WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for The Monkey.
For decades, horror fans have associated Stephen King with monsters. Whether a sinister clown lurking in sewers, a rabid dog patrolling the yard, or a toddler somehow brought back from the dead, King’s creatures practically leap off the page becoming cultural figures unto themselves.
But loyal Constant Readers know that an equally villainous entity lurks within the author’s second short story collection. Third in King’s 1985 tome Skeleton Crew, “The Monkey” follows a wicked windup toy who kills with a clash of his shiny cymbals. In parallel timelines, Hal Shelburn is stalked by this surprising villain who causes death and destruction wherever it goes.
This deep cut demon has not reached the ubiquity of Pennywise, Randall Flagg or Annie Wilkes, but it may be the author’s most overt and bizarre exploration of death. Forty-five years after its initial publication in Gallery magazine, this deadly curiosity has been brought to life through Osgood Perkins’ nihilistic eyes. Much more comedic than its source material, The Monkey is a grisly showcase of outlandish death that conceals an uplifting message about life itself.
Barely faithful to the 1980 story, Perkins’ visual changes can be seen right away. King’s simian killer wears an eerie smile while clanging together large cymbals in front of its face. But due to copyright issues—Disney currently owns the rights to a cymbal-playing monkey—Perkins was forced to adapt. His creature holds a snare drum and a pair of miniature drumsticks seemingly clasped in its hairy paws. While admittedly frustrating, this change actually works in the film’s favor. When wound up by an ornate key protruding from its back, the Monkey lifts a drumstick over its head, reminiscent of an outlaw cocking a gun. Next, the drumstick rapidly spins like a deadly wheel of fortune, targeting anyone in the nearby area. When the uncanny creature has made its choice, the drumstick freezes then smashes down on the head of the drum, unlocking jovial circus music along with the chosen one’s grisly death.
Perkins’ film describes the Monkey as a demonic force, yet King’s spooky toy feels more like a Grim Reaper. Only working when it wants to, this literary contraption springs to life on its own, often clanging its cymbals in the dead of night. But the cinematic version needs an operator. Its arm may remain poised to strike for hours at a time, but Perkins’ curio cannot murder without first being wound up. However, there is a surefire method of protection. The person who turns the key is somehow safe, exempt from what will surely be a shocking demise. Rather than King’s harbinger of death, Perkins’ Monkey becomes a cruel temptation and unexpected tool to spread random misery. Its extended ritual motions build anticipation while allowing the operator time to regret his part in the forthcoming carnage.
While the Monkeys themselves may be similar, they create wildly different waves of destruction. Death by cymbals is relatively mundane and usually mistaken for an accident or natural cause. Hal’s friend falls out of a tree and breaks his neck while his babysitter is shot to death by a quarreling boyfriend. His Aunt Ida has a solitary stroke and another friend is run over in the street by a careless drunk driver. The closest King comes to Perkins’ “freak accidents” are a rag man who dies when a radio falls into his bathtub and Uncle Will’s dog Daisy—yes, King’s Monkey slaughters animals too—who succumbs to an explosive brain hemorrhage. “Like someone put a stick of dynamite in her head,” the vet later says. While certainly devastating, these unassuming fatalities can easily be explained away by the grim brutality of life. They also leave Hal alone in his assertions that he is somehow to blame. After all, how can a wind-up toy have caused what appears to be just another unexpected tragedy?
But Perkins’ Monkey specializes in grisly and surprising kills that feel more akin to Final Destination than King’s original story. The opening scene features a harpoon accidentally firing through a pawn shop clerk then retracting to pull his intestines across the room. Some time later, Babysitter Annie (Danica Dreyer) is accidentally decapitated by a hibachi chef showing off his flamboyant knife skills. The film then becomes a buffet of bizarre dismemberment and death. A young woman explodes while diving into an electrified pool, an unsecured shotgun blows a realtor to smithereens, and Hal’s Uncle Chip (Perkins) is trampled to death by a herd of wild horses. Perkins seems to be having a ball with these outlandish deaths, but poor Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) may get the worst of the batch. After falling face first into a box of fishing lures, the rollers in her hair burst into flames and she careens into a For Sale sign in her own front yard.
