Osgood Perkins, the visionary filmmaker behind last year’s creepy-as-hell “Longlegs,” still remembers the first time he was exposed to Stephen King’s macabre world.
He was a kid and his parents (actor Anthony Perkins and actress Berry Berenson) had left him with a babysitter. He crept downstairs and what he saw horrified and delighted him. It was “Salem’s Lot,” the 1979 CBS miniseries by “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” auteur Tobe Hooper, based on King’s beloved 1975 novel. He vividly remembers – still – the little vampire kid floating outside the window.
And now, with “The Monkey,” his adaptation of King’s 1980 short story (collected in “Skeleton Crew” in 1985), Perkins has made something that will traumatize an entirely new generation of curious kids with sleepy babysitters.
Perkins said that James Wan, the director of “The Conjuring” and “Saw,” and his producing partner at Atomic Monster, had held the rights to the story for a long time. “They had not been able to crack it,” Perkins said. The scripts that they had developed weren’t up to snuff, so they encouraged Perkins to start over. He was over the moon.
“It’s Charlie Bucket getting the candy bar, and the fucking golden ticket is inside,” Perkins said. “And you go, I can’t believe it’s actually that, it’s the happiest privilege. You get the greatest author of all time in the space, and you get this indelible image of the monkey, which everybody feels something about. And a creator, when you’re given that credit at the store, with audiences, they already know what they feel. They feel something off and uncanny about this monkey toy. It was just incredibly exciting. I’m humbled by the opportunity.”
When Perkins sat down to adapt the short story, he searched, looking to “find the key that’s going to unlock it.” “Ultimately, it is up to me. King didn’t expect me to honor the story specifically and I didn’t feel like the short story was the movie in and of itself,” Perkins said. “I needed to invent the thing.” After a little while, Perkins said, he came to the realization that the monkey itself didn’t really do anything. “The monkey is not M3GAN. It doesn’t attack you. It’s not Chucky. It doesn’t stab you,” Perkins said.
In Perkins’ “The Monkey,” twin brothers (played by Theo James) are cursed by this monkey that their dad left behind and one that, they think, was responsible for their mother’s untimely death (she’s played by Tatiana Maslany). As adults, one of the brothers is attempting to stop the horrors caused by the monkey, while the other brother is attempting to weaponize the monkey. But it’s very hard to direct death.
As he worked on the script, Perkins began to see the monkey as almost like Buddha. “It’s got this almost spiritual weirdness to it, where it just so happens to be there when people die in insane ways, unexpectedly, for no reason,” Perkins said. “I’ve had that happen to me in my life. That’s happened. And when I had that moment of connecting to that, it was like, Oh, I’m an expert. I’m an authority on what it’s like to have a monkey in your life.” Perkins connected the emotions to what had happened when his mother died in the 9/11 attacks (she was on American Airlines Flight 11) and how he and his brother, musician Elvis Perkins, dealt with that tragedy in different ways. “We were such different people, who shared the same experience, but couldn’t have responded more differently,” Perkins said.
The reconciliation around her death and his own relationship to his brother became important, Perkins said, as did humor. “When you experience something tragic, it’s rough for a long time and then it changes. You get older and if you’re lucky enough to have support and you’re lucky to be in a life that can afford help, you can grow into something else,” Perkins said. “You get a distance from these things. And I was fortunate that I had some the ability to have a comic distance, and it all felt sort of holistically healing, in a way.”
Yes, “The Monkey” is wacky and chaotic, with some deaths that would make the creators of the “Final Destination” franchise squeamish. But there’s also a real soulfulness to it. It seems foolish to think anybody but Perkins could have adapted the King story this well.
“Once you achieve that place of authority then you’re freed up in such a way, where you’re just writing what you know to be true,” Perkins said. He points to a scene where a person gives a eulogy and another where Maslany’s character tells the boys something in a graveyard, as being possible only because he himself reached that place of authority. “There’s no solve to any of this stuff. Once you get into it, you find that center. Then anything is possible.” That confidence, Perkins said, is important because writing is such a “lonely, aggravating, agonizing experience.” If he has confidence, he can be loose, and the work will be much better. “You can actually tell yourself it’s going to be okay and then you let it happen.” Perkins has often repeated in interviews that the way he succeeds is by not trying so hard. “When you try hard and you bear down, things tend to get a little tight, and when you let it come and you let it pass through you, it’s a much happier experience,” Perkins said.
