If you’re a fan of horror movies, you’ve probably heard the name Osgood Perkins a lot over the last ten years. The filmmaker is responsible for the highly impactful and atmospheric Longlegs, as well as an adaptation of Hansel and Gretel. He directed the moody stunners I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016) and The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), and is in post on an isolated cabin-in-the-woods set thriller Keeper. Not only has Perkins cemented himself as the go-to director for an entire genre of film, he’s also developed a reputation for making slightly autobiographical films, channeling his trauma through a filtered lens and an easily digestible narrative. His latest effort, The Monkey, may be originally derived from the ramblings of another master of horror, but the movie still very much has Perkins’s signature fingerprints all over it.
“I’m looking at a concept that is basically, there’s a monkey that appears in childhood, it doesn’t do anything, but a bunch of people die in really unexplainable ways that are insane,” director Perkins tells me about his first reaction to being offered a chance to adapt the story for the screen. “Oh, well, that’s my biography — there’s just no monkey in it.”
In the film, when identical twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (played in their youth by Christian Convery, and as adults by Theo James) find their father’s old clockwork monkey in their attic, a peculiar series of gruesome events follow. Determined to rid themselves of the wicked talisman, the boys toss the toy down an old well out back on their property, grow up, and move on with their separate lives. Years later, the cursed object miraculously resurfaces, and the deadly cycle begins anew.
Based on the Stephen King short story of the same name, director Perkins found familiarity in the material, which in many ways, reflects the chaotic ramblings of his own life. The eldest son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins and Cat People actress-photographer-model Berry Berenson, his family history is horribly fraught with senseless tragedy. When Osgood Perkins was only 18 years old, his father Anthony passed away from AIDS-related pneumonia. A very tense and repressed actor, Anthony lost his own dad at the tender age of five, incorrectly believing that he was the reason behind the catastrophe because he had wished the man dead so many times. Osgood’s mother, who married Anthony shortly after his conversion therapy at age 41, made it a point to shield her sons from the truth of her husband’s sexuality for as long as humanly possible, leaving Oz and his brother Elvis to believe falsehoods about the man who raised them for their entire childhood. Berry herself died in a strange twist of fate on September 11, 2001, as she happened to be a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11.
Knowing his background, it’s easy to understand why Perkins would attempt to find a creative outlet for life’s frustrations. Funnily enough, although the studio already had a script in place when they contacted him, Perkins found the material to be a little too melodramatic, and opted to adjust the story to one that fell more in line with his own life. “I felt like I had an opportunity to personalize it, which was going to make it a winner. I think what happens with adaptations of important authors is that there’s a timidity to it. Where it’s like, ‘Oh, I gotta be careful to make sure to just do the thing the way that it is, because I’m afraid to do the thing, and I should probably just copy the thing. That creates a very wanting experience, right? It’s not very fulfilling, because the book is a book, it’s not a movie. The book of Lolita is an unbelievably perfect entity, and the movie Lolita is an unbelievably perfect entity, and they have nothing to do with each other. The Shining and The Shining: both gorgeous things that are not even related, in a lot of ways.”
Perkins, who took the gig as “an opportunity to do an homage to the man,” felt that the most effective way to honor King, who he candidly refers to as the greatest American author of all time — “Like, sure John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac, and all of these titans that I’m in love with, but if we think about relevance and impact?” — was to externalize his experience through bite-sized, easily accessible chunks of information. “Looking at the monkey, and looking at what it does, oh, it doesn’t move. Oh, it doesn’t stab you. Oh, it doesn’t crawl around. Oh, it doesn’t choke you. It just sits there. It’s just like a totem, or a deity, or a God, or an idol or an icon or a statue. It’s a thing that stuff happens around.” He continues, “What if it doesn’t do anything? What if the monkey just creates life and death around it, like life does, or like God does?”
Seeking to bypass any Chucky or Annabelle associations, Perkins refrained from making his evil toy doll emote. “What if the monkey’s more just this inert God thing, and what if it’s just about the fact that crazy shit happens to people?” It was at this moment in development that Perkins had an epiphany. He realized that being an expert in inexplicably strange occurrences meant that life had, oddly, morphed him into the perfect man for the job. “I was like, oh, well you know who crazy shit has happened to? Me!”
