“Like life.” That is what the titular object in The Monkey promises. It’s not lifelike, not with its bugging eyes and colorful clothes and drum at its lamp with drumsticks in hand. (Chimpanzees don’t dress like that and play instruments in the wild, after all.) The Monkey is like life because it promises only the unexpected, reliable chaos, laughter followed by pain, and the realization that we have no control over most of what happens in our lives. We only have the ability to choose how we react when something happens.
Well. We also have the choice to turn the key or not, and no one should ever, ever turn the key. The Monkey is the latest genre experience from writer and director Osgood Perkins, most recently famous for helming the staggeringly successful Longlegs of 2024, but known for years as a singular, uncompromising stylist in the horror genre. With horror as his canvas, Perkins paints scenes of dread replete with terrible places and haunting characters that feel like shared hallucinations experienced by audiences. While Perkins’ films are notably often quiet, he knows how to puncture the silence with a blade as sharp as the devil himself.
With The Monkey, longtime fans of the filmmaker will be treated to a Perkins work unlike any other that has preceded it. This master of the subtle conveyance comes out of the shadows with a cartoon hammer in his latest film, and while the writer-director has always had a sense of humor about his work, The Monkey is as much an absurdist comedy as it is a blood-soaked thrill ride following the travails of one cursed family.
The Monkey is based on the 1980 short story of the same name by Stephen King. It 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 started losing loved ones to tragic accidents. Believing the monkey is connected to the catastrophes, Hal throws it in a dry well, but it resurfaces somehow decades later to haunt Hal again. In order to break the curse, Hal teams up with his son to try and dispose of it once and for all.
In celebration of The Monkey, director Osgood Perkins spoke about the writing process, developing the script, finding the right music and time period, behind-the-scenes tales and his upcoming movie Keeper.
The idea for adapting King’s work came to Perkins from James Wan’s Atomic Monster and The Safran Company, which is headed by Peter Safran and has produced various films of Wan’s in The Conjuring universe as well as mega-budget movies like Aquaman and The Suicide Squad. The two parties presented Perkins with the short story and a draft of the script. His interest was piqued, and he agreed to come on and start a screenplay from scratch. After reading through the source material once he didn’t consult with it again. This was meant to be a jumping off point for Perkins, and the producers weren’t interested in a “copy paste” job.
The team originally intended to go through a studio for production, but the suits couldn’t wrap their heads around what Perkins was trying to pull off. “The studio sort of started to say, ‘Well couldn’t you redo it to make it more like this other thing?’ Which failed, by the way,” recounts Perkins. “I was like ‘No it’s totally not that. Don’t you get it?’ And the producers and I agreed, let’s pack it up.” Making another independent film was not a daunting prospect for Perkins, and with the complete support of Safran and Atomic they set out to make it their way.
“Producers called me, and they said, ‘Hey, we have this amazing piece of IP; we have a script we don’t like. Can you help us?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ but the movies I make are worth no money; they said, ‘We don’t care.’ I said, ‘Alright, I’ll give it a shot.’ It’s sort of my job to, I don’t want to say diminish, because it’s got a negative connotation, but it’s my job to sort of focus the thing and be like, ‘What is this thing that we’re going to be giving to people?’ because it’s got to be something they kind of want and understand. My job is to conjugate something into that, and so a fair amount of the early development processes is about trying to be as pithy as you can about what the thing is.”
“It was like looking at the monkey and thinking about the monkey. I read the short story, but the short story wasn’t enough; it’s not a feature, it’s a concept, it’s a notion. So, I started thinking about the monkey, and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s weird because the monkey doesn’t do anything. It’s not Megan doing a dance, it’s not Chucky; it doesn’t do a dance. It’s like this totem; it’s like this idol; it’s like this deity; this thing that just sort of sits like it’s Buddha or something. It’s like a god; it doesn’t do anything; things just happen around it. As soon as I settled into that, I got into this place of, ‘Oh, the monkey’s God, the monkey’s sort of vaguely in charge of life and death. God is right; there’s no switchboard where they’re actually like, this person dies, and this person dies. That was kind of the notion around the monkey. It was going to have that kind of energy.”
“I’m going through the short story realizing people die in crazy ways for no reason. I was like, ‘Oh that’s happened to me a couple of times’ and I was like, ‘I’m an expert on the monkey’ and for all the writer creators out here whatever you’re doing, you realize the moment you become an expert, it’s good times.”
A major theme of The Monkey is that of the mysterious or estranged father — a man who leaves his sons longing for a shred of truth about the parent they’ve never truly known, and who brought him into this world without asking only to keep them at a distance for hidden reasons. In The Monkey, the Shelburn boys are happy with their mother, but the traumatic events of their lives mean that when Hal becomes a father himself, he turns into a version of the absent dad he grew up longingly wondering about. When the twins find the monkey amid some of their dad’s old things, for the sensitive Hal especially it starts out as a conduit for connection with the dad he mourns. He was a pilot, and he traveled all around collecting keepsakes for his boys. That must mean he at least cared at one time, right? By grafting himself into his stories, Perkins is working through how these questions of the mother and the father have affected his own life.
