[COLUMN] The Monkey is Deeply Weird, Deeply Personal Horror Comedy | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains light spoilers for the plot and themes of The Monkey.

This is, perhaps, a very strange observation to make about a film that concerns a killer monkey toy, but: The Monkey is an endearingly personal work for writer and director Osgood “Oz” Perkins.

The Monkey opens with a flashback to Captain Peter Shelborn (Adam Scott) desperately attempting to offload a curio to a disinterested pawn shop owner (Shafin Karim). It is a wind-up monkey toy. Flustered and covered in blood, the pilot tries to get rid of the strange object. When the owner studies the toy to see if it works, a chain reaction of unlikely events ends with the owner’s intestines splashed across the store.

Shelborn grabs a flamethrower and takes it to the monkey, trying desperately to destroy the cursed object. At this point, the film introduces voiceover narration from Hal Shelborn (Theo James, Christian Convery) who muses that he doesn’t know if every father passes down a killer curse from one generation to the next. Hal deadpans, “But ours sure did.” It spoils little to reveal that this creepy monkey toy is not done with the Shelborn family.

At times, The Monkey feels decidedly light on plot. The nature of the narrative is something similar to the Final Destination franchise, with the cursed monkey never killing anybody directly but instead setting in motion a series of random events that inevitably result in a person’s death like some macabre Rube Goldberg machine. There is no rhyme or reason underpinning the monkey’s carnage. Its victims are chosen at random; the person turning the key gets no say in the intended target.

Instead, The Monkey is held together by theme and by subtext. At its core, The Monkey is a story about family and about the trauma that parents pass down to their children. The film focuses on Hal’s dysfunctional family dynamics: the disappearance of his father; the “one-in-forty-four-million” brain aneurysm that killed his mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany); the estrangement from his older twin brother Bill (also James and Convery); his relationship to his own son, Petey (Colin O'Brien).

However, this is not some generalized or abstract “trauma” like in so much modern horror. The Monkey is an undeniably personal work for Perkins. In some ways, it feels impossible to parse The Monkey through any lens other than that of its director’s life and experiences. The Monkey is haunted by details drawn from Perkins’ own family history. For a gonzo, gory and graphic horror comedy, The Monkey has a deeply personal perspective.

Of course, The Monkey was adapted from a short story written by Stephen King. It’s not difficult to parse the elements of The Monkey drawn from King’s own life. Like Hal, King was abandoned by his father at a young age and raised by a single mother as the younger of two brothers. This anxiety about absent or dysfunctional fathers and put-upon mothers runs through King’s bibliography, most obviously in books like Carrie and The Shining.

At the same time, it is easy to understand why that premise would appeal to Perkins. The best way to understand The Monkey might be the most flippant: imagine the kind of movie that Steven Spielberg might have made if his father was a closeted gay actor who died of AIDS and his mother had died on 9/11. Just as the specter of Spielberg’s familial dissolution hangs over his filmography, Perkins’ films are all fantastical and horrific abstractions drawn from his own past.

All of Perkins’ films have drawn from his family history. Promoting Hansel and Gretel in 2020, Perkins spoke candidly about the autobiographical underpinnings of his filmography. “Where I am now is the manifesting of experience,” he explained. “Now I get to paint the portrait of what it's been like for me.” Indeed, Perkins has talked about tending towards writing female leads in order to avoid becoming “complacent”, to put some distance between himself and the work.

It feels like there is even less distance between Perkins and The Monkey. There are moments when even the word “subtext” feels misleading. Hal and Bill first find the malevolent toy while digging around the back of their father’s closet, hardly the most subtle of visual metaphors. Following the death of their Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), Hal returns home to the township of Casco to determine if the monkey has returned. Sensing that the monkey has a natural habitat, Bill asks the realtor (Tess Degenstein) if he can inspect the house’s closets.

The monkey seems drawn to these broken families. Following Ida’s death, it falls into the possession of Ricky (Rohan Campbell), whose mother (Janet Kidder) grumbles about Ricky’s own absent father. Ricky sells the monkey on to Bill, but has second thoughts. “It reminds me of my father,” he tells Bill while trying to arrange to buy the monkey back. This is likely a ruse, but it is still interesting that Ricky chooses to take that angle in trying to regain possession of the cursed toy.

