Stephen King’s The Monkey From Longlegs Director Teaser Debuts

Neon Pictures has released a new teaser for The Monkey, an upcoming film based on the award-winning short story by Stephen King, which centers on an evil, cymbal-banging monkey toy. The story originally appeared in Gallery magazine in 1980, and was reworked dramatically when it was published in King’s Skeleton Crew story collection five years later. The iconic image of the monkey was used on the cover of Skeleton Crew and has been revisited throughout King’s career, notably on the poster and promotional imagery from the 1988 film Monkey Shines, which is not based on The Monkey and wasn’t as well-loved.

The film is set to be written and directed by Longlegs‘s Osgood Perkins, who previously said that they’re intentionally going for an ’80s/’90s throwback feel. You can see the trailer below.

“It’s gonna feel more like Misery or Creepshow or Gremlins or American Werewolf,” Perkins explained back in June. “It couldn’t be less like Longlegs. To me, if you’re gonna make a movie about a toy monkey, you can be serious about it. But so much of King is funny and nostalgic feeling. So we tried to make a movie that felt a little bit more like something from the late ’80s – ’90s. It’s sorta like, if Robert Zemeckis had just like a little bit of acid and made a Stephen King picture about a monkey toy.”

Here’s the movie’s synopsis: 

In The Monkey, when twin brothers Hal and Bill discover their father’s old monkey toy in the attic, a series of gruesome deaths starts occurring all around them. The brothers decide to throw the monkey away and move on with their lives, growing apart over the years. But when the mysterious deaths begin again, the brothers must reunite to find a way to destroy the monkey for good before it takes the lives of everyone close to them. The Monkey was originally published in Gallery magazine in 1980, before being revised and reprinted in the 1985 collection Skeleton Crew.

The cast of The Monkey includes Theo James (The White Lotus), Tatiana Maslany (She–Hulk: Attorney at Law), Elijah Wood (The Lord Of The Rings), Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth), Colin O’Brien (Wonka), Rohan Campbell (The Hardy Boys) and Sarah Levy (Schitt’s Creek). Producers on The Monkey also include Michael Clear (M3GAN), Brian Kavanaugh-Jones (Insidious), and Chris Ferguson (Child’s Play). Executive producers include Fred Berger (La La Land), Peter Luo and Nancy Xu, and John Friedberg (Greenland).

The Monkey will be in theaters on February 21.