The only death that remains from King’s version of the story is that of Mrs. Shelburn. After years of ignoring the Monkey on his brother’s high shelf, Hal is suddenly seized by the uncontrollable desire to wind it up and later finds out that his mother has died. Across town, the doomed woman is standing by the water cooler when she suddenly suffers a massive brain embolism. Perkins’ Lois Shelburn (Tatiana Maslany) dies in similar fashion, though her passing hits much closer to home. In his bedroom, Hal (Christian Convery) commands the Monkey to kill his twin brother Bill (Convery), but finds that the insubordinate monster has directed death somewhere else. While Lois makes food for her beloved boys, blood begins to pour from her eyes and she collapses, smacking her head on the kitchen counter.
While Perkins’ deaths are certainly more cinematic, these differences also reflect each creator. King has long specialized in finding horror in everyday life. While some of his characters fall victim to outlandish ghouls and over-the-top situations, many simply die by fate’s cruel hand. It’s possible that this fascination stems from an incident in the author’s early childhood. At the age of four, King stumbled home from a neighbor’s house, pale as a ghost and refusing to speak. King’s mother would later discover that her son’s playmate had been hit and killed by a train. King still has no memory of the incident and balks at the notion that he’s spent his career trying to make peace with this trauma. However, the incident mirrors young Bill’s response to his friend’s untimely death and it’s possible that “The Monkey” is King’s attempt to explain why fate would point its finger at an innocent child and how King managed to survive when his companion did not.
Perkins has also stated that these extreme deaths stem from his own history with trauma. The director’s father, legendary actor Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992 while his mother Berry Berenson died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Discussing his latest film, Perkins told Empire, “I spent a lot of my life recovering from tragedy, feeling quite bad. It all seemed inherently unfair. You personalize the grief: ‘Why is this happening to me?’ But I’m older now and you realize this shit happens to everyone. Everyone dies. Sometimes in their sleep, sometimes in truly insane ways, like I experienced. But everyone dies. And I thought maybe the best way to approach that insane notion is with a smile.”
While Perkins’ story exists to process the outlandish and unthinkable, King is focused on the random nature of mundane destruction. We should all be cautious while playing near train tracks, climbing trees, or riding bikes in the street and we are all vulnerable to our bodies’ natural failings. But the deaths in Perkins’ film cannot be anticipated. Everyday objects become deadly weapons and danger seems to lurk around every corner. With wildly differing tones, each version of the story explores a different type of grief. King is reckoning with survivor’s guilt and the horror of hindsight bias while Perkins presents a more basic fear: a world that could kill us at any time.
Like many of King’s short stories, “The Monkey” is somewhat autobiographical. The world-famous author and his older brother were raised by a single mother, his father having abandoned the family when he was two years old. King’s Hal discovers the Monkey while searching through a closet filled with his father’s belongings, souvenirs from a career in the Merchant Marines. Hal describes piecing together the life of a parent he will never know and this too feels connected to King’s own past. Rather than a killer curio, young Stephen found among his father’s things a box of Avon paperbacks the author now credits with sparking his love of genre fiction.
As Hal sits with knowledge of the Monkey’s power, a horrible revelation enters his mind. Perhaps his father did not abandon his wife and two young sons for a responsibility-free life of adventure. Maybe this unknowable man actually fell victim to the Monkey and died in a long-forgotten freak accident. Maybe it wasn’t lack of love that deprived him of a parent, but another cruel twist of fate. While King only mentions this oddly reassuring idea, Perkins uses it to open the film. We first meet the Monkey as a frantic father tries to return the cursed object after purchasing it as a gift for his sons. Following the aforementioned harpoon death, the terrified pilot tries to melt the strange creature with a blowtorch. We leave Hal’s father shooting flames through the air and never find out his actual fate. While Lois believes he simply ran off, Hal seems certain that Mr. Shelburn was an early victim of the Monkey’s wrath.