If I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House was dedicated to his father, and Longlegs was about the artifice created by his mother’s love, then The Monkey is about Perkins and his brother — well, at least partially. “My experience was that, especially when my mom died, my brother and I, being such different people, we really schismed. We really lost each other. We really lost a certain kind of connection.” Through the recollection of his own memories, Perkins excavated the wishbone of his movie. “What if it’s about that? Like, what if that’s the shape, and that the reconciliation that has to happen is between those two forces?”
Despite the easy comparison between the brothers in The Monkey and real-life brothers Oz and Elvis, the director insists that the exact characters onscreen are not completely emblematic of him and his sibling — a point made all the more discernible by the fact that he and Elvis are not twins (and neither are the Hal and Bill from the book). “So, who are the brothers? Well, they’re both me, right? Neither one of those brothers is my brother. Both brothers are facets of me. They represent my good parts, my limitations, where I’m big and where I’m small.” The nuclear family written into the script may not be an exact representation of his own, but the mood of the picture is more Perkins than any of his previous endeavors. “It’s more about me, probably, than any of my other movies are,” he says. “Maybe that’s why it’s funny, because I’m looser about it, and I don’t take it too seriously, because that would make me into a real asshole.”
It’s also not lost on the filmmaker that in his attempt to populate his movie with horror tropes, enlisting a pair of doppelgangers as his leads provided the narrative with an uncanny sense of texture and unease. It might even attract a big-name actor to the role, like Theo James of The White Lotus fame. “I felt like having known Theo a little bit before we did this, that he’s a really playful, silly, loose guy,” recalls Perkins. “He’s not serious, he’s not pretentious, he’s not self-important, you know, in the same way that Nicolas Cage is just like, the most joyful, playful, non-ego-driven human being that I know.” Apparently, while working on Longlegs, Perkins realized that many people found Cage’s humility surprising. “Nick is anti-ego, like, there’s no ego on Nicolas Cage, and similarly, there’s no preciousness around Theo James. He’s not concerned about how he’s going to come off. He’s not careful about what he’s doing. He’s very brave, and we did it with a lot of affection.”
In the film, James, who Perkins repeatedly praises as a “terrific actor,” plays both adult versions of the twins, Hal and Bill. While some filmmakers might feel compelled to steer the ship with an iron fist when directing a single performer to craft two separate personalities, Perkins employs a more hands-off approach once he’s handed over the script. “The material resonated with him, then his application is to apply his ability to the part, and I don’t fuck with that,” he says. “I don’t try to insert myself. I don’t tell him what I think he needs to do. Once I’ve written the words, and I’ve shaped the thing, and I’ve written the subtext into the dialogue, and I think I know what it means, then I give it away. It’s his job to bring it to life.” Perkins adds, “He wants to do the best job he can do, by the way, right? It’s on him to do the thing, so.”
Zany, off-beat, and uproariously funny, The Monkey’s sense of humor is so dark, it’s inky black. This was so much the case that Perkins was shocked to find his movie so well received by an LA audience at an early screening: “We all thought it was funny, but then you look at it for a long time in the editing room, and you begin to wonder.”
Upon finding the toy, young boys Hal and Bill discover that if they turn the key in the stuffed animal’s back, the monkey will begin to bang his drum, and someone, somewhere within close proximity will die in an unnatural way. More pointedly, bodies drop like flies around them in increasingly erratic Rube Goldberg freak accidents, ranging from death by harpoon, launched by a statue adorned in diving gear akin to something out of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, to accidentally ingesting a giant scorpion by way of taking in a steaming hot cup of morning brew.
Balancing on a razor’s edge, Perkins successfully delivers a bizarre horror-comedy that acts as a coping mechanism for grief by finding humor in the absolute absurdity of it all. “If it’s a smartly written comedy, you don’t have to play it very hard — you just let it roll off,” relays Perkins. “I was raised on The Simpsons, so I was raised on really smart comic writing, as opposed to dumb, sophomoric, hurtful writing, I suppose? It’s a different kind of comic writing, that’s like insult-driven or whatever. I’m much more of a Brad Bird, Conan O’Brien-era guy.”
This translates to The Monkey’s body count, which comes across as more sporadically pungent than mean-spirited. “I thought all the deaths were pretty goofy, and surreal, and sort of Itchy and Scratchy, and pleasant, and enjoyable, and I can see them as playful set pieces that people are going to like,” smiles Perkins. “I think that the Benihana thing was pretty fun. Benihana was the place I went to for all my birthdays, and I used to take my older kids to Benihana for their birthdays all the time. It just felt cozy, and it’s just, like, so preposterous.”