Another big change Perkins made while adapting the King story was to change what the monkey looked like. Part of this was because of necessity – Disney actually copyrighted the small, cymbal-playing monkey because the toy makes an appearance in Pixar’s “Toy Story 3.” Perkins’ monkey instead has a drum, which actually adds to the intensity of the movie. Every time the twirls one of its sticks, it creates an unbelievable amount of suspense, because you (as an audience member) knows that when the stick comes down, somebody is going to die in some horrible way.
The monkey in “The Monkey” is also bigger, more physically substantial.
“You look down the path a little bit of actually making the fucking movie and realizing, , Are people really going to be interacting with a little thing? It seemed very awkward to me, so I wanted to give it a presence,” Perkins said. He also pointed back to the fact that it doesn’t really have to do anything. It’s not running around and biting people’s ankles. “Its presence is what makes it a problem. And so I had to give it real presence.” The monkey is the physical manifestation of the hidden horror that the boys’ father passed down to them. It should probably be noted that Perkins’ father, actor Anthony Perkins (best remembered as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”), was a closeted gay man who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992. Osgood was only 18.
All of this talk of Perkins’ past is making it seem like “The Monkey” is a downer, awash in trauma, which has turned many potentially enjoyable horror movies into introspective slogs. This is not the case. “The Monkey” is a ton of fun, channeling the chaotic energy of 1980s classics like “Gremlins,” “An American Werewolf in London” and King’s own “Creepshow” (made with “Night of the Living Dead” auteur George A. Romero). It is also, proudly, very different than Perkins’ sleeper hit “Longlegs” from last summer.
“It felt very natural to me. This is obviously my sense of humor. The references for the movies was in the art that I was considering, it was more ‘Death Becomes Her’ than it was going to be something else. It felt more like me, in a way, than anything else,” Perkins said. “I don’t really like making people feel scared, but it happens. I don’t try to terrorize anybody and I’m not out there to make any me feel bad. This was an overt attempt to make people feel good.”
There’s a specific moment, where a shock of electricity crawls along a puddle that feels like something out of one of those old movies. (The electricity leads to a woman who is diving into a pool. The electricity causes her to explode into meaty chunks, somehow outdoing the diving board explosion from “Lethal Weapon 2.”) Perkins said that the “wacky bolt of electricity” felt like everything from Robert Zemeckis to Steven Spielberg to Emperor Palpatine in “Return of the Jedi.” “We want to hit all the high notes and have it just be fun and surprising,” Perkins said. “There’s nothing serious about it. There’s nothing real about it. And I think the release of that in a horror movie, when you’re having a good time with something as improbable and unlikely as what we’ve got, it’s pretty relaxing.”
But did Perkins ever hear from Stephen King? The man who had scared and excited him all those years ago?
Perkins met him the day before we talked. “He absolutely loves the movie,” Perkins said. He pointed me to his review on Threads, where King said, “You’ve never seen anything like it,” followed by some more R-rated language. (King, who escaped X after Elon Musk started acting up, has since returned to the platform.) “Feel free to quote it, because I quote it every day, because his positive review of the movie is kind of what it’s all about,” Perkins said.
But don’t worry, Perkins isn’t done – he’s got another movie, “Keeper,” out in October, again from Neon (which released “Longlegs” and “The Monkey”). “The best thing I think I can offer to anybody is that ‘The Monkey’ is nothing like ‘Longlegs’ and ‘Keeper’ is nothing like ‘The Monkey,’” Perkins said. “My fellow artists and my producers and my distributor, we’re managing to reinvent things every time and not cross the same bridge twice, and just trying to put forth good things in the theater, to fight the good fight against streaming.”
An Osgood Perkins movie getting lost in the nebulous world of streaming? Talk about scary.
“The Monkey” is out now.
The post How ‘The Monkey’ Writer-Director Osgood Perkins Added Soul to All the Splatter appeared first on TheWrap.
