Osgood Perkins Uses The Monkey to See Funny Side of Death and Stephen King

Osgood Perkins is taking a big step into King country this week as he turns Stephen King‘s 30-page, 1980 short story “The Monkey” into one hell of a bloody fun ride. The film, like the original story, focuses on twin brothers named Hal and Bill (Christian Convery as children) who discover an old drumming monkey toy among the detritus left by their deadbeat dad. Here’s the problem: Every time the monkey is wound and bangs his little drum, someone dies… horribly and ironically. The curse of this monkey follows the boys into adulthood where they are now played by Theo James of The White Lotus and Divergent fame. Much cartoonish gore ensues.

It’s ironic that Perkins honed in on King’s writing since the original 1977 hardback cover art for The Shining depicted Jack Torrance with imagery undeniably reminiscent of Oz’s famous actor dad, Anthony Perkins (Psycho, co-writer of The Last of Sheila). The Shining was a lot of people’s gateway drug into King’s storytelling, and fittingly enough, Oz’s own initial encounter with King also came via Anthony Perkins.

“My Dad was a child of the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s,” Perkins says in a sitdown with Den of Geek, “a movie actor and a stage actor, and TV was not something that we did. My brother and I [watched] MTV, but a lot of television was not how we were raised. My Dad was a really avid paperback novel reader. I guess he traveled a lot and had a lot of downtime. He was an extremely smart dude.”

During all those travels and well-worn paperbacks, one cover in particular caught young Osgood’s imagination.

Says Perkins, “I have a distinct memory of holding his fat paperback copy of Pet Sematary with the cat’s face and the misspelled title, and the kid’s handwriting. For whatever reason, whatever age I was when I held that in my hand, I can’t even tell you why it had such a profound impact on me but I never will forget that moment of seeing the vibe coming off of that book. The title treatment and the misspelling of the word, I thought was so great. Creepshow, the comic book with the Bernie Wrightson artwork, the playfulness of that element of Stephen King, those are my gateways through the visual… weirdly more than through the text.”

The Dark Humor (and Autobiography) in Tragedy

Yet when it came time to finally adapt King as a filmmaker, Perkins found himself drawing on a vibe that was much lighter than Pet Sematary’s tone, if an intensely perverse way. There have of course been plenty of Stephen King film adaptations with a great deal of levity, including Stand By Me or Misery, but The Monkey is straight up, front-to-back gallows humor comedy. But as Perkins tells us, he found the kernel of absurdity in the original story via the title simian doll itself.

The filmmaker explains, “I was given an opportunity to work with the material, and it was exciting immediately because the monkey itself is such an iconic, instantly uncanny thing that, for whatever reason, just stirs in the human mind. ‘There’s something about that thing I don’t like.’ We showed our monkey doll to one of the stand-ins for one of the kids, and his response was, ‘Oh, I hate that so much.’”

Perkins notes that unlike other dangerous movie dolls, your M3GANs or Chuckys, the Monkey doesn’t technically do anything. It’s just a totem, but that is one place where the film’s dark humor springs. “It felt like the leer of Gremlins,” he muses. But while thoroughly funny, the plot of The Monkey threads several childhood traumas for its twin protagonists, including the death of a parent. Perkins drew from many tragedies in his own life. (While he does not confirm these are the influences, Perkins’ father died from AIDS in 1992 and his mother Berry Berenson died as a passenger during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.)

Learning to cope with those tragic events helped him process the lighter side of mortality.

“The monkey doesn’t do things, it just exists, so it represents the fact that everybody dies,” said Perkins, echoing one of Tatiana Maslany’s lines in the movie. “The Monkey just happens to be there when people die in insane ways. I connected that to my own personal experience with some pretty shocking tragedies in my life, which felt—at the time—very cursed and so far out of the realm of possibility. I connected to The Monkey as being, ‘Oh, it’s just how life goes.’ I was like, ‘Oh, well, I’m an expert on that.’ Life sometimes goes into this insane place of death.”

Making the movie likewise tapped into a perhaps therapeutic space for the director: “I was able to connect with the healed part of myself. When these things happened when I was younger, it was bad. But as time goes on things change and you adapt, you heal, and your life changes. Your surroundings change and you cope with things, you process things, you’re able to take a different attitude or different point of view… if you’re lucky.”

Honoring Stephen King

Besides layering in autobiographical aspects of himself into The Monkey, Perkins threaded a few details intrinsic to King as a person, a big one being the Dad that “went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.” Another is the main characters’ lifetime connection to a small town since King is a lifetime Bangor Maine-er. And of course the idea of childhood traumas coming back to haunt you as an adult is a staple of King’s writing (IT, Salem’s Lot, Doctor Sleep, etc.). 

“The whole idea from the getgo is that it was going to be a movie that honored Stephen King,” Perkins says. “I wanted it to be called ‘Stephen King’s The Monkey.’ That was on the title page. Things get nudged through legal and advertising and all this stuff, but every title page of every draft I turned in was Stephen King’s The Monkey. I felt like the combination of the image and his name was the alchemy, the most honest representation of the thing.”

Since completing the film, the director muses about recently revisiting King’s On Writing memoir.

Says Perkins, “I was surprised by how much I had taken unconsciously, like the babysitter. The relationship with the babysitter is foremost in the first couple chapters. He had this crazy babysitter who used to sit on his head and fart. The fact that this trickled down made me think I really did reflect him more than I even thought. His stuff sunk in so deep to all of us, especially those of us who work as horror writers. If you don’t bow at the altar of that, who are you?”

While there are no other King stories Perkins currently has his eye on to adapt, he would be open to a specific type of film inspired by one King movie in particular. 

“I tend to be a little bit more like, ‘What does the universe want for me?’ As opposed to ‘call my agent and get all these books. I want to option all this shit.’ I just don’t think about that. If anything, I would want to do something that felt like Creepshow, something short, a vignette kind of thing. I had a real admiration, adoration, and weird sick love for the episodic, chopped up vibe of something like Tales from the Crypt. The Robert Zemeckis Santa Claus one is so good. The energy of the little shot, like a short story, may be the answer. I would love to do a collection of King short stories, an anthology.”

The Influence of Barry Sonnenfeld… and Batman?!

King wasn’t the only artist he was trying to pay tribute to though. The way Perkins and his cinematographer Nico Aguilar shot the film only enhances that darkly comedic vibe. It harkens back to cinematographer-turned-director Barry Sonnenfeld (The Addams Family, Men in Black) in the use of wide angles, framing people with a lot of existential headroom, and the Gothic art direction.

“Sonnenfeld was absolutely something that Nico and I talked about. The kinetic, playful nature of the camera. Things like Raising Arizona [on which he DP’d] is such a wild, expressive take on how to use the camera for comedy. Zemeckis does it also. Death Becomes Her has a couple really great examples. We set that intention for ourselves.”

That appreciation also extended to another filmmaker who has had dealings with The Addams Family, namely Tim Burton.

“I also wanted to bring back the canted angle, the Dutch angle,” said Perkins. “I kept calling it ‘the Batman shot,’ and that’s from Tim Burton’s Batman where every once in a while he’d go to a really canted Dutch angle. That’s fun. A lot of upshots looking at Theo are canted out of admiration for early Tim Burton, which we also wanted to emulate.”

Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey opens in theaters everywhere on Friday, Feb. 21.

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