Films: The making of an 'adorable horror movie'

IF YOU ever encounter a toy monkey with bulging eyes, a sinister toothy grin, colourful clothes and a drum, never ever turn the key in its back. Not if you don’t want those around you—strangers and loved ones alike — to die a horrible, gruesome death.

At least, that’s how it goes in The Monkey, a new film from Longlegs director Osgood Perkins, based on Stephen King’s horrifying short story of the same name.

The gory horror-comedy follows twin brothers, Hal and Bill, who find a mysterious wind-up monkey and prompt a series of atrocious deaths that tear their family apart.

They try to get rid of the chimp, but it keeps finding its way back into their lives — so much so that, 25 years after the horrific killings of their childhood, it resurfaces with a new murderous spree that forces the estranged brothers to confront it, once and for all.

“This monkey has a Malvolian force behind it, a kind of ability to cause death and carnage around it at any turn,” says The Gentleman star Theo James, 40, who plays the grown-up versions of Hal and Bill.

“It also has a very strange and opaque way of granting wishes, wishes of death.”

What’s so terrifying about the monkey is that it isn’t an animated toy, it doesn’t murder with its own paws. Instead, turning the key causes its grin to widen and its arms to beat its drum, an action that first seems innocuous before it becomes clear that its drumming is a precursor to certain death, a graphic slaughtering of a person of its choosing.

“In developing it early on, you’re always tasked with figuring out what the mythology is, or what the monster is, and why it works or how it works, and it’s tricky because this is an inert character,” says director Perkins, 51.

“It’s not like Chucky or Gremlins or M3gan. It sort of plays its drum and people around it die, so I had to figure out what made sense to me.

“Because I’m always trying, in the movies I make, to make it about me.”

Family is a theme that runs through The Monkey: Hal and Bill are raised by a single mother, their estranged father out of the picture. The boys have a lovely relationship with their mother, but all hell breaks loose when they find the monkey amid some of their dad’s old things and the sensitive Hal sees it as a way to seek connection with his father — with disastrous consequences.

“It’s pretty well known that I have experienced some pretty shocking stuff in my life, the loss of both of my parents being pretty wild events,” says Perkins, whose father, Psycho star Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS-related pneumonia, and whose mother was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 and died in the September 11 attacks.

“I was eager to use this property as a key to sort of healing those experiences by applying a comic and absurdist touch to it...

“It became this almost absurd quality of the monkey that it doesn’t really do anything. People die all the time. In fact, everybody dies sooner or later, one way or another, and sometimes it’s totally normal and natural and sometimes it’s totally terrible and crazy.

“In my own personal life, I’ve had a share of both. I’ve had some pretty extreme, tragic deaths in my life. I’ve had some strange things happen. So I sort of took from there and said: ‘What if the monkey is kind of just there?’

“Of course it’s causing these things to happen, but I leaned into the universal concept of: ‘Everybody dies, it’s just a question of when’.”

“The monkey is a parable for mortality, and death is chasing or looming over us at all times. We can’t outrun it,” James adds.

For James, who picks up the roles of Hal and Bill in the later timeline in the film, playing twin brothers who are very different —one sensitive and introverted, the other almost machiavellian — was an interesting exercise.

“Hal is very internal,” he says.

“I always like performances where the detail is in the minutia. You read it through the eyes, and Hal has been diminished by the trauma and death that’s surrounded him.

“But Bill is the opposite. He wears kind of gender-fluid clothes. He doesn’t give a s*** about how society views him. He projects himself with an aura of confidence and mania.”

While The Monkey is, in many ways, a splatter film, full of gory and imaginative deaths, it’s also darkly comic. The killings, while bloody and unorthodox, are at times so absurd they’re hilarious, at others horrifying and haunting in their impact.

“He always pitches it as Gremlins meets a spice of Hereditary, and I think that’s quite right,” says James.

“It’s a little bit of a change for Oz, cause it’s highly comedic. It’s a very funny movie. From the very beginning when he showed me what he was doing I thought it was heartfelt and warm and terrifying, but also really funny.”

“I just feel like the world is getting pretty dark and serious, and a little bit of relief getting served up as a horror movie feels like good medicine,” says Perkins.

“We really tried for an adorable horror movie. Everything is sort of ironic or dystopian or negative, and this felt more adorable than that.”

‘Adorable’ is an interesting word choice by The Monkey’s director, since the film is not lacking in old-school horror, tapping into the universal fear of death and how it’s coming for us all, we just don’t know how or when.

“We all get there in the end, but the thing about humanity — perhaps it’s a blessing, or is it a curse? — we think for most of our relative youth that death doesn’t exist in our zeitgeist, but it’s been there since the day we were born,” James reflects.

“So, it’s how you deal with the spectre of death, and what that does to a person.”

The Monkey is in cinemas now.