In addition to themes of abandonment, much of King’s story involves adult Hal’s attempts to connect with his own sons. Due to the Monkey’s return and the stress of a recent layoff, he’s become distant and cruel, lashing out at his wife and older son Dennis. It’s only the younger Petey who gets his compassion and the two work together to get rid of the toy. Similarly, Perkins explores this father-son relationship and the distance caused by unrelenting tragedy. His adult Hal has just one week per year with his only son Petey (Colin O’Brien), believing that proximity will place him in the Monkey’s crosshairs. Both stories turn on Aunt Ida’s death and a return to the “homeplace” where father and son are forced to confront Hal’s traumatic childhood.
Though King’s story revolves around fathers and sons, Perkins is concerned with a sibling relationship. His Hal and Bill are identical twins—born four minutes apart—yet they seem to despise each other. Bill constantly picks on his younger twin and even enlists a horde of mean girls to torment him each day at school. In fact, his treatment is so cruel that Hal winds the Monkey up hoping his brother will die, only to watch the strange power claim his mother’s life instead. As adults, they’ve not only grown apart, but lost track of each other altogether. While King’s brothers do not always get along, they’re more or less friendly and supportive. As an adult, the literary Bill is kind yet distant, making a single appearance at a family dinner.
While Perkins seems to be following suit, his Bill finally appears in the story’s third act. Intuiting the true cause of his mother’s death, Bill has been harboring deep hatred for his younger twin and compulsively winding the Monkey up. Fatalities abound in the tiny town of Casco, Maine as Bill hopes the next death will take out his brother. However, it’s likely these indirect acts of murder hide guilt over the destruction of his own family. Bill probably knows that Hal tried to kill him with the Monkey to protect himself from his twin’s constant harassment. But it’s easier to embrace rage directed outward than to confront the grief in his own heart. Finally reunited, Bill admits that he could have benefited from his brother’s love and the two make plans to reconnect. Unfortunately the Monkey has other ideas. Just moments after this touching détente, Bill is decapitated by his mother’s bowling ball, a grim callback to Hal’s childish fantasies. It seems not even awareness and reconciliation can protect us from death’s unpredictable power.
In a bizarre juxtaposition, Hal and Petey drive through a town racked with shocking deaths while talking about the power of love and connection. We remember an earlier scene in which Lois hugs her two boys to her chest and reminds them that everyone will someday die. Tinged with dark humor, she describes the spectrum of human fatality while all three still wear their funeral attire. But her unsettling speech contains seeds of hope. If everyone dies, there’s no sense worrying about how and when. We might as well enjoy the time we have and dance with each other while we can. Hal shares this treasured aphorism with his own son while devising a plan for dealing with the cursed object, one that dramatically differs from King’s original ending.
If “The Monkey” explores the randomness of death, King’s conclusion is a metaphor for denial. He and Petey pack the toy away and drop it into the deepest part of the local lake. Whatever possesses the powerful creature fights back, causing a massive storm that demolishes Hal’s tiny rowboat and nearly pulls him into the deep. Having swum back to shore, Hal briefly wonders about some other father catching the fiendish object on a fishing line, but intentionally pushes the thought away, content to protect his own family for now. But Perkins takes a more proactive approach. He and Petey drive through town with the Monkey perched in the back seat. Hal insists they must now keep it close and make sure no one turns the key, thus defending against its awful power. They are not pretending death will never touch them again, but doing what they can to protect each other.
By admitting anyone could die at any moment, Hal finally finds the courage to enjoy his life. In this way, Perkins’ version mirrors King’s larger body of work, if not the film’s actual source material. For decades, the Master of Horror has been writing about the power of human connection and evil overcome by communal love. From It and The Stand to Salem’s Lot and Doctor Sleep, many of his novels conclude with disparate people finding strength in each other. With The Monkey, Perkins comes to the same conclusion. Though bleak, nihilistic, and drenched in blood, his version of King’s iconic short story reminds us that it’s only in embracing the reality of death that we can reach towards each other and cherish what little time we have.
