Rather than slavishly copy Stephen King’s story, writer-director Osgood Perkins turns The Monkey into a deeply personal black comedy.
NB: The following contains spoilers for The Monkey.
Stephen King is surely one of the most widely-adapted novelists of the 20th century. The author’s work is such a go-to for filmmakers that some stories have been adapted more than once: Carrie, The Shining and The Dead Zone among them. This year, Edgar Wright has his own version of King’s dystopian thriller The Running Man barrelling into cinemas.
Adapting a piece of literature into a movie or TV show isn’t about simply taking a series of described events and figuring out how to stage them in front of a camera, however. It’s a process that involves choosing which parts of the story to amplify and which to leave out; deciding what themes ought to be emphasised or even reworked to suit the tastes of the filmmaker or the social mores of the times.
Carrie (1976) was filtered through the stylistically baroque and blackly humorous lens of its director, Brian De Palma. With The Shining (1980) Stanley Kubrick dialed down the supernatural and instead made a stark horror about humanity’s innate capacity for cruelty and violence; it’s strongly implied that protagonist Jack Torrence is a mean, abusive sonofabitch before he even sets foot in the Overlook. King himself may have been vocal about his dislike of Kubrick’s film, but few could deny that the director didn’t have a unique angle on the material.
It’s when filmmakers fail to find a personal approach that adaptations fall flat. Neither adaptation of Firestarter is a classic; not because there’s anything particularly bad about the source novel, but because both versions of it – one released in 1984, the other in 2022 – treat it as a generic horror about people with telekinetic powers. There’s no attempt to draw out an original tone or comment on the human condition that might separate it from other films of its type.
Similarly, subsequent adaptations of Carrie (in 2013, directed by Kimberley Pierce) and The Shining (the latter as a Stephen King-approved TV mini-series in 1997) both lacked the distinct style of their earlier counterparts and failed to re-tell their stories in a fresher, contemporary light.
Not so with this year’s The Monkey, writer-director Osgood Perkins’ take on a King short story first published in 1980. It takes the bare bones of the story and premise – that of twin brothers seemingly cursed by a wind-up toy – and turns it into something entirely personal and unique to Perkins. Where the source is stark and ominous, Perkins’ version is wild and darkly comic. It’s ‘cursed object’ horror as an absurdist fable about the inevitability of death.
Although based on material by King, The Monkey becomes as rooted in Perkins’ own history as the films that have originated entirely from his own imagination – The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Gretel & Hansel, and his 2024 sleeper hit, Longlegs. Tellingly, perhaps, Osgood didn’t seek out King’s story to adapt; instead, it was offered to him by its producers. Rather than treat it as some untouchable, sacred text, he found a way to turn it to his style and make it echo his own experiences.
As Perkins has discussed openly in interviews, tragedies in his personal life frequently inform his work. His father, actor Anthony Perkins, who became a horror legend thanks to his turn as Norman Bates in Psycho, died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Growing up, Osgood didn’t know how ill his father was; the truth was kept from him by his mother, the model and actor Berry Berenson, who also helped Anthony keep his homosexuality out of the press for much of his life.
Less than a decade after Osgood’s father passed, tragedy struck again; on the 11th September 2001, his mother was aboard one of the hijacked planes that struck the World Trade Center.
“I wouldn’t know how to do [The Monkey] if I hadn’t sometimes in my life felt cursed,” Perkins told GQ earlier this year. “If I hadn’t been like, “Oh, my dad died like this, and then nine years later, my mom dies like this.” It’s kind of like, Oh, that’s really fucked, I’ve obviously been targeted by the universe to suffer. Most people don’t get battered like this. So once that’s been sort of personalised, then you’re able to kind of process it, digest it, and shit it out. Then you’re in a pretty limber place from which you can create something universal. It goes from the personal to the universal.”
Perkins therefore took The Monkey and refashioned it into a bleakly humorous tale of a family malfunctioning under the stress of loss and grief. Twin brothers Hal and Bill’s father walked out of them suddenly years earlier; little do they know that he was trying to get rid of the titular monkey – a demonic toy that, when activated with the turn of a chunky metal key, somehow causes the death of someone nearby. The victim will be random, and their demise will be spectacularly unpleasant.
As in so many horror stories – see also The Babadook – the monkey keeps coming back, despite repeated efforts to get rid of it. Perhaps inflamed by their father’s absence, Hal and Bill (both superbly played as kids by Christian Convery) don’t get on, with Bill mercilessly teasing his quieter, bespectacled sibling. Their enmity is only worsened as more people around them meet violent ends – Bill blames Hal for the death of one family member in particular.
The strain continues well into adulthood, when the monkey emerges yet again and threatens the lives of the now grown-up Bill (Theo James, also playing Hal) and his estranged teenage son, Petey (Colin O’Brien). Throughout, Perkins plays on both the absurdity and tragedy of the brothers’ situation: how fearful and angry they are over something that is almost entirely out of their control.
Beneath all the outlandish deaths – and boy are they outlandish, like a caffeinated take on The Omen – The Monkey offers a unique perspective on the grieving process, and how the ways we react to the loss of a loved one – Hal has turned in on himself, while Bill has become consumed by rage and bitterness towards his sibling. As Perkins told Rue Morgue magazine, writing The Monkey allowed him to “make it autobiographical… a story about my life, and my relationship with my brother, and the loss of my mom. And I can do that from a distance, with a smile.”
Continuing on the same subject in a conversation with Sci-Fi Now, Perkins said that neither brother is based on his younger brother, Elvis; instead, they serve as facets of his own personality and his own feelings about the loss of his parents. “The truth of it is that both Hal and Bill are me,” he said. “It’s all my good aspects and all my bad aspects. I didn’t write about my brother. I didn’t assign my brother’s characteristics to either character. Both characters are my Jekyll and Hyde.”
Quentin Tarantino once said something to the effect that good screenwriting should have a confessional element to it; that a writer should put enough of themselves into their work that they almost feel a hint of embarrassment when it’s handed off for someone to read. Perkins certainly does this with The Monkey; far from a straight adaptation, it drastically shifts the tone of King’s tale, while at the same time remaining true to its spirit. King himself approved; he described Perkins’ febrile rendition as “batshit insane.”
“As someone who has indulged in batshittery from time to time,” he wrote on social media, “I say that with admiration.”
Incredibly, Perkins wrote and shot The Monkey with relative speed; in his interview with GQ, he explained that it was made between Longlegs and his next film, Keeper, with all of them committed to film in the space of about 15 months. That urgency shows in the final cut: it’s a rave of a film, its events and gallows humour hurtling out of the screen like some blurted-out admission. Far from being just one more in a long line of Stephen King adaptations, The Monkey becomes the springboard for a bold and strangely moving dive into Perkins’ own psyche. Other horror screenwriters could certainly learn a thing or too from its Perkins’ approach – even if they’d struggle to match the madcap outrageousness of his death sequences.
