The Monkey | Trailer for Stephen King adaptation, from Longlegs director

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Riding high on the momentum of Longlegs, here’s a trailer for director Osgood Perkins’ follow-up, The Monkey, based on Stephen King’s writing.

While you shouldn’t get your hopes up regarding the content of Neon’s recently-released teaser for The Monkey – it’s certainly not a long one! – it’s worthy of report all the same given that the film has been flying somewhat under the radar for a while now. It’s a project that we haven’t yet covered yet but given the success of Neon latest horror thriller, Longlegs, Neon has elected to use that forward momentum to highlight its upcoming take on the Stephen King short story.

The teaser shows very little in the way of footage, instead focusing on highlighting the quality of personnel involved in the production. Behind the camera you’ve got Longlegs directer Oz Perkins, once again working with Neon following the success of Longlegs, which has recently surpassed Parasite to become Neon’s highest-grossing title ever.

The original King short story focuses on ‘twins Bill and Hal, both played by James, whose discovery of their dad’s monkey toy in the attic leads to a string of grisly deaths.’

So there’s a double dose of Theo James, the recent lead of Netflix’s The Gentlemen series. He’s supported by Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell and Sarah Levy. If all of that isn’t interesting enough, then Perkins’ reveal that the film will veer far from Longlegs’ dark and bleak tone into something more comedic is also worth a mention.

“It’s feeling more like an old John Landis movie or a Joe Dante movie or a Robert Zemeckis movie,” the filmmaker said a while ago to The Hollywood Reporter. “I saw an opportunity to make a wry, absurdist comedy about death …. At the end of the day, if you want to reduce it, it’s the haunted toy or evil toy subgenre, and I couldn’t imagine doing a serious one of those. To me, it rang utterly false to approach it that way, so I just went in the other direction.”

The film releases in February of 2025. Here’s the brief teaser below.

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