Aiming for less malice and more mind-boggling gags, the director sought out a more audacious tone for his hilarious hybrid. “The other thing about the deaths in this movie is that none of them are possible, so that kind of takes them out of the realm of horrible, into the role of cartoon — which is where we wanted to be.” The deaths are also announced by splashes of “Killer Red,” as Perkins calls it, a very specific ruby shade that signals to the audience (in a very slapstick manner), if they’re paying attention, that someone onscreen is about to meet their demise. “We did want to mark out death with the color red, and then not use it otherwise,” he says. “And that’s just something that you plant in your movie to just give it some texture. It’s dropped in there for you to notice.”
After giving quiet nods of approval during each phase of the making of this movie, King took to Twitter to fawn over Perkins’s interpretation of his material. “You can imagine that was an alright day for me,” the director humbly downplays with a grin, knowing full well that the author is not one to mince words. “Yeah, I’m better than Stanley Kubrick, it turns out,” he jokes.
Grinning as if in approbation, the toy monkey in the movie is almost identical to King’s original tale of woe, with one key difference: it bangs on a drum, instead of crashing cymbals. “Funnily enough, when I was given the assignment by the producers, it came with, ‘Oh, it can’t be the cymbals, because Disney owns the monkey with symbols,’ because Disney used it in Toy Story, I guess?” Perkins stares incredulously. “They own that thing now, just in the same way that, incredibly, Disney owns Darth Vader. They own all this great shit just ‘cause they can. So, for me, you can approach that reality in two ways: ‘That’s bullshit! What do you mean they do!?’ Or be like, ‘I guess it should be a drum.’ And hey, a drum is cool, because it has a rhythm to it, and there’s something ominous about it, and it’s really oral. Cool, it’s a drum. Disney, you can have the cymbals. You got it anyway. Well, you can have Darth Vader too, I suppose.” Ironically, the drums actually play better, since a drumbeat can symbolize both the start of war on a battlefield and simultaneously landing the punchline in a joke.
Although some might point to the devil as the root of evil contained within the mangy meddler, Perkins himself has never identified as religious, he just likes the material that the good book provides him. When pushed to reveal more about the monkey’s modus operandi while in production, the director held fast to the idea that the critter is merely entangled in a warped Yoko effect. “You don’t always owe mythology on everything,” says Perkins, who refuses to infantilize his audience. “I’d be nudged by a producer here and there, like, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to just put a little backstory about how the monkey got its thing?’ And I was like, ‘I guess maybe the point is that the monkey doesn’t really do anything. The monkey doesn’t really have any power. It’s just that people are going to die crazy anyway. Maybe the monkey is just the focus for that?’ So, it doesn’t come from anywhere. All I can tell you is that you can’t destroy it, because you can’t destroy the fact that everybody dies.”
The chronicles of Perkins’s own mythos are so deeply ingrained in The Monkey that he (along with his teenage daughter Beatrix) actually appears onscreen in a speaking role for the first time in years. The director, who originally gained notoriety for his adorably awkward depiction of “Dorky” David Kidney in the widely beloved Legally Blonde, characteristically turns to self-effacing humor, referring to himself as a “shitty actor,” before alluding to his own nostalgia. “People really like Legally Blonde a lot,” he says. “Like, they like it a lot.”
In addition to exercising his own demons, Perkins hopes that the message in the movie, as impeccably stated by Tatiana Maslany’s razor-sharp Lois, “Everybody dies, and that’s life,” provides fans with the same sort of existential comfort that he finds in the coagulated randomness of life. “It’s a real trust fall that we take just by living every day with the acknowledgment that whatever this is, stops, and something else happens,” says Perkins.
“And so, what are we gonna do? Sit around and perseverate about that all day, worry about it? It can be done. We can move through life that way, but I think it’s just being in acceptance. It’s simple, maybe simple to the point of being a little corny, but I think the idea is, you live every day like you’re alive. And someone’s like, what do you want audiences to take away when they leave the movie theater? My answer is that they’re still alive, right? That you get to go out into the night and breathe the night air, or you get to eat a little bit more of the popcorn that you had, or you get to go and make love, or you get to go and have a great dream, or you get to go and have a good meal, or I don’t know. But the idea walking out of the theater is, here we are. And at some point, it won’t be this, but for right now, it is.”
“The Monkey” opens in theaters tomorrow, Friday, February 21.