As a genre fanatic, I can’t wait for a lot of the upcoming horror movies set to hit the 2025 movie schedule, from the live-action Until Dawn to Ryan Coogler’s vampire movie and beyond. One of my more anticipated releases is Longlegs director Oz Perkins’ upcoming Stephen King project, the longform adaptation The Monkey. And somehow the filmmaker’s latest thoughts on the film have boosted my interest even higher.
Perkins and The Monkey star Theo James talked to EW about going in an arguably unexpected creative direction with the movie when expanding it from its roots as a short story later published in the Skeleton Crew anthology. Because despite being a movie about a dinky monkey-and-drum toy that causes unavoidable tragedies and destruction for the twin boys who find it amongst their dead father's keepsakes, it’s kinda sorta maybe also funny?
Though an attempt to bring The Monkey to the big screen was already in the works with James Wan's Atomic Monster, it was Oz Perkins' outside-the-box idea that everyone behind the scenes got on board with, at least after getting used to it. According to the director:
What if it's a comedy? Here's this monkey that doesn't do anything. It's not M3GAN. It doesn't attack. It's evil just in its existence. Things happen around it for no better reason than they do. Its presence makes people die in insane ways.
Okay, I'm definitely on board with that concept, especially since the red band teaser trailer that came out around Halloween definitely had a darkly comedic feel to it that I wasn't entirely sure was intentional or not. But yes, indeed, that was the case, and Perkins reflected on his own personal history in explaining his genre-bending approach:
I've had people die in truly, deeply insane ways. Everybody dies whether there's a monkey or not. What if you could do this with a smile — process the fact that everybody dies? And what an insane, surrealist notion, dude! You will die; we'll all die. That's crazy shit. To do that as a comedy felt very apropos.
As many are aware, the filmmaker's father is legendary actor and Psycho star Anthony Perkins, who passed away in 1992 from AIDS-related pneumonia after keeping his ailments private for years. His mother, actress and photographer Berry Berenson, was one of the victims onboard American Airlines Flight 11 when it was hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower on September 11, 2001.
There's nothing inherently comedic about either of those circumstances, obviously. But Perkins can appreciate the unique nature of the details and his connection to them, and can use that feeling as a building block for turning The Monkey from a freaky short into a multi-layered movie that can meld pitch-black laughs with a heartfelt exploration of family dynamics across different timelines. I guess one could try to say that about 2017's IT: Chapter One and 2019's IT: Chapter Two, but this still sounds like it's on a different wavelength.
In the interview, Perkins addresses a particular hibachi grill scene sparked from a memory from his own past, which sounds like it goes gloriously over the top, with inspirations from both Death Becomes Her and An American Werewolf in London. As he put it:
Without saying what happens, it's ridiculous, and it's funny. The kids in the movie shit talk all the time. My 15-year-old daughter says fuck every second word. That's just a way of saying that the design of all of it is meant to cause a smile to appear on your face.
Here's hoping the smiles that show up on audience members' faces are more joyous and less nightmarish than the garish grin on this cursed toy. Check out the aforementioned teaser trailer below!
If anything, The Monkey's dark comedy tones sound more reminiscent of Creepshow's humor-heightened horrors, but that wasn't exactly a full-length adaptation of King's work, since only two of the stories in his screenplay were based on his works. And even that movie fell more in line with EC Comics' brand of humor over more modern sensibilities, so I still think The Monkey sounds like nothing else before it where live-action King is concerned.
The Monkey is set to cause havoc in theaters, and everywhere else it shows up, on February 21, 2025.
