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After a series of blood-soaked teases, The Monkey is very nearly ready to splatter its way into theaters. (You can read io9’s review here.) io9 got a chance to talk to writer-director Osgood Perkins, who found breakout success with last year’s Longlegs, ahead of its release. The Monkey is also a horror movie, but it’s quite different in tone, something it owes to its roots as a Stephen King short story as well as Perkins’ own creative versatility.
Cheryl Eddy, io9: I was surprised by the amount of humor in the film. What guided your decision to embrace that almost comedic tone?
Osgood Perkins: I felt like I didn’t want to approach an evil toy monkey movie with a straight face. Life seems short, and when you’re given an opportunity to delight people, I think that’s probably more important than anything at this stage, as history hurtles forward towards whatever it’s hurtling towards. And also I felt like if I was going to do a movie about death, about the big D word, that I should do it with a smile. I didn’t want to bum anybody out.
io9: The Monkey makes a strong case that there’s always a new way to approach a Stephen King adaptation. How does it feel to be a part of that long tradition and what do you think makes The Monkey unique from the rest?
Perkins: I think it fits in with Creepshow and Misery as being sort of the fancifully funny ones. From when I first got the material, when I was first blessed with the opportunity to do this, I really wanted it to feel like it was done in reverence of the man. If I took anything seriously in the development of this movie, it’s that I wanted to be in reverence of Mr. King and all that he’s given to us. It’s like at a certain point, if I have the opportunity to create something and to express myself—well, what an opportunity that is, what a gift that is, what a privilege that is. And I thought I would meet that privilege with humility and with reverence and with homage. So the idea was to make a Stephen King movie that felt like a Stephen King movie and didn’t feel like it was trying to be something else. I think King has a great sense of humor; I think he’s also very melancholy in a lot of what he does. And there’s an attention paid to the importance of family, parents, children, all that obviously is always front and center in his work. I really just wanted to do something that felt, to me, like it was for him.
io9: Has he seen it? What does he think of it?
Perkins: He tweeted—you should look at it specifically because I’ll misquote it. But it was “the monkey is unlike any movie you’ve ever seen. It’s bat shit crazy. And as someone who is engaged in bat shittery from time to time, I say that with admiration.” You realize I’ve memorized it because it’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever going to say. [Note: it’s nearly word-or-word, but you can read King’s original Threads post here.]
Star Theo James (left) with director Osgood Perkins (right). © Neon
io9: In the story, the monkey crashes its cymbals together, but the movie goes for a spinning drumstick and a drumbeat. Why did you change that detail?
Perkins: When the producers came to me with the material, they said, “You can do anything you want, except it can’t be the cymbals because Disney owns the cymbals.” Because they used the cymbal-playing monkey in one of the Toy Story sequels. And as Disney does, Disney owns. So we weren’t allowed to do that. For a moment, it seemed like a loss. Then it was like, well, I could just play the drums and the drums are percussive and the drums have energy and the drums have rhythm and—oh, drum roll. Oh, rim shot. Drums are better! Thanks, Disney, for taking away the opportunity to do the cymbals. It’s a classic example of making a movie and you’re handed what seems like a limitation, which you can really blossom it into something new.
io9: Why did you want to include the spinning drumstick, sort of like a preamble?
Perkins: Tommy Lee!
io9: Nice.
Perkins: It was just like a funny extra little gesture that the thing can make. You know, the sort of heavy metal drum spin—or even Buddy Rich does that, right? It’s just a flair. It’s a flourish.
io9: The monkey’s got flair! The movie’s gore is over the top with some very creative kill scenes. Did you literally assemble a long list of “horrible ways to die,” or what was the creative process like in coming up with those sequences?
Perkins: I’ve talked about it in a lot of interviews before, but as a screenwriter, as a writer of anything, you sit down every day as best you can on a regular schedule, and you bleed at it for as long as it takes. Some days are good days and some days are bad days, and some days it comes and some days it doesn’t. And I just sat in front of it and found my way to things that I thought were funny. I sort of made one rule for myself and that was none of these deaths can be real. None of them can be real causes of death. Electricity and pool water do not operate that way in physics. That’s not a thing. Hibachi knives are not sharp enough to cut people’s heads off. As long as I was living in the land of like Itchy and Scratchy or Wile E. Coyote, it was the right zone. So I used those as my north stars.
© Neon
io9: Have you heard the comparisons to the Final Destination movies? What do you think about that?
Perkins: I don’t think much about it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Final Destination movie, to be honest. And it’s funny, like the distance between what I do and the idea that I would sit in front of a Final Destination movie and be like, “Oh, I’m going to try to do that” seems very—like, I can’t reconcile those two things. I get it because there’s sort of that Rube Goldberg quality of like, how’s this going to happen? So I get that. And I don’t mind the comparison. It had nothing to do with what I was doing.
io9: Elijah Wood’s character is so detailed and specific—where did he come from? Was he based on anyone in particular?
Perkins: No, he just represents sort of the blowhard parent, the blowhard dad who thinks that they know what they’re doing in a world where—I think most of us parents accept, acknowledge, and surrender to the fact that we’re doing the best that we can, and we’re fucking up a lot of the time. And certainly none of us can say they’ve written the book on it. I just wanted to have kind of like the most repellent version of a parent waiting to take over for [Theo James’ character] Hal if he fails.
© Neon
io9: We often see twins in horror, and Hal and Bill have a more contentious relationship than most. Why did you want to explore that theme of “good twin/bad twin” and why does it work so well in the context of The Monkey’s story?
Perkins: It felt like a horror trope. Anybody who’s seen Longlegs and thought about it realizes what kind of, like, a pop art version of a horror movie that is. In keeping, I wanted this to feel like a King thing, so I wanted to use as many uncanny elements as I could. It did feel like having adult twins is not something—you see a lot of creepy twin kids. The Shining has [the Grady sisters]—I know that’s not from the King novel, that’s Kubrick’s invention; in the novel, they’re just sisters, I believe. So all due respect there. But I think it was just another additional uncanny element which we could spin comically. The basic sort of hypothesis or the thesis being that two people can have identical experiences and be totally different people and have totally different subsequent experiences, which was the sort of the story for me and my brother, which is what a lot of this is based on. The quality of, you can go through the same thing but it affects you in totally different ways, and you react in totally different ways.
The Monkey hits theaters February 21.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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Matt Damon is Odysseus. A film by Christopher Nolan, #TheOdysseyMovie is in theaters July 17, 2026. pic.twitter.com/7a5YbfqVfG
— odysseymovie (@odysseymovie) February 17, 2025
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Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.