Sixteen Further Screams For Halloween: Day 9 (The Monkey)

It's shocking how good 2025 has been when it comes to the tried and true Stephen King cinematic adaptation. This along with The Long Walk already out, and a new version of The Running Man due out in the cinema soon. That and a goddamn It spinoff series coming some... time? Too spooky for me. Which leaves us here, with an adaptation of an old short story from the 80's done by that guy what done Longlegs. That was one hell of a movie, as is this. I actually read The Monkey before sitting down with the picture, just as a curiosity. It's a simple enough concept, and King uses the fear and dread of this toy that kills people when you wind the key well. A nice 30 pages of scares and frights and trying to get rid of this cursed object. Osgood Perkins takes that idea and runs with it in different and exciting directions, and the result is one hell of a horror picture.

The Monkey is operating on two very different registers at once, and it melds them perfectly together to form something stronger than either would have been on their own. Let's discuss the more serious throughline first. To me, this is a movie all about grief and loss and how it can damage you, how you carry that damage, and how you can come to terms with it. The twin brothers, Hal and Bill, have both suffered intense and horrific loss at the hands of this fucking haunted monkey toy. Both retreat inward into solitude because of it, but it's what they take with them that drives their actions in the movie. Hal, our protagonist, is a deadbeat dad and a loner loser with loads of self-loathing (Boy I really like the alliteration there, gang) who has cut himself off from as much attachment to his family as he can, not speaking to his brother and basically never seeing his son. Despite that, he's still going to lose his son to adoption by Elijah Wood, and the pair are stuck together with him keeping that distance because of that pain and loss. If he never makes another human attachment, if he keeps everyone he loves at arm's length, then the monkey can't kill them to make him feel bad. Contrast with Bill, who was always a bit of a shit, but who breaks upon the death of his mother and blames Hal for it, living in solitude and letting that hate fester in his heart before concocting a half-baked revenge scheme to get the monkey back and kill his brother with it as revenge. Except, it doesn't work because this fucking monkey never kills the one you want. It drums to its own beat, as does the mortality of us all, and so Hal and Bill each have to learn to live on in the spectre of death. Hal needs to learn to accept mortality and connect with his family, and Bill needs to learn to set free the hate in his heart and live on.

And then Bill's head gets obliterated with a fucking bowling ball shot from a cannon. This is the other sicknasty register that The Monkey operates on: dark comedy. In the short story, the deaths the monkey toy caused were simple accidents; falling from a tree or being hit by a car. Nasty, but accidents. The deaths in The Monkey are absurd death traps that Final Destination would reject for their silliness. Within the first few minutes a man has his guts dragged out by a goddamn harpoon. A man steps on a rake like he's Sideshow fucking Bob and chokes to death on his own vape. A GODDAMN GUY SHOOTS A HIVE OF WASPS OR BEES OR SOMETHING AND ALL OF THEM FLY IN A SINGULAR STREAM DOWN HIS FUCKING THROAT HOLY SHIT!!! Amidst this deep meditation on death and mortality, this movie is fucking hilarious. It's sick, tragic, horrific, and comedic all at once, and never once lets up. It's so fucked up! Death is so fucked up that you can't help but laugh at just how titanically fucked this all is! Some of the editing choices to speed through things and go "yep, he's dead" are absolute genius in their comic timing. What an absolute fucking hoot of a movie that still has a deep message within it. It's absolutely wild, it's cinema, and that's where we are going to leave Stephen King this year. Who knew there was still such gold to be held within the short story? Really, it's more the framework used by Osgood Perkins to craft a masterfully dark comedic horror film. Well done with that, and let's leave it there.