Osgood Perkins on setting The Monkey in the 1990s and 2020s, the darkly comedic tone, and re-designing the monkey
Last March, we heard that production had wrapped on the Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, which is coming our way from the team of producer / genre regular James Wan and director Osgood Perkins, whose credits include The Blackcoat’s Daughter (a.k.a. February), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Gretel & Hansel, and the recent Nicolas Cage horror film Longlegs (you can read our review HERE). Longlegs was released by Neon – and they’ll also be giving The Monkey a theatrical release on February 21, 2025. In anticipation of the film’s release, Perkins was interviewed by SFX magazine, and during that interview he discussed the darkly comedic tone he brought to the material, the story’s setting, and the fact that he had to replace the cymbals-playing monkey from King’s short story with a drum-playing monkey.
Perkins wrote the screenplay for The Monkey. The film will tell the following story: When twin brothers Hal and Bill discover their father’s old monkey toy in the attic, a series of gruesome deaths starts occurring all around them. The brothers decide to throw the monkey away and move on with their lives, growing apart over the years. But when the mysterious deaths begin again, the brothers must reunite to find a way to destroy the monkey for good before it takes the lives of everyone close to them.
Theo James (The White Lotus) plays the twins in later years, while Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth) plays them in their younger days. Also in the cast are Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings), Tatiana Maslany (She–Hulk: Attorney at Law), Colin O’Brien (Wonka), Rohan Campbell (Halloween Ends), and Sarah Levy (Schitt’s Creek).
James Wan and Michael Clear are producing The Monkey for Atomic Monster, while Jason Cloth and Dave Caplan produce for C2 Motion Picture Group. Executive producers include Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Fred Berger of Automatik, Peter Luo and Nancy Xu of Stars Collective, John Friedberg of Black Bear, and Chris Ferguson. Atomic Monster and Stars Collective developed the project, and C2 Motion Picture Group provided the financing.
Perkins told SFX that the monkey had to play a different instrument because “The producer said, ‘Oh, by the way, Disney owns the cymbals, because of [the toy monkey in] Toy Story. So it [couldn’t] be cymbals. What if it was a drum? It’s one of those things where a limitation becomes an opportunity. If you’re making movies and you’re not up for that adage then you’re in real trouble! ‘I was like, ‘Hey, that’s awesome. The drum is better.’ The drum is like a marching drum. It’s like, ‘Drum roll, please!’ before something happens. That’s better than cymbals. So thanks, Disney. I prefer it!“
As for the setting, the film takes place in modern day and in the 1990s… but that wasn’t the original intention. Perkins explained, “Stranger Things kind of cornered the market on ‘It’s like movies from the ’80s, it’s like Gremlins, it’s like Spielberg!’ – and it did it so well and so successfully. Initially the movie that I wrote was set in the ’80s, with the childhood stuff in the ’50s, because that felt very Stephen King to me. But of course It already did that, and Stranger Things took that away, so we moved it to the ’90s and the present.“
The writer/director said that it was important to him from the start that the film should have a comedic edge to it. He didn’t want it to be “dreadfully somber. It was going to be more comedic, and cozy, which I think seemed correct for a movie about a toy. I wanted to steer away from the more serious movies about possessed toys, which don’t ring true for me. When you see the monkey or feel the monkey it’s like, ‘Oh no, not that horrible thing!’ So I have that. That’s pre-existing. What I don’t need to do is then goose that, because that’s already laid in. Instead I can add a layer of warm, redemptive, father-son road trip comedy, which just gives the thing a more robust life and becomes more interesting to me, more textured. I hope everybody goes into it with dread and carries their dread around with them, but is also happy to have a laugh.“
Are you looking forward to feeling dread but also laughing while watching Osgood Perkins’ take on The Monkey? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
