Based on the 1980 short story of the same name by Stephen King, The Monkey follows a man named Hal Shelburn, who is terrorized by a cymbal-banging monkey that rains misfortune down on whoever possesses it. Hal first found the object among his father’s belongings in a storage closet, and after the discovery, he and his twin brother Bill start losing loved ones to tragic accidents. A series of outrageous deaths tears their family apart, resulting in anger, obsession, and isolation. Believing the monkey is connected to the catastrophes, Hal throws it in a dry well, but it resurfaces somehow twenty-five years later to haunt Hal and Bill again. The monkey begins a new killing spree, forcing the estranged brothers to confront the cursed toy. In order to break the curse, Hal teams up with his son to try and dispose of it once and for all, despite his brother’s wishes, who has his own motives.
To celebrate one of the best horror-comedy movies of 2025, The Koalition spoke to cinematographer Nico Aguilar to learn how he used visuals to connect to the emotions of The Monkey, lighting the twins differently, creating the monkey’s world, comparing Perkins to Scorsese, and more.
Perkins and his team wanted to telegraph the themes and feelings of the film using some easily identifiable tropes born out of those teen cinema staples of the 80s and 90s, and Aguilar boils the aesthetic directive of the movie down to one concept: Accessible.
“The Monkey was always meant to be commercially accessible versus being a cult film or independent or an art house film,” says Aguilar. “It’s from a Stephen King novel. We wanted the film to be accessible. We wanted people to like it, but we also wanted to make it tasteful, and we wanted to make it interesting and new.”
“I didn’t want to fall into any visual tropes or any sort of visual rules with The Monkey. I wanted the film to be accessible and to sort of be a thing of its own. That was really the goal. What I mean by that is I try to just choose the colors, the contrast and the style based on what the story and the scene needed versus trying to emulate another story or try to impose a style from an art house film. That was never the intention, the intention was always to support the story honestly. If I was going to say it simply, in my view, we did take big swings.”
“We used 1970s lenses, we used zooms, and we referenced 1970s and 80s filmmakers, but never with the intention to copy and paste. It was just to sort of take what we needed to communicate the story, and whenever it was needed, we didn’t impose it. We would just use something else. That was our thought behind it.”
So what does accessible mean in terms of a film’s visual language? Aguilar explains, “It’s about really making the language of the camera through color and camera movement and composition really be as emotive as possible and as close to the emotion of the scene as possible. Because then the audience gets it like that.”
“Art house films usually use composition and color in a way that’s kind of complex, and sometimes you need to sort of think about why they are choosing something in a certain way—and when you realize it, it’s brilliant! But in The Monkey, first and foremost, the audience needs to understand what you are trying to convey as quickly as possible, and that, to me, is accessibility.”
Aguilar did not want the world of The Monkey to feel ordinary. He wanted it to feel like “the monkey’s world,” and in a world where a monkey with a wind-up key in its back can kill people, that means stylizing to take it beyond an environment that feels routine. Imported vintage lenses from the 1970s were selected, and in pre-production, reduced-size sets were built to light actors and stand-ins so Aguilar could build a color palette for the film with colorist Bryan Smaller, based on what the production design would actually be. Aguilar even broke the film down into a visual arc in which he laid out how the types of lenses and the colors would change based on the emotional evolution of the main characters.
“I wanted to sort of meld the monkey world and the characters all in one. That’s why we start the film with spherical lenses from the 70s.That, to me, is like the world isn’t the monkeys. It hasn’t really come out that much then. He’s doing a few killings but not as aggressively as later in the story. That’s why we chose these lenses for when they’re kids and then when they’re adults.”
“The opening sequence sets the tone to a certain extent, but that scene is of its own sort of section because it’s the dad, and we don’t really get the POV of the dad. It’s almost more like either the impression of the kids, the memory of the kids, the dad, or maybe it is the dad’s thing, but it’s sort of a separate thing. The way that it’s colored sort of brings out some of those green tones and some of that contrast that we later see in the film, especially in the lirer, so that was intentional. I wanted the film to not have any rules per se. I wanted it to evolve with the characters visually. There are some scenes that are dark, there are some scenes that are bright, and the main thing that dictated whether they were bright or dark was honestly the page. I wanted the page to really be the dictating thing about how the imagery was going to go.”
“We changed to these very aggressive anamorphic lenses because that’s when I wanted to show, ‘Okay, this is the time of the monkey,” but also to show that the monkey has affected the characters emotionally. Bill has completely uprooted his life for the monkey and also Hal in a different way. I wanted to show that their worlds have been affected by the monkey very, very much. Then at the end of the film, we stay anamorphic, but now we do modern anamorphic, which is a completely different look to show there has been yet another change in the monkey’s world, but also how the monkey affected the characters.”
To understand how his camera should convey the honest emotions of the characters, that meant Aguilar had to get to know their characters themselves. Color was everywhere. Neon anywhere they could make it work on screen, and every house needed to be a character unto itself. The Monkey feels like being in an amusement park where each ride takes you into a strange new over-the-top world with zany characters that reside within.
