To ape someone. To monkey around. Monkey business. Ape arms. Monkey basket. Monkey see, monkey do.
From the top of my head, I can think of quite a few idioms and sayings involving monkeys, and none of them have an even remotely positive connotation. Why is that? Well, I'm not an expert, but I think apart from their often aggressive and unpredictable nature, I would say that it's the same underlying fear as with dolls - their resemblance to us. Monkeys look like humans, but they're not quite us. They surely act like us, but in a distorted way and that's eerie. We tend to be afraid of human-like things that look like us, but are underneath strange, that's somehow unsettling. So, take a doll, a toy in the shape of a monkey and it's double scary, especially with creepy eyes and teeth and a lethal music instrument, for whatever reason...
Stephen King milks that fear to its full potential in his short story The Monkey, where such a toy monkey causes death every time it plays its cymbals. In this post, as usual, we're first going to take a closer look at the short story King wrote and then what Oz Perkins does in his movie adaptation of the same title. It will be very interesting because Perkins surely takes his liberties. Is it better than the short story, though? Let's see.
There are spoilers in this blog post, so watch and read before if spoilers bother you.
The Monkey by Stephen King (Gallery Magazine, 1980)
Maybe it's just going to come back and that's all this is about...
The story that was first published in Gallery Magazine in 1980, and five years later in his second short story collection Skeleton Crew, won the British Fantasy Award 1982 for Best Short Fiction. It follows Hal Shelburn, whose son Dennis finds a box which contains the wind-up monkey that was his childhood's nightmare while cleaning out the attic of his childhood home after the death of his aunt. Every time the monkey goes off and plays its cymbals, someone dies. He thought he got rid of it back in the day, but here it is now again, both his sons fighting over it.
Hal remembers finding the monkey as a child, and consequently people around him dying over the course of the years - his best friend Johnny falling from a treehouse, his Uncle Will's dog Daisy, his aunt Ida's cat, his babysitter in a shooting, and most bitter of all, his mother from a brain embolism... Young Hal comes to believe that the monkey is cursed, and throws it into a dry well.
But the monkey doesn't let go, that's its shtick. It reappears decades later in his family home and Hal and his younger son Petey, who senses the evil in the monkey, go to Crystal Lake where they want to throw it in a bag full of stones into the deepest part of the water. Little Petey waits ashore. As the bag sinks, Hal thinks he hears cymbals clapping and a storm starts and Hal's boat starts sinking. Luckily he makes it to the shore, but the fish in the lake weren't as lucky since the newspaper reports the next day that hundreds of fish in the lake have suddenly died.
Two things stand out in this story for me, the issue with father-son relationships being the first. Just like King himself, main character Hal grew up without a father, and had an older brother, and has two sons himself. There is a distance between him and his older son Dennis, who, we find out, Hal is very strict with, and whom he punishes bodily sometimes, while he adores his younger son Petey. The story touches on too many psychological issues for its own good - the relationship between the father and the older son is obviously cracked, the fight scene between him and Dennis is in parts hard to bear, and there's no explanation for Hal to discriminate against his older son while preferring his younger son, other than that he himself was the younger one.
The other thing is that there's almost a dark side to Hal which he is able to control, but which resurfaces during his interaction with Dennis, a mere twelve year old kid. He is in a vulnerable position, having lost his job and returning to his childhood home for the funeral of his aunt, and vulnerable times are times the demons come out. His guilt for seemingly causing the death of his mother is only one of the things buried in his subconscious.
You know what else is buried and keeps on resurfacing? Yeah, the monkey.
... maybe even most bad things weren't really awake and aware of what they were.
So, it is an interesting mix that King puts together here; a general meditation about the evil within (which may or may not be hereditary as Hal suspects his father was killed by the monkey too), applied upon the infamous "The Monkey's Paw" trope that we just recently talked about, King's usual cursed inanimate object bringing hell to the living, and finally lots of personal elements and issues that constitute the skeleton of it all. Maybe it is such a good story because it is so intimate, dusting deep seated familial issues. Or maybe the story owes some of its oomph to the creepy toy itself and the primal fears it unleashes.
Whatever it is, this story of a guy returning to his childhood home to find his past demon in the shape of a toy monkey, is a deep, simple, unadorned narrative, which in its turn is the basis for a very lively, jazzed up, fabulous, and extreme cinematic adaptation which the author himself describes as "batshit insane".
