Stephen King’s delightfully screwed-up stories have been getting the big screen treatment since 1976, but not a single adaptation over the past 49 years looks quite like “The Monkey.” That’s likely because none of those other movies had Oz Perkins, the creative horror mastermind behind movies like the trippy Nicolas Cage-starrer “Longlegs” and the terrifying slow-burn “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” behind the camera. Perkins is clearly suited to the absurdity of the King short story, which was featured in his 1985 book “Skeleton Crew.” In the latest issue of Empire magazine, the filmmaker draws direct parallels between the story’s cursed toy and his own strange, tragic family life.
Perkins tells the outlet that “The Monkey” actually already had a “very serious script” when he joined the project, one provided by James Wan’s Atomic Monster production company. “I felt it was too serious, and I told them: ‘This doesn’t work for me,'” Perkins recalls. He decided to craft his own version of the story, highlighting the inherent comedy of a cymbal-clashing monkey that visits “Final Destination”-style kills upon whoever it meets. “The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways,” Perkins says. “So, I thought: ‘Well, I’m an expert on that. Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways.'”
Oz Perkins has endured unlikely family tragedies, too
The filmmaker says he “spent a lot of [his] life recovering from tragedy, feeling quite bad,” and wondering why his parents died in ways that seemed “inherently unfair.” Perkins is, after all, the son of acclaimed “Psycho” actor Anthony Perkins and actress and photographer Berry Berenson. The elder Perkins passed away in 1992, having kept his HIV/AIDS diagnosis a secret until his death, according to his LA Times obituary. In that same memorial piece, Anthony Perkins is quoted as having feared that he killed his own father after wishing him dead just before he had a fatal heart attack. The actor best known as Norman Bates was only 5 years old at the time.
Osgood Perkins’ mother also met a shocking fate: she was a passenger on the first plane that hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In her obituary for The Guardian, Berenson’s own works — photo work for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, plus roles in movies including “Cat People” and “Remember My Name” — are overshadowed by a long explanation of Perkins’ death. The column also makes mention of her grandmother, Elsa Schiaparelli, a surrealist Italian fashion designer who worked with Salvador Dalí (but, thankfully, was not killed in a strange way). All of this, no doubt, contributed to Perkins’ uncanny connection to King’s source material. “I’m older now and you realise this s*** happens to everyone. Everyone dies,” Perkins tells Empire. “Sometimes in their sleep, sometimes in truly insane ways, like I experienced. But everyone dies. And I thought maybe the best way to approach that insane notion is with a smile.”
“The Monkey” certainly seems poised to grin through the pain, and Perkins says that King himself has seen the new movie and “loves” it. A brand new red-band trailer also highlights the strange levity of the story’s premise. “The monkey that likes killing our family? It’s back,” Theo James’ Bill tells his brother Hal (also played by James) over the phone in the latest clips. He’s perfectly deadpan as he says: “It must be vanquished.” We also catch glimpses of some gnarly (but darkly funny) kills, from a Scooby-Doo-esque sea diver suit that harpoons someone at an antique shop to a scorpion crawling into a coffee cup. “It’s that thing of, ‘Our time is short, the world is hard, rotten things happen,” Perkins concludes. “But you have to go forward. You have to laugh. What else can you do?'”
“The Monkey” hits theaters on February 21, 2025.