WSB x Moving Picture Review: The Monkey

Every era in horror history has seen a rise and fall of “monsters of the moment.” Universal Pictures had its classic monsters drawn from folklore and literature, the Atomic Age had huge, irradiated beasts and mad scientists, while the Cold War brought us dozens of alien invasions. Slashers had their day amidst the so-called “golden age” of serial killers, and zombies, of course, have had a long-running time in the limelight. Each era’s monsters reflected the cultural anxieties of the time. In fact, that’s one of the founding tenets of What Sleeps Beneath, which is why for the past year or so, it’s been a recurring internal debate. What will the next era’s monster be? Now, a pattern finally seems to be emerging and one frontrunner in the race is…fate. The trend crept up on us. Truth or Dare (2018) then Smile (2022) baited the hook. But suddenly, it’s gaining steam. All within the last year, we’ve gotten Tarot, Smile 2, the return of the Final Destination franchise with Bloodlines; 

And The Monkey.

The Monkey 2025, image via IMDB

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First published in Gallery magazine in 1980, Stephen King’s short story about a cursed wind-up toy would be included in King’s acclaimed 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, and that damned monkey has been haunting book covers ever since. Now, in 2025, Oz Perkins (Longlegs, The Blackcoat’s Daughter) brings King’s story to the big screen with a string of changes—all of which make the film a much more entertaining ride. 

Starring Theo James as twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn and Christian Convery as the young versions of each, The Monkey traces the discovery of an evil drum-playing clockwork monkey (never call it a toy) and its supernatural attachment to the Shelburn family. Despite several attempts to get rid of the monkey, it keeps finding its way back to the brothers, leaving a fateful trail of “freak accidents” in its wake, death and destruction following with every turn of the key in its back. 

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To start, Perkins’s film is at once much funnier and darker than King’s original tale. King does admittedly kill several of Hal and Bill’s classmates in pretty brutal ways, but for the most part, the deaths in the film are both more graphic and more grotesquely absurd, leaning heavily into the slapstick horror-comedy that Perkins is going for. Interestingly, the film’s more humorous tone doesn’t include the eerie anthropomorphized inner voice that Hal gives the monkey in the story. At least not directly. Reading Hal imagining the monkey speaking to him, taunting him, works well on the page, but one could easily see it working to good effect on the screen, too. Instead, we settle for the Shelburn twins talking at the monkey, who only sits, grinning back with its unsettling beady eyes.

Tatiana Maslany in The Monkey, image via IMDB

The monkey’s ability to arrange objects and circumstances into gruesome, almost Rube-Goldberg-like tragedies feels straight out of the playbook of the Final Destination franchise. It’s another change from King’s original work, which was a bit more practical in its accidental deaths. It does, however, allow Perkins to experiment with fate—that “everybody dies,” and that everything is an accident, or, that nothing is. That refrain seems as relatable as ever as paradigms shift across the globe and the titanic forces shaping an uncertain future feel more out of reach than ever before. The Monkey seems to be asking viewers to, at least to a certain extent, accept that some things are, and will always be, out of our control.

The film’s few other changes lead more into spoiler territory, so instead, let’s talk about Oz Perkins and the impressive way he was able to pull this film off. Unlike Josh Ruben, whose track record with films like Scare Me (2020) and Werewolves Within (2021) made the success of his new horror-comedy Heart Eyes all but guaranteed, Perkins’s films have generally had a much blacker tone. All three of his earlier films, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), and Gretel & Hansel (2020), take on a much quieter, Gothic appeal, while the more intense procedural aesthetic of Longlegs gave no real indication of the direction Perkins would go with his Stephen King adaptation. 

Prefer listening to your short stories? Order Skeleton Crew using our Libro.fm link instead!

That’s not to say this doesn’t feel like an Oz Perkins film. The Monkey is still a sharp, stylish-looking film, with an emphasis on its characters’ relationships with their parents, a recurring theme in Perkins’s work. It’s also filled with plenty of references to keep horror fans searching for more. Hal and Bill’s ill-fated babysitter, for instance, is named after one of Stephen King’s most infamous antagonists. The road sign to a grungy motel that Hal stops at for the night references one of the cardinal rules from Joe Dante’s Gremlins. And whether it counts or not, you’ll never convince me that Aunt Ida’s house, with its wide-lipped wraparound porch, is not the spitting image of the evil, grinning monkey, itself. 

If nothing else, this month has made it clear that the horror-comedy is back with a vengeance. The Monkey is a movie best seen in your local theater. Already, reactions online have been commenting on what fun the film is surrounded by other fans, and I couldn’t agree more. Even if you aren’t able to make it to the theater, definitely invite a few friends over and fill up the scariest popcorn bucket you can find, and whatever you do, don’t turn the key.

WSB x Moving Picture Reviews is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Festival. The Pittsburgh Moving Picture Festival celebrates both the art of cinema and the rich motion picture exhibition tradition of the City of Pittsburgh. Our goal in this series is to highlight new and upcoming genre films and, wherever possible, to support local, independent movie theaters in the process.

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Article Written by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He is an independent member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.

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