Osgood “Oz” Perkins, the director of the recently released Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, has a pretty particular take on horror. The Monkey is an adaptation of King’s short story of the same name published in the anthology Skeleton Crew, but it’s nonetheless a very original horror comedy made by a filmmaker who understands genre tropes and subverts them. In 2024, Longlegs terrified everyone with a bleak twist on serial killer horror tropes. Thus, many would think that the director of these films (and The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) is really into the horror genre. They would be wrong.
Perkins insists he’s not into the horror genre, telling IndieWire:
“The way I have come to look at my trajectory, if anybody gives a f*ck about my trajectory, it’s born into horror, right? Born into a royal family of horror, right? And you kind of uneasily pursue it, because that’s what some of us do — we follow the footsteps of the father, we’re sort of intrigued by that path, and we can connect with the father through the follow. So there’s that, but I don’t love horror movies.”
“I don’t sit around and think about horror movies all the time,” added Perkins before namedropping one of the biggest new horror franchises of the past decade. “I certainly don’t see a lot of the ones that are supposed to be ‘the ones.’ Something like Terrifier, for example, so successful, so well done — absolutely unappealing to me, like in every possible way. True crime, horrible to me. I would never ever dabble in true crime because I’m not interested in real pain. That doesn’t do anything for me.”
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Currently sitting at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes, The Monkey is already giving people a lot to talk about, especially because of its particular balance between comedy and horror. It’s yet another notable addition to Perkins’ catalog, and though the director’s credentials could represent a future foray into other genres and formats like TV shows, it seems he’d rather stay where he is today. On the success of The Monkey, Perkins told Variety:
“It’s changed everything and nothing. It’s given me confidence, but it’s not like I’m going to run off and make a video game movie or an X-Men movie. I don’t think anybody wants that. You can probably just expect more of the same from me, but just made better.
“I was raised in a very old-school Hollywood household where, in the ’70s and ’80s, there was a real divide between TV and movie people. Now it’s all one big jambalaya.”
Perkins’ Relationship With Death Was Essential When Writing and Making ‘The Monkey’
The Monkey follows Hal Shelburn, a boy who suspects that a monkey toy formerly owned by his father is cursed. The babysitter dies in horrible circumstances. Soon, other people close to Hal and his twin brother Bill start dying. They eventually decide to get rid of the wind-up monkey toy, and the deaths stop. But 25 years later, people mysteriously start dying again, and Hal suspects the monkey toy may be behind this.
It is a straight-up horror film, one with multiple Final Destination-like set pieces that result in a kind of Rube Goldberg gore machine. It’s a funny movie, with intricate kills that will satisfy viewers who like a bit of comedy in their horror. The humor and gore are sometimes a bit over-the-top, but Perkins has a reason behind it all, and that is to change the audience’s usual reaction to death.
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The director admits that his relationship with death was crucial when writing the script. His father, Psycho star Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992 when Osgood was young. And his mother, Berry Berenson, was a passenger on one of the September 11 flights. He calls them “insane” deaths, ones which may have inspired him to make this very original horror comedy. Perkins tells Variety:
“I’m certainly writing from an autobiographical place, given that I sustained some pretty insane kind of deaths in my life. I think that if I had written this movie when I was 29, it would have been pretty sad. But now that I’m 51, it’s a pretty funny movie.
“Time changes everything, it breaks it all down like a silt in a riverbed. If I was going to give a movie about death to an audience, I wasn’t going to hand them a bummer – I was going to hand a delight, an opportunity to shake it off and have a smile.”
So go reflect on death and have a laugh with The Monkey, now in theaters from NEON.
4
/5
Release Date
February 19, 2025
Runtime
98 Minutes
Director
Osgood Perkins
Writers
Osgood Perkins
Producers
John Rickard, Natalia Safran, Ali Jazayeri, Chris Ferguson, Fred Berger, Giuliana Bertuzzi, James Wan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, John Friedberg, Jason Cloth, David Gendron, Michael Clear, Jesse Savath, Peter Luo, Dave Caplan
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