The Monkey is all about having fun, and from the get-go, it was approached as everything should be over the top and fun. The stable home that the Shelburn twins live in with their mother feels comforting and more normal, with G.I. Joe toys and Transformers scattered about—things that viewers who were kids at the same time could connect with. But when the brothers go off to live with their Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) and Uncle Chip (played by Perkins), things get demonstrably weirder.
“For the comedy to come through, the image can’t be too dark. If it’s way too dark and way too serious, then you don’t allow people the agency to not take it seriously. So, the image was always crafted in a way that allowed room for comedy to exist, and that was done very intentionally. But at the same time, I never lit it like a comedy. I’ve done another comedy before called Fool’s Paradise, which is Charlie Day’s directorial debut movie. I’m really proud of how it looks because it doesn’t look like a comedy either. It’s done in a contrasty, colorful way because I don’t think there’s a way to light comedy. I also don’t think there’s a way to live horror. I think the cinematographer should always craft images in a way that supports the story and gives room to the emotions that should be there. That means sometimes being a little brighter and a little bit darker, but always with the intention of making sure the audience feels what they should be feeling.”
“[Perkins’] original idea for Chip and Ida’s was ‘festooned with taxidermy.’” The warm wooden interiors give way to dark hallways and cool neon lights. When we go with adult Hal to visit his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) where he lives with his mom and stepdad, it’s like walking into the lamest man-cave on earth. Elijah Wood makes a brief appearance as stepparent influencer and rich jerk Ted. Even the smallest characters need totally realized spaces for themselves. Take, for example, the character of Thrasher (Rohan Campbell), who acts as an unknowing lackey for the villainous Bill. The audience only sees Thrasher at home in two quick scenes, but the residence is packed to the brim with little touches.
But the pièce de résistance in terms of sets for The Monkey was Bill’s lair, which is where the movie hits its most pop art heights. “In trying to pursue this sort of absurd Hollywood classic, there was the idea that someone was going to have to be kind of an archvillain, and Bill being an archvillain in his own mind became a kind of guiding principle for this guy. He uses a lot of terminology that’s kind of Lex Luthor-esque. He’s sort of the star of his own comic book if he could be with this weird overblown villain ego. Destroyed by the grief of losing his mother and certain that Hal was responsible for turning the monkey’s key, Bill dedicated his life to finding the monkey again as an adult to take vengeance on his estranged twin.
For the lair, it was key to avoid doing a build in a studio if possible, and the location needed to be selected around a gag where people fall through the ceiling. The team kept running into challenges, but fortunately there was an old building in the area that used to be an electrical station that powered a railway. Now it’s like an art studio, but the old-timey industrial nature made it a great fit for a Luthorian hideaway. “There’s emerald green and gold, and we got pretty crazy with it.” Within Bill’s lair, the monkey has its own throne room where he sits atop a tower of TV sets.
Both of the brothers’ worlds are built differently to represent their personalities and the kind of people they have become, balancing between isolation and warmth. “It is [brighter] and it’s warmer. The world of Bill and the lair he surrounds himself with is 80% blue-green and then 20% or less warm because the warm, to me, always represented sort of gentleness. I wanted to show that Bill still was gentle in a way. He was overwhelmed by this trauma, but he still had a gentle side, which we later see. Hal, on the other hand, is too gentle. He’s sort of lost all his agency, and he’s just given up. He’s way too gentle; that’s why most of the colors in his world are these warm tones. I really like this scene when they’re both talking on the phone, and you cut back and forth. One image is warm, and then the other one is cool. I really wanted that. I wanted, when they’re talking on the phone, to feel like they’re completely different worlds, but also emotionally, they’re coming from different worlds emotionally. They’re dealing with their trauma in a different way, and that was the whole point of choosing the colors the way I did.”
The production designer’s original sketch of the structure was eight feet tall, but it ended up towering to 26 feet in the final form. With Perkins giving the green light to his PD’s creative flights of fancy, it feels like an apt metaphor for The Monkey itself, a movie that turned away from the assurances of working with a studio to keep the vision intact and aspired to invoke influences as refined as The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and as culturally massive as Back to The Future. Just keep building. And it’s a combined feat that feels achievable for artists when they are empowered by a director in the way that Perkins lifts his people up and trusts them to do their jobs.
Aguilar describes Perkins as a “kindred spirit” to him, adding that, “Thanks to Oz and his trust in me—and he immediately trusted me fully, which was amazing—he really gave me full reign to sort of design the film visually, and I brought in wacky ideas.”
He adds that working with Perkins reminded him of his experience shooting additional scenes with Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon. Aguilar says the two directors have a similar approach to communicating the needs of a scene through the perspective of what the audience needs, instead of getting mired down in the technical details of composing a shot. Every filmmaker has their own way, of course, but in Aguilar’s experience, he sees Perkins as a director who knows how to show an idea and not just tell it—and Scorsese is pretty good company to be mentioned with.
The Monkey is now in theaters. To learn more about the look of the film, check out our interview in the video below and our interview with Perkins and Theo James.
