The rules are simple: the monkey does not take requests. You turn the key, and then you take a chance on what happens next.
If this all sounds like the height of absurdity, a little monkey with a drum that rains hell down on and around its chosen stewards, Perkins agrees with you. And the story elements taken together provided the perfect avenue for the director to change gears when it came to mood. Because a thing about Perkins is that, even if the bulk of his filmography does not wave this attribute around like a flag, he is very funny. He’s quick on his feet, adept with a witty turn of phrase. While working on his previous movie, Longlegs, he and cinematographer Andres Arochi talked about Perkins finally focusing a script on humor; he wanted Oz to write a comedy.
In celebration of one of The Monkey, the best horror-comedy movies of 2025, The Koalition spoke to Perkins and actor Theo James to learn more about the process and psychology of The Monkey, death, becoming identical twins on a bloody collision course, and more.
“I feel like increasingly in the movies I’ve made, it’s been something to make horror movies that scare people and have people on edge and freak people out,” says the director. “I feel like the older I get, maybe, and the older the world gets, that a certain levity and kind of commentary on how things are is maybe a little more interesting and a little bit more textured and smarter, so the comedy of this makes the whole thing feel fuller to me.”
The two genres, horror and comedy, are of course close companions. It’s a process of patient buildup and release; only the release comes from screams instead of belly laughs. The bits are the scares, and deploying them at just the right moment—like a good joke—is what keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat. Horror and comedy are also united when it comes to the commentary texture that Perkins is compelled by. There’s so much fun in [Stephen King’s stories], and there’s so much real stuff being talked about in a way that is scary and disturbing, but he always does it with this sense of humor,” James explains. “I think what Oz pulled out of it in such a big way was that sense of humor, that dark humor, which he has in spades.”
While horror and its fans have always been good to Perkins as a filmmaker, his family’s history makes for something of a path predetermined with the director going into the family business. But as he’s gained more experience and gotten older, the filmmaker says he feels called by something a little bit different right now. “I think I kind of started making horror movies—I don’t want to say by default—but sort of because of my dad, and it felt like something I would do. And there were horror movies I really loved, so I did it a few times, and it’s not that I don’t like it; it’s just the honest truth is I don’t go for horror, especially new ones. I go for old movies, like Eyes Without A Face or Don’t Look Now,” explains Perkins, who cites madcap movies like Death Becomes Her and Malignant—which the director calls “fucking funny” and is helmed by his producer Wan—as tonal core texts for The Monkey.
“The monkey himself—or is it a her? Or is it no gender at all? Probably the latter,” says James, who plays the grown versions of Hal and Bill. “This monkey has a Malvolian force behind it, a kind of ability to cause death and carnage around it at any turn. It also has a very strange and opaque way of granting wishes, wishes of death. The monkey is a parable for mortality, and death is chasing or looming over us at all times. We can’t outrun it. We all kind of get there in the end, but the thing about humanity—perhaps it’s a blessing, or is it a curse?—is that we think for most of our relative youth that death doesn’t exist in our zeitgeist, but it’s been there since the day we were born. So, it’s how you deal with the specter of death and what that does to a person.”
James even questions whether the monkey is literally there at all or if it’s just a manifestation of the Shelburn family trauma, a symbol for the cycle of pain or dysfunction they’re too immobilized by to break, no matter what further damage it perpetuates in the process. It’s not a toy; never call it a toy. But what the monkey contains is vast. On the one hand, it is an emotionless merchant of death that seems to function like a bingo ball hopper when it comes to picking victims.
“I think the appeal for me about the monkey was that it was an inert entity like a statue, like a deity, like an idol, like a god, and that he just so happens to be there when stuff goes sideways. I think if it’s a metaphor for anything, it’s just a metaphor for the natural occurrence of things. People die; sometimes people die in insane ways, sometimes people die in really normal ways, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s horrible, and the monkey kind of just beholds it, said Perkins.”
Perkin continued, “I like the passive quality. There was something really rich and honest about that. Yes, the other side is a slight metaphorical sense of the shadow of the monkey on your back, where, in a way, the monkey doesn’t need to exist. Potentially there’s the idea that death is happening, and that’s just life, and that’s kind of the thesis of the film. It is an emblem of memory and trauma, how you deal with it, and how to represent someone who’s kind of come to terms with it. Bill, on the other hand, is deeply afraid of it, and he’s desperately seeking immortality.”
“It becomes about the people around the monkey. It becomes about how everyone’s sort of dealing with this inevitable, immovable fact that everybody dies. Like Theo said, there are a lot of ways to sort of approach that. There are a lot of ways some people are really afraid of death. Some people don’t think about it, some people obsess about it, some people welcome it, and some cultures celebrate it. Cultures like ours make it like it doesn’t exist or like it’s something just inherently negative. I think it just sort of becomes just some sort of idol to living and dying, and then you watch the people around it sort of cope with that fact,” Perkins concluded.
