The Monkey: Oz Perkins finds a darker side to Stephen King’s cursed toy story

Stephen King’s 1980 short story ‘The Monkey’ is a surprisingly sombre take on the ‘cursed toy’ premise. When a moth-eaten toy clangs its cymbals, people die of natural but suspicious causes. The protagonist, a father worried that he’s failing his wife and sons the way his own father did, is also the victim of an economic downturn. Oz Perkins’s film adaptation changes things, starting with the toy. Because Disney owns rights to the cymbal-playing monkey thanks to a cameo in Toy Story 3 (2010), The Monkey’s monkey features a drumming gadget (which inevitably evokes Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 film version). Perkins also changes the tone, leaning into the nastily playful aspect of childhood terrors. Though the ‘family curse’ is still present, this is as much about siblings as parents.

Known for curious, disorienting art-horror films like February (aka The Blackcoat’s Daughter, 2015) and Longlegs (2024), Perkins confidently takes a different approach. In some ways, it’s more like a 1980s Stephen King film than ‘The Monkey’ is like a Stephen King story – inclining to the black humour, broad strokes characterisations and even golden oldie soundtrack choices of George A. Romero’s Creepshow (1982), John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) or Lewis Teague’s Cat’s Eye (1985). 

The monkey not only blights the lives of twin brothers Hal and Bill (Christian Convery as children, Theo James as grown-ups) but destroys a small Maine town like the vampire of ’Salem’s Lot or the antique shop of Needful Things. The grinning, evil contraption “doesn’t do requests” – when wound up, it drums and people of its own choosing die. The primal sin is young Hal’s: bullied at school by a hilariously malevolent girl gang under the direction of his brother, he turns the key after he knows full well the likely consequences, hoping to get rid of Bill. Instead, the monkey kills his struggling Mom (Tatiana Maslany, doing wonders with a necessarily curtailed role). The monkey’s curse continues, with the uncle who adopts the boys trampled to jam in his sleeping bag. The uncle is a funny cameo from Perkins himself, reminding us that before he turned to direction he was known as a comedy character actor in the likes of Legally Blonde (2001).

Mention of the Pale Horseman of the Apocalypse perhaps links the Monkey universe with the Japanese killer slave-gods of the King-influenced Death Note manga franchise, but the horror here is what people do to their own families. Grown-up Hal has a sullen son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), who is about to be adopted by a smoothly obnoxious parenting guru (Elijah Wood). Hal stays away from Petey to keep him out of the monkey’s killing zone – finally realising why his own father disappeared – and it’s almost a relief for the lad to learn that the estrangement is because of a supernatural curse rather than Hal just being an uncaring deadbeat. On a last road trip with Petey, Hal is pulled back into the monkey’s orbit by the death of his aunt. Returning to the town where he grew up, he finds it plagued by daily freak accidents staged as horrific, startling, slapstick takes on the deaths of the Omen or Final Destination series.

King presumes one turn of the key would be enough to frighten people off cranking the monkey, but Perkins – who lost his father to Aids in 1992, and his mother in 9/11 – has a darker take. Here, the callous community is proud of its death toll, with a busload of cheerleaders turning up to applaud each fresh atrocity. The monkey’s current owner is addicted to winding it up no matter where the axe (or shotgun or hornet’s nest or samurai sword) may fall. With extreme close-ups of its sinister workings, Perkins makes the toy a shiver-inducing weird presence, but also invests it with a glamour that makes people want to steal it for themselves, especially those who have unresolved family issues and are willing to ignore the evidence in the hope that this time the monkey will do its owner’s bidding.

King and Perkins are both explorers of the nightmare side of America, acknowledging that killer cars or demonic serial killers are only aspects of problems which run deeper. In The Monkey, things would be fine if the toy were left on the shelf, but the imp of the perverse – as identified by the founding father of American horror, Edgar Allan Poe – insists the key must be turned, and the consequences exulted in. In its own terrifying, challengingly comical way, The Monkey stands as horror’s State of the Union address.

► The Monkey is in UK cinemas 21 February.