The Monkey by Osgood Perkins (2025)
Well, the most distinct thing Osgood Perkins does with this dryly serious, almost dramatic in tone horror story is to turn it into a horror comedy and that's a clever choice. It helps the director in creating something authentic, something of his own without being competitive to the original work. It's a daring choice nonetheless, that could easily misfire. So which one will it be, a hit or a miss?
Theo James plays a dual role in this film, namely Hal and his twin brother Bill. The dual timeline in the written work is abandoned for a linear narration, starting from Hal and Bill's childhood and the story of how they found the monkey.
The advantage of having twins in your fiction is mainly a sort of mirror effect. You have your lead character, and you have them once again, same but different. Perkins takes the torn-ness that resides inside Book-Hal, the evil, the guilt inside his chest and gives it to Bill, he basically personifies the dark side of this main character. This results in this wonderfully complex character, a man with ups and downs, turning into a flat, a caricature of a figure. Or maybe better, even two caricature-like figures occupying the lead role. In any other movie this would be a hard no, but if everything else is caricature-like in a movie, why not the lead character(s) too?
Another aspect that gets lost in Perkins' constellation is the father aspect, which is kind of the point of the short story, and it seems like Perkins added a child in the last minute with a ridiculous plot line of the boy soon being adopted by his step father (hilariously played by Elijah Wood). (Unfortunately, just because someone wants to adopt someone, they can't just go ahead and do it. It doesn't work like that. But we'll suspend our disbelief fo this one.)
Before jumping over to the omissions and additions that actually work in the movie, one last negative: the bullying, which is in accordance with the background that causes Hal to be a recluse, but is kind of too much and unnecessary, to be frank.
What works though, is the addition of the initial scene answering the question in Hal's head, whether his father has really left them or if it was the monkey's curse that got him. This introduction is a crazily overblown, over the top carnival of the senses that thankfully sets the tone for the rest of the movie.
I'd like to emphasize the killings which are the film's gory, bloody, preposterously ridiculous, impossibly absurd highlight providing a violently tongue-in-cheek grand guignol experience.
As a thirteen-year-old girl, I was neither popular, nor pretty. I was a nerd with glasses and a pony tail, and although I had a free pass from bullies (and we had some mean bullies) for having a German, a European mom, kids weren't crazy about hanging with an introverted book worm like me. But I did have one fan, I'll call him Özgür though that's not his real name. He was a metalhead who thought he's in love with me and tried to make me realize that we belong together in very heavy metal ways - each year I'd receive mixed tapes with his favorite songs (metal was never my favored genre of music though I have a solid knowledge because of him), he would carve my name into his arm with a sharp carpet cutter and gift me the skin he scraped while doing so, and he would write stories about me.
These were not normal stories, as you can guess. As I was totally intimidated by him and rejected his advances, he'd write these stories, which were nothing but violent fantasies of aggression toward me, packaged into over-the-top song lyrics or creative writing pieces we had to read out loud in class. I remember this one piece he wrote, where I was a cleaning lady and was entering a house where a cursed bird, who had already killed all its family, lived. Ignorant of the danger awaiting me, I enter the kitchen to prepare to clean the house, but then get attacked by the bird, and in my panic my hand gets caught up in a meat grinder which miraculously starts working and I'm pulled into it and get turned into ground meat. Since I forgot to close the front door stray cats come to the smell of my meat and they eat me.
This is just one story I remember but he used to do this regularly and despite the slightly disturbing undertone of a psychologically unstable teenager, I laughed at them. They amused me.
Watching Oz Perkins' version of The Monkey reminded me of those stories. A babysitter's head gets cut off by a Japanese cook who works on a hibachi grill. Uncle Chip is trampled to death by a horse stampede. A woman who jumps into an electrified hotel pool explodes. A guy gets steamed to death by the milk frother of his coffee machine. It's freak accidents over freak accidents that cause strange deaths. You can say anything about the monkey, but not that he's not creative.
The movie ends on a weird showdown of the twin brothers which, of course, results in one of them dying, and the monkey drumming its pseudo-happy circus tune uncontrollably, brings about the apocalypse.
You win some, you lose some, and then you die. As the Monkey's box says, "Like Life".
My verdict: I will honestly have to go for the film version this time... I never thought I'd let someone win over Stephen King, but I find the movie so much fun, like a literal explosion of colors and gore and bone shards that I can turn a blind eye on the weak story and just have fun. Osgood Perkins wins this round.
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