Oz Perkins Returns Stephen King To The Cornball Grindhouse With The Monkey

Stephen King’s short stories, like his longer work, span variously balanced combinations of playfulness and dread. For every creeping nightmare, there’s a dirty knock-knock joke delivered by someone’s Mainer grandpa. This fusion came to its natural head with King and George Romero’s EC Comics homage Creepshow, but in the decades since, the cultural conception of King’s work has become more stately, more hallowed. Intellectual property to be honored and arm-wrestled over. But with his adaptation of The Monkey, filmmaker Oz Perkins takes Stephen King back to the cornball grindhouse—far sleazier, sillier, and juicier than the dreadful source.

These takes only share a few elements: A dad named Hal, father-son rifts, the state of Maine, and a wind-up monkey whose percussion directly leads to someone’s life coming to an end. But even if the tonal and narrative distance between King’s fable of creeping dread and Perkins’ amusement park ride of a bloodbath seems as wide as the space between cymbals held by a stuffed monkey, they make a similar sound when clanging together. As outlandish as each version may be, they reflect their creators’ outlook on that which its title toy brings: unpredictable, unstoppable death.

Originally published in the porno magazine Gallery, back when they did things like that, “The Monkey” short story got a makeover half a decade later for one of King’s best collections, 1985’s Skeleton Crew. Sitting alongside The Mist, “The Raft,” and “The Jaunt,” “The Monkey” is a sweaty-palmed ode to fatherly fear and guilt, written when King’s oldest was 10 and his sons were eight and three. King, writing it the same year that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining made Jack Torrance’s addiction and antagonism towards his family irredeemable, further delved into a dad on the brink of ruin.

In the short story, Hal navigates dense flashbacks and present-day horror after rediscovering the cursed monkey he threw down a well when he was a child. Taking it out of his childhood home’s attic in the aftermath of his aunt’s death, he worries endlessly that the toy from hell will once again bang its cymbals and end the lives of his wife or young sons. As he’s confronted with this old evil, a gift from a father he never knew, he travels farther down memory lane, recalling the deaths of his childhood friend, his mother, pets—all the traumatic losses of youth for which you might blame yourself, here literally due to an evil relic and a kid falling under its spell. Each flashback gets more nasty and more intense, until the action taken in the here and now becomes inevitable.

“The Monkey” is a story of middle age and regret, of confused and wrongheaded parenting burdened by overprotective baggage. Underemployed and grim, Hal’s quickly becoming a loser, a mean loser at that, getting physical with his son and snapping at his wife. His semi-successful quest to rid his family of the monkey is also a quest to restore his relationship with his loved ones—to reassert some control over his life.

That earnestness evaporates in the hands of Perkins. The Longlegs filmmaker’s suffocating atmospheric dread finally breaks in this movie, but the light filtering through the clouds is hilariously bright, emitted by a cartoon sun laughing hysterically as it chars sunbathers to a crisp. As Katie Rife writes in her review, “The Monkey makes its farcical intentions clear from its opening scene, which takes place at a pawn shop full of treacherous-looking oddities.” The Rube Goldberg deaths following the beat of the film monkey’s drum kick off here, culminating in a delightful midnight-movie title card.

Hal (Theo James) is still a bad dad in this story, though just to one son, and still never knew his dad. But he’s also an identical twin with the bonkers Bill, a scummy maniac who’s responded to death-magic by deciding to worship the monkey. This dual role (played by Christian Convery when the twins are children, because the more chronological film uses a time jump) is just one sign of the film’s goofy tone. Another is Perkins casting himself as the young boys’ sideburned swinger uncle, who’s quickly trampled to death by horses in the film’s best gag.

Killing himself off for laughs is indicative of Perkins’ blackened, bitter humor of acceptance, which is the main through line of The Monkey. Perkins tweaks mortality’s nose with grim deadpan (“Everybody dies. That’s life,” says Hal and Bill’s mom, not too long before she also kicks the bucket) and goopy physical comedy (at least a couple heads burst like water balloons). Death isn’t just random and tragic in The Monkey, but outrageous, inevitable, and incessantly following one guy around. You don’t have to strain your eyes to see how Perkins—whose mother died aboard American Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11 almost nine years to the day that he lost his father Anthony to AIDS-related complications—fits himself into the material. How do you cope when death seems to always be nipping at your heels? You just have to laugh.

King may have been worried that his short fuse might ruin his kids, or that the demons in his closet might tear his family apart, which is why there’s a chance in “The Monkey” of preventing the beast’s percussive death knell. The finale, where Hal drops the Monkey into the deepest part of a lake, then rows for his life, chased by a nightmarish storm (featuring a monkey-shaped cloud at that), confirms that The Monkey is something elemental, distinct from humanity. It’s not just a messenger or harbinger of death that seduces weak people to enable its killing, like in The Monkey. Rather, it is a black hole of life, only sated by being sunk into a lake filled with small fish lives unwittingly sacrificed to its ravenous cymbals. In dissociating the toy from the people around it, King finds optimism even in the short story’s murky ending.

For Perkins, The Monkey is nothing without stupid and spiteful people there to use it. (Toy monkeys don’t kill people, people do.) As the toy changes hands, a town is torn asunder—and the population is, at best, unfazed by their quickly dwindling number. That’s definitely a meaner take on the material, one that fits right in with the glib kills. The short story is full of good intentions and damaged people. The film is full of morons and freaks, killed off in equally moronic and freaky ways. At its heart are brothers who offer extreme versions of those traumatized by death: shut-off isolation and leaned-in murderous madness. You can either fear death deeply, down in the pit of your stomach, or embrace it as the final punch line of life. As Hal and his son drive off with the monkey, they haven’t solved or fixed anything. But they’ve accepted their situation, and are in it together.

When the film more explicitly attempts to divert course back towards more serious discussions of family—especially with narration that can’t hold a candle to King’s compelling prose—it clashes badly with the aloof and bloody set pieces that make up the meat of the movie. All of Perkins’ thematic observations are contained in the convoluted ways in which people are removed from this mortal coil. Pretending like he’s spent even a King short story’s worth of time on character gets in the way of how well Perkins warps the material towards his own ends.

Start with: The book. Its 30-odd pages of tension, filtered through the bad knees and short temper of a stressed-out dad, fly by. The world-building and back-and-forth timeline are so effortlessly engrossing, it’s hard to realize how immersed you are until you’re worried that Hal’s kid is going to be run down in a parking lot. That, along with its intense, heroic ending, form a perfectly admirable bubble for the film version to burst. Not even close to capturing the realistic emotions or relationships of the story, The Monkey instead delights in taking its central gimmick to ridiculous ends. It’s very funny, perfect for the horror-movie crowd that already loves to laugh in the face of death. It’s also so tellingly different from King’s work that you can’t help but start analyzing the differences after wiping the blood spray off your face. This added bit of nerdy fun benefits from having the original fresh in your mind.

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