The theme of fatherhood runs through The Monkey. Hal is estranged from his son, Petey, motivated by his desire to avoid traumatizing his son in the way that he himself was traumatized. This is obviously a deeply personal theme for Perkins, one that informs earlier films like Hansel and Gretal and Longlegs. “I’m a parent of three,” he explained while promoting Longlegs. “We do our best to minimize the negative impact we have on our kids.”

As an adult, Hal is reintroduced reading a book titled Fatherhood VII, written by Ted (Elijah Wood), Petey’s stepfather who is planning to formally adopt Hal’s son and whose other bestselling self-help books include Jesus’ Dad. Hal’s efforts to protect Petey from the curse that he inherited from his own father Peter, involve complete detachment. Incidentally, Oz is named for his own paternal grandfather, theatre legend Osgood Perkins.

Discussions of Oz Perkins’ filmography understandably tend to focus on his father. Anthony Perkins was a screen legend, and one of the most iconic actors in the history of Hollywood. Notwithstanding the tragedy of having to live in the closet, his role as Norman Bates in Psycho would be enough alone to make him a figure of note. Interestingly, The Monkey is a film populated with dingy motels and hotels. Bill even hides away in the abandoned phone company headquarters CascoTel.

Perkins’ previous film, Longlegs, is perhaps best understood as an extended metaphor for the family’s experience of having to conceal so much about their patriarch’s life and personality. Perkins has argued that Longlegs is a movie about his mother, Berry Berenson, and specifically about how “a mother can lie, and she can lie out of love.” However, that lie is still filtered through the lens of the tragedy of Anthony Perkins, who had to hide himself from the world.

As such, Perkins’s relationship with his father obviously informs The Monkey. However, the film is also clearly preoccupied with the tragic death of Perkin’s mother in the first plane to hit the Twin Towers on 9/11. Hal’s father is an airline pilot. Lois opines that she could have been a stewardess. One of the film’s more load-bearing brick jokes involves skydiving. The movie’s climax involves a plane crashing from the sky and a woman in a wedding dress crashing through the ceiling.

Perkins doesn’t just draw from the imagery of his mother’s death. At its core, The Monkey is about the cruelty of random chance, these seemingly arbitrary accidents that happen with no warning or rational explanation. “Everything’s an accident,” Lois tells her children as they attend the funeral of their babysitter (Danica Dreyer). “Or nothing’s an accident. Either way, same thing.” Ruminating on the remote odds of his mother’s death, Hal muses “it had to happen to someone.”

This feels like an expression of how Perkins responded to his mother’s death. “My experience with how my mom died on 9/11 was like: What? Huh? Wait a minute. That’s a thing that can happen?” he confessed. Perkins has also spoken about the difficulty of processing personal grief when it happens in the context of something so much larger, acknowledging, “It’s harder to resolve when there’s a lot of noise in your space.” The Monkey taps into that.

For all the film’s absurdity, there is an incredible amount of Perkins in The Monkey. Indeed, while Perkins acknowledges that the toy only plays a drum because Disney own the copyright to the monkey with the cymbals, Perkins is himself a drummer. His younger brother, Elvis, acknowledges that drumming is quite relaxing for Oz. “He can enjoy playing drums as a hobby, and not be tormented,” Elvis explained. So even that choice feels somewhat personal in nature.

In a world where blockbusters tend to feel increasingly depersonalized and factory-assembled, it is refreshing to see a major studio release that is not only so weird and esoteric, but also so obviously the work of a person with a distinct perspective that informs their work. None of this is to suggest that The Monkey is some austere or self-serious work, especially compared to the much more somber and morose tone of Longlegs.

Given the chaotic nature of The Monkey, Perkins’ unique personal perspective and the film’s familial subtext serve as the glue that holds the end product together. The plot of The Monkey is pure nonsense, a series of elaborate deaths threaded together in a daisy chain, escalating to an absurd climax that doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny. However, The Monkey works because it’s not really about an evil monkey doll. It is ultimately about something more human and more relatable.

The Monkey is a fun midnight movie, a crowd pleasing schlocky high-concept horror comedy. However, it is all of those things and a deeply personal work. It is a reminder of what is missing from a lot of modern mainstream fare.