It’s been a hot second since we’ve had a new movie from Oz Perkins in theaters, but the filmmaker is making up for lost time, it seems. Not only is his much-anticipated Longlegs hitting theaters soon, but he’s already got his next film in the can as well. Next up for Perkins is an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story The Monkey. While much remains mysterious about the project, Perkins recently opened up about it and, in short, called it both a family movie and pretty extreme.
In a recent interview with Bloody Disgusting in honor of the forthcoming release of Longlegs, the director of The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel & Hansel shared some details about The Monkey. For starters, he compared it to several other classic horror films while also saying that it’s a bit like a Robert Zemeckis picture – assuming a little bit of acid was involved.
“It’s gonna feel more like Misery or Creepshow or Gremlins or American Werewolf. It couldn’t be less like Longlegs. To me, if you’re gonna make a movie about a toy monkey, you can be serious about it. But so much of King is funny and nostalgic feeling. So we tried to make a movie that felt a little bit more like something from the late ’80s – ’90s. It’s sorta like, if Robert Zemeckis had just like a little bit of acid and made a Stephen King picture about a monkey toy.”
That is all, in a word, fascinating. It also doesn’t hurt that The Monkey has an impressive ensemble cast that includes the likes of Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) and Elijah Wood (The Lord Of The Rings). Speaking further, Perkins elaborated a bit explaining that he hopes this is the kind of movie parents and their kids will want to see together, even if it does involve people blowing up.
“For me, ideally it’s the movie that kids and their parents wanna go see together. People blow up, people explode; it’s very extreme but it’s very funny. It’s very father-son redemption, it’s very touching, it’s very nostalgic, it’s very Stephen King.”
The story in question was first published in King’s short story collection Skeleton Crew in 1985. This is the same collection that The Mist came from, which inspired Frank Darabont’s 2007 movie of the same name. The synopsis for Perkins’ movie reads as follows:
“In The Monkey, 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.”
The Monkey is set to be released by NEON in theaters sometime in 2025. For more, be sure to get the details on FANGORIA #24, which features Longlegs on the subscriber cover.
