Stephen King's The Monkey Director Teases a Surprising Tone for the Adaptation

Osgood Perkins hypes his approach to the iconic short story.

By Jenna Anderson

The tapestry of Stephen King adaptations is still being added to, with a number of movies and television shows showcasing his macabre stories. This includes a film adaptation of The Monkey, which will be the latest feature from Longlegs director Osgood Perkins, and it sounds like he is bringing a unique sensibility to the adaptation. During a recent appearance on Bloody Disgusting's Boo Crew Podcast, Perkins compared the tone of The Monkey to a '80s-'90s horror movie on "acid."

"It's gonna feel more like Misery or Creepshow or Gremlins or American Werewolf," Perkins revealed. "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."

"For me, ideally it's the movie that kids and their parents wanna go see together," Perkins continued. "People blow up, people explode; it's very extreme but it's very funny. It's very father-son redemption, it's very touching, it's very nostalgic, it's very Stephen King. The fact that I've had his seal of approval from the top, given the fact that I've really invented a new thing, is exciting. The success we've had with Longlegs has been astonishing and The Monkey being a completely different movie, a completely different movie in every possible way, is really exciting to me to see what's gonna happen."

What Is The Monkey About?

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.

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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 does not currently have a release date.

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