“Everybody dies, and that’s life.” This ominous refrain in Oz Perkins’ The Monkey encapsulates its central theme: the brutal inevitability of death. Adapting Stephen King’s short story, Perkins infuses the film with his own twisted vision, blending horror and dark comedy into something uniquely unsettling. While some might compare it to Final Destination (in the best kind of way!) , this film is even more unforgiving—there’s no cheating death here. It’s coming, and it’s going to be gruesome.
From the start, Perkins sets The Monkey apart from his previous somber films like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Longlegs. The grindhouse-style opening credits and the sight of a bloodied Adam Scott clutching a toy monkey immediately establish the film’s wickedly fun tone. The premise is simple yet terrifying: a cursed toy monkey that bangs its drum whenever someone is about to die—often in spectacularly brutal fashion.
After a chilling prologue, we meet twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburne (Christian Convery as children, Theo James as adults). When they discover their father’s old toy monkey, they unknowingly unleash its deadly curse. Each time they turn the key in the monkey’s back, someone around them suffers a violent and gruesome death. As the deaths begin piling up, the brothers try everything to rid themselves of the monkey, but it keeps finding its way back, leading to even more carnage as they grow older.
Perkins has a blast crafting inventive, nightmarish deaths. A swimming pool turns into an electrified death trap, a kitchen death mixing icing and blood and a shotgun blast into an estate agents head. Unlike Longlegs, which oozed dread, The Monkey leans into gleeful, over-the-top mayhem, turning death into something disturbingly playful. There is something thrilling about watching a director like Perkins play with the idea of death and dread and a jump from the moodiness of Long Legs to the bloody campy/romp of The Monkey. We have seen many horror movies in the past taking a child’s play toy and turning it into an object of fear, and there is no difference here. While we are used to seeing these toy monkeys have a pair of cymbals (you can thank Disney who trademarked this for Toy Story 2 so a drum has to suffice here).
You can’t help but feel that beneath the chaotic whirlwind of this story, lies something deeply personal. Perkins, who is the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins, he suffered an unimaginable loss when his mother, Berry Berenson, was killed on 9/11. While Longlegs explored themes of fatherhood, The Monkey seems to wrestle with the randomness of tragedy—suggesting that fate, like the monkey itself, is cruel, senseless, and unstoppable.
Visually, The Monkey is one of Perkins’ most striking films. Cinematographer Nico Aguilar bathes scenes in an eerie, almost dreamlike menace, while editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng keep the film lean and relentless at 98 minutes—a theme that is running over recent horror hits like Heart Eyes and Companion. It may be based on a short story, but it is fleshed out enough to tell the story it needs to, without overstaying its welcome.
Beyond its personal subtext, The Monkey also pushes back against the need to over-explain horror. It doesn’t dwell on origins or logic; it embraces the sheer, absurd randomness of fate. In doing so, Perkins crafts a film that is as entertaining as it is unsettling. Sometimes, all you can do is laugh in the face of death and accept that it is your time to go. The Monkey is a campy romp that is the most fun you will have with a horror movie this year.
