‘Osgood Perkins’ appears in sharp, thick print across the promotional materials for The Monkey, the latest adaptation of the Stephen King story about a toy chimp that causes a series of exponentially messy deaths. You can’t miss the name at the top of the poster, on video thumbnails, and in the film’s first teaser — before any actual footage of the movie. Perkins has been working for decades, but 2024’s indie horror phenomenon Longlegs launched him into Brand Name status. Shrewdly, film distributor Neon hopes to sell his latest film to an audience hungry for more of the dish they loved last time.
That audience won’t get what they’re expecting. And yet, as movie studios fixate on giving fans exactly what they want, Perkins may be making a name for himself by giving them exactly what he wants. The Monkey is, to put it gently, the peanut butter to Longlegs’ celery.
Perkins’ previous nauseating horror-thriller has a sly humor to it (what else can we make of Nic Cage’s prosthetic-centered performance?), but first and foremost, Longlegs is a grim and gloomy affair, taking inspiration from difficult horror like The Silence of the Lambs and Possession, along with infamously challenging domestic dramas like John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. Perkins blends languid shots and an unusual story structure to create a sense of unease, sparking a sense of novelty among horror fans accustomed to most of a given year’s popular horror films painting by numbers with viscera.
The Monkey is, by comparison, closer to what horror fans expect to see in theaters or on Shudder a couple of times each month. Its Stephen King source text is so iconic that it has inspired cover art for many editions of his short story collection Skeleton Crew since it was published 40 years ago. The adaptation tells a familiar tale of good vs. evil with a clear protagonist and a laughably literal antagonist. As Perkins’ hero Hal (Theo James) fights to overcome the villain and restore his place in the nuclear family unit, Perkins serves gore and jump scares as liberally as a drunk uncle at a wedding’s open bar.
But The Monkey, for all of the familiar trappings, isn’t just another horror-tinged distraction. As the kills become gnarlier — and more, how do I put this?… impressive? — it becomes clear that Perkins is using a familiar skeleton to support something muscular and human. He once again borrows from the works of some of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Not the ones that get added to the Criterion Collection, but those you see get loving 4K discs from boutique brands like Arrow and Vinegar Syndrome.
In the 1980s and early ’90s, directors Frank Henenlotter, Stuart Gordon, and Peter Jackson made a splash — quite literally — across horror movies with films like Basket Case, Re-Animator, and Dead Alive. These movies were a shock to the system, returning to the schlocky humor and cartoonishness of 1950s late-night drive-in terrors while blowing past the standards and norms of modern decency.
The Monkey revives that approach to horror filmmaking. In a moment when horror directors either burden their films and TV shows with blunt, metaphorical messages or drain the blood from their kills in hopes of courting the wider PG-13 audience, Perkins has made a film that’s both more horrifically violent than his contemporaries’ projects and also unapologetically funny.
Along with promoting Perkins, The Monkey’s trailers make one other promise to viewers: People will die, and it will be fucked up. So it’s fitting that the director would, this time, learn from the champions of the shameless, vulgar, and profane.
Perkins could still return to the Longlegs style of serious, gloomy horror, making it a calling card in the way Eli Roth did with torture porn and M. Night Shyamalan has with twisty thrillers. But I suspect he’s drawn to something beyond a particular subgenre.
As many critics have noted before me, the unifying material of Perkins’ work appears to be his family.
Perkins’ father, Anthony Perkins, best known for the role of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, died from complications of AIDS. His mother, actress Berry Berenson, died on Sept. 11, 2001, as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11. He comes from a long line of tragedy. In 1937, Anthony Perkins’ father (also named Osgood) died of a heart attack three hours after the opening performance of his new show at the National Theatre. As a child, Anthony Perkins blamed himself, having long wished for his father to be gone. As an adult, he named his first son after his late father.
Viewers don’t have to squint to see the Perkins family tree in The Monkey, Longlegs, or their predecessors. And that, alone, could justify Osgood Perkins’ name taking prominent placement across every new release. With both Longlegs and The Monkey, he screams the same cathartic truth that has radiated not just through his family tree but from the center of horror itself: Everybody dies.
What’s special — what makes seeing Osgood Perkins’ name appear shortly after the lights lower and the score starts — is that we know the message when we buy the ticket, but not our reaction. Will we laugh? Will we cry? Will we squirm at Nic Cage embodying an unknowable existential dread? Or will we barf because a toy monkey caused a human being to explode into a trillion pieces of flesh, bone, eyes, and fingernails?
Like I said, it won’t be what you’re expecting.
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