Casting a lead with a very serious jaw and seriously good looks for the purposes of subverting them in The Monkey was what led Perkins to tapping James for the grown-up Shelburn twins. James has broadened his profile in more recent years with acerbic series like The Gentlemen and White Lotus, but he rose to prominence playing very earnest roles in projects like Downtown Abbey and the Divergent franchise. Getting to embody two emotionally disparate characters in The Monkey gave the actor space to play with both types.
“Hal is very internal,” says James. “I always like performances where the detail is in the minutia. You read it through the eyes, and Hal has been diminished by the trauma and death that’s surrounded him. But Bill is the opposite. He wears kind of gender-fluid clothes. He doesn’t give a shit about how society views him. He projects himself with an aura of confidence and mania.”
James isn’t quite the expected choice to play the nervous Hal or the unhinged Bill, but the choice being counterintuitive is what appealed to Perkins. “I thought he was really right for it, because I wanted someone who isn’t sort of typically known for being a comic but I think is funny,” explains the writer-director, who first got to know James during the peak COVID era when Perkins was attached to produce and showrun a series that James was part of, but it never got off the ground. “I thought his persona as a leading man would be fun to undermine with this stuttering every man in Hal. Then as Bill, he is able to embody more of the whacked-out tough guy. It’s almost a kind of Tyler Durden-ish vibe. The characters are so different from what Theo normally does. I think it’s exciting.”
James, too, was eager to work with Perkins after their first project ended up shelved. At that time, the actor watched Perkins’ entire filmography to get steeped in his work, and James loved what he found. “I thought particularly since his first movie he has an inky black heart with humor to it, which I loved,” James recalls. “The stakes in his movies feel really complex and dark, but there’s a tinge of old cinematic glory to it—the old days of cinema, which I loved.”
They have a timeless quality that courts horror fans of any stripe, but they feel at home among prestigious genre offerings that arrived in the wake of sensations like The Witch and Goodnight, Mommy. The Monkey, on the other hand, is an adaptation with a blatantly pop sensibility. Where Perkins’ prior work could fairly be described as brooding, The Monkey is bombastic. The director veered into more jump scares with Longlegs, and he has floored it all the way to exploding bodies with his latest.
“He always pitches it as Gremlins meets a spice of Hereditary, and I think that’s quite right,” says James. “It’s a little bit of a change for Oz, because it’s highly comedic. It’s a very funny movie. From the very beginning, when he showed me what he was doing, I thought it was heartfelt and warm and terrifying, but also really funny.” Another word the actor uses is “Spielbergian” in regard to “its family dynamic, its cinematic scope,” which is a very intentional reference for Perkins in The Monkey.
Even in casting James, Perkins wanted to invoke an older Hollywood leading man, a hero from the days of Landis. “The updated version of that is you hire someone who is actually kind of twerpy,” says Perkins. “That twerpy leading man thing is also great, but it felt more classical to have a strong-jawed leading man in this movie to add to the overall bold Hollywood effect that we were trying for.” Where Perkins’ films operate often in the negative space between what characters say, The Monkey wears its intentions on its little chimpanzee sleeve. Sensitive young Hal is the nerdy-looking boy with glasses; Bill the bully has that 1990s center-parted hair and wears a black button-up with flames on it you might see at Hot Topic.
“Hal is operating from a place of kind of love and understanding. He’s the moral compass for the film, whereas Bill is someone who came out of the womb first and as a result he is deeply jealous of his brother in a kind of idle way that there’s another entity that would love his mother as much as he does. So, his jealousy comes from the fact he has to share his mother, and as a result, everything about his being and his jealousy and his hatred for his brother comes from a standpoint of not being loved enough by his mother. That sounds quite like how therapists talk, but in a way there’s a truth to that, and you kind of have to find those realities within a movie. Even a fun, bombastic one like that, you have to find those kinds of kernels of truth,” said James.
As far as bombastic horror goes, which The Monkey has plenty of, Perkins is not leaving it behind, even making those feel-bad kinds of movies isn’t resonating with him right now. Horror, he says, is probably what will be packed into the time capsule of humanity so that “in a billion years” the aliens can find it and see “what humans couldn’t deal with.” It’s the genre that accepts that our world is filled with things we won’t and can’t understand. It is filled with unimaginable cruelties inflicted for no reason, and it is often defined by the power of the will to survive in the face of such cruelty. It contains terror, but it can also contain magic. It is also free to be purposefully ridiculous and hyperbolic.
Realism is not the currency here. Imagination is, and with The Monkey, Perkins is imagining in a more fun way than ever before. “I think the more movies I make and the more things I work on, the more tangibly aware you are of sort of the artifice of things. None of this is that big a deal,” says Perkins. “Making movies is not that significant, compared to what most people in the world are faced with on a day-to-day basis. God forbid. I mean, the ability to mount a movie is like borderline foolishness in the context of the world, so I think that when one gets to a certain place with that, I think you have to just smile more than not, and it feels like this movie does that.”
The Monkey is now in theaters. To learn more about the movie, check out our full interview in the video above and our spoiler review of the movie.
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