“It’s pretty well known that I have experienced some pretty shocking stuff in my life, the loss of both of my parents being pretty wild events,” says Perkins. “I was eager to use this property as a key to sort of healing those experiences by applying a comic and absurdist touch to it. It just felt like the image of the monkey was this iconic indicator of bad things to come, but also kind of approachable and bizarre and surreal in its own right. It just seemed like all those things went together.”
There is also special attention paid to the relationship between the Shelburn boys and their single mother, Lois, played by Tatiana Maslany. Perkins handling the tension between the world as it is and the world as it was shaped for us by our parents. Who is really being protected when adults lie to their children to create a better reality than what is true? What happens to us as grownups when we must begin unwinding the stories we’ve been told to discover who and what we are and where we came from? The questions of matrilineal duty thread their way through The Monkey, and with the role of the mother holding an almost sacred space for Perkins, Lois required a powerhouse talent and someone dynamic enough to meet the tonal mélange of the film.
“Tatiana is just an amazing actor,” says Perkins. “She gives 20 different things on 20 different takes, and they’re all correct, and they’re all honest, and they’re all fun, and they’re all interesting and unexpected. And it seems like she would run out of them, but she seems to never run out of them. So, to have someone who is playing my mom—or at least what I feel about my mom—it seemed like getting truly one of the best actors I’ve ever beheld.” It’s through Lois that the audience gets a kind of decoder ring to decipher the whole tone of the film.
We see that she is a single mother raising two boys, with a bitterness that lingers at her husband for having jumped ship years ago. Maslany is only in the film for the 1999 timeline, but in just a few lines the viewer gets a total sense of her character: gallows humor, matter of fact, fiercely loving of her boys, ribald when the occasion calls for it. Lois is not just making the best. She has made the best of her unexpected life, and her love and wisdom shield her boys from the scars that cruel reality could leave without sheltering them away from how the world works. She’s sort of the embodiment of laughter at a funeral, and as the only actor who has ever won an Emmy on a show where she played more than 15 characters, Maslany certainly has the range to inhabit all the folds of 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. 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.
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. 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 care 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.”
“You get to know a person, you think a person’s pretty cool, and I just knew Theo was this guy, right? He’s playful, he’s sort of irreverent, he’s goofy, he doesn’t take himself seriously, and he’s not trying to protect his image. He doesn’t do that. There are actors who are bad actors, worried about how they look, but Theo is ready to play, and somehow, I’ve been lucky to get these folks who are ready to play. Tatiana is like a fabulous radio, and every time you tune the dial, it’s something different, but everything is great. If you do 10 takes with Tatiana, you get 10 things. You sit in the editing room, and you’re like, ‘Hm, they’re all good. What does this scene mean because she’s given me 10 versions of what it means.’ She’s a goddess.'”
“It was also like that with Theo. I let the guy do his job. He wants to be good in the movie; it’s important to him that he’s good in the movie; it’s important to him that you folks don’t leave and be like, ‘Well, Theo James is handsome but bad.’ He cares, and so we talked about it a little bit; we shaped it a little bit, but for the most part, I really don’t know what he’s going to do on take one. That’s what take one is for. Take one is for me to look, and if I see something, say something if I see something. I say, ‘That’s great.’ I see something bad; I call my producers over and say, ‘Is it too late to fire him?'”
“When Theo first signed on, he was like, ‘You know what would be great?” It would be great if we could shoot all of Hal’s scenes first, and I’ll have a beard, and then we’ll stop shooting Hal, and we’ll start shooting Bill, and I’ll shave the beard. I was like, ‘Schedule rules on independent movies; they just don’t operate that way. I don’t have that time; I can’t go back and forth to set, and things were crazy. So, he had to do the same guy a couple of times.”
Perkins 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 to build a color palette for the film with colorist Bryan Smaller, based on what the production design would actually be. The film was broken down into a visual arc in which different lenses and the colors would change based on the emotional evolution of the main characters.
“I had it much more back-and-forth time periods. We put it together linearly and anybody who makes movies knows the editing room is like stepping into an acid trip. You’re like, ‘Whoa, if I just do that, then there’s all that, and if I just go that way, it’s all that. It’s all this infinite, and it’s insane. So, you have to start making decisions about things. But we discovered we could get laughs with cuts. We decided we could sort of tell the story on cuts, which is the dream, which is the way you want to do it. When young Bill says, ‘I’m going to try it. I’m going to try to turn the monkey key and see what happens, see if it kills somebody we know,’ and cut to my funeral. Every death we shot in the movie, and we actually shot additional deaths. We got all of it and then we went back for more. I wrote all that because I wanted Bill to be a dumb bully.”
