arthropod is very real and was in a scene that simply ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. Said Perkins,
That's a deleted moment that just didn't fit in the movie. It didn't quite play. It's a real scorpion. He was paid very, very well. He had an entourage. They were really cruel scorpions [laugh]. But he did his thing and we rooted and cheered for him. He made his way into the cup of hot cocoa, and we cut the scene. Poor bastard.
I love the image that this conjures of a film crew enthusiastically watching a deadly scorpion hit its marks and erupt in celebration when Perkins called “cut.”
So where did the scene fit in the film? I had assumed it was part of the second act montage that sees the titular monkey slaughtering the citizens of Casco, Maine, but the writer/director corrected me and explained that the scorpion scene was originally in the first act of the movie with young Hal and young Bill (played by Christian Convery). Perkins explained,
It was young Hal making a hot chocolate for his brother and then sort of seeing the scorpion and knocking it over before he drinks it.
This presumably would have fit in with young Hal’s fantasizing about murdering his twin brother, which we get a taste of in the finished cut of The Monkey with the scene where Bill gets a bowling ball dropped on his face while he is sleeping. So why isn’t it featured in the film? Osgood Perkins and Theo James had a quick dialogue about that:
Osgood Perkins: It wasn’t great.
Theo James: It was great!
Osgood Perkins: It's not in the movie anymore. It's not great.
Also starring Tatiana Maslany, Colin O’Brien, Sarah Lev, Rohan Campbell, Elijah Wood, and Adam Scott in addition to Theo James and Christian Convery, The Monkey arrived in theaters this past weekend on a big wave of positive buzz and quickly became a success with its second place finish at the box office. If you’ve already seen it, I can personally attest that it’s even better the second time you watch, so you may want to make it a part of your plans in the coming days (and perhaps you can even pick up the awesome Monkey popcorn bucket exclusively at AMC Theatre locations)
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