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 that 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 moves 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. “But horror movies in general make me feel kind of bad. So, I have always been aware of that, like, ‘Am I making people feel bad with what I’m potentially doing? I know they like it, but do I like it?’ So, the idea of making something that makes me laugh feels like a natural evolution. I’ll see what I feel like doing next, but it feels like it might be hard to go back to serious.”
“It became personal to me when I connected to the monkey, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m an expert on the monkey part of what grew out of that.’ I’m going to write a movie about me and my brother and the fact that we sort of lost our parents. When we lost our mom, it was crazy, and we sort of had this experience. We’re very different people, but I ended up not writing my brother as either of those guys. I’m both guys, so I’m all the good parts and all the bad parts. I’m a dad; I’m a pretty good dad, but I’m also kind of an asshole,and I was kind of a blowhard as a kid and probably pretty stupid and mean. I can say that about myself now because I’m older, but that sort of seems to be the record. So, the idea was that he was just sort of the king of the malapropism; he was just always saying, ‘I’ll eat the rest of your placenta; he doesn’t know what it means.”
“‘It’s like yoga. You have to go every day, and you have to do the thing every day. You’re like, ‘This is shit, I hate this. I hate when downward dog comes back around it’s a fucking nightmare.’ But with writing, it’s the same deal. You have to show up every day, at the same time. You start at the same time, you go to the same place, you sit at the same thing, you leave at the same time, you beat yourself up enough, you sit there every day, and the reward is you get to a place where it comes. It just starts to come, and you just take your hands off of it. The metaphor I use for death is like watering a lawn with a hose. You squeeze the fucking hose, water the lawn; the water doesn’t come out, but if you just hold it gently, the garden grows. So, the idea is that you sit down all the time, and then you let it come.”
“‘How did I write the crazy deaths? I don’t know. They wrote me.’ It’s such a goofy thing to say and I beg your pardon to anybody there who wants some more fabulous explanation, but the truth is that when you get into a groove as an artist, it’s doing it and you’re like cool. I must have done that but the whole, ‘How do you do it? You don’t really do it. Is that sucky? Is that a sucky thing to say? But it’s the truth. You’re much like the monkey; things are happening around and you’re capturing it as it as it goes.”
Similar to director James Gunn, Perkins uses music to write with “because music for me is the doctor, and it’s the gateway. It forces images, ideas, and things into my mind. When I first started on this movie, I had it as the 50s and the 80s, and then I realized I wanted it to be like a Stephen King movie. I wanted to feel like a Stephen King movie. So, I started in the 50s and 80s, and I realized that’s sort of like Stranger Things. Then I wrote it as the 50s for long enough that it sounded like the 50s to me, and I just chose all those songs as I was writing that were in my mind from draft one. Luckily, I got all those songs. We got Nina Simone singing Bob Dylan. How could it be bad? My editor and I were like, ‘We could put anything under this, just roll the music. The whole sequence of Bill doing his taxes for like 20 minutes.”
Now that The Monkey is complete, Keeper is next for the director. Keeper follows a couple embarking on a romantic anniversary retreat to a remote cabin. When Malcolm (Sutherland) abruptly departs for the city, Liz (Maslany) is left alone. During her solitude, she encounters a malevolent force that reveals the disturbing secrets hidden within the cabin.
“We have another movie coming out in October. When we made Longlegs, we were like, ‘Let’s make The Monkey right away because we love everybody, and when we worked in Vancouver, I fell in love with everybody. We got the script, we got the money, we got the people, and we got the thing. Ah, there’s a strike, and I couldn’t do it. So, I kind of cried for a minute because I was really invested in doing the movie. 30 minutes later, I got up off the ground. I was on the ground; I’m a grownup. Don’t forget to cry sometimes, grown-ups. So, I get up off the ground, and I call my producer. I’m like, ‘Chris, we have to make a movie,’ and he said, ‘What do you mean? Everybody’s on strike: actors, writers, it’s all done. I said, ‘I don’t care. We have to figure it out. He was like, ‘We could do found footage, I guess. I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess we could do found footage, sort of like a Skinamarink kind of thing. Just kind of put the camera on the floor, roll it around, put on cartoons, and whisper.”
“But then what happened was we discovered, oh, we can get a guy, Nick Lepard. this lovely guy is Canadian and not in the Writer Guild, he could write a movie for us. I could get Canadian actors who don’t want to work for SAG but can work for the Canadian Union and get them. Cut to, we found a house, and we wrote a script. I didn’t touch it. I’m a member of the Writers Guild; they’ll come find me. He wrote a script, we found the actors, we got a house, and we did a thing. It’s Tatiana Maslany, and it’s Rossif Sutherland who’s Donald Sutherland’s youngest son. We did this thing in a house, and from the moment that I got up from crying and called my producer Chris to wrapping the picture, it was something like 14 weeks. Then we made The Monkey, and then we’re finishing Keeper, and Neon’s putting them all out. We can’t be stopped. Let’s go.”
To learn more about The Monkey, check out the interview with Osgood Perkins. The Monkey releases in theaters on February 21st.
