The “batshit insane” movie that earned Stephen King’s approval: “I say that with admiration”
There’s no guarantee that Stephen King is going to love an adaptation of his stories. In the past, he’s been outspoken about the ones he loves, the ones he loathes, and the ones he thinks completely missed the point. The most notorious of these is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a film that many would rate as one of the greatest movies ever made, but which was not at all in keeping with the source material.
Over the years, he’s put his stamp of approval on Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption, and Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me. On the other end of the spectrum, he’s voiced disappointment over Graveyard Shift, A Return to Salem’s Lot, and Dark Tower, though none of them earned the vitriol of The Shining.
Often, though, King will either decline to make public comments or offer a relatively benign verdict. One recent movie that called him to action was The Monkey, Oz Perkins’s comedic adaptation of King’s 1980 short story of the same name. The original text follows a man whose family has been haunted by a toy monkey holding cymbals that has a terrible power. Whenever it claps the cymbals, an outlandishly gruesome death follows.
Perkins’s film adheres to this general formula (though the monkey totes a drum instead of cymbals). However, he made the bold decision to throw in a strong comedic angle. “I took liberties like a motherfucker,” he said in an interview with Empire (via Screenrant), explaining that the original script had been far too serious for his tastes. The filmmaker garnered attention last year for directing Nicolas Cage in the serial killer horror movie Longlegs, which, despite its star, took a fairly traditional approach to scaring the shit out of you. But he had a personal reason for wanting to make The Monkey a complete departure from the norm.
His parents were Psycho actor Anthony Perkins and model and actor Berry Berenson. Perkins died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, while Berenson died nine years later as a passenger on one of the hijacked planes on 9/11. “The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways,” Perkins said, “So, I thought: ‘Well, I’m an expert on that.’ Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways.”
He explained that he spent a lot of his life viewing their deaths and his grief as uniquely personal, but that now, with a little more distance, he’s realised that death, whether peaceful, violent, or anything else, happens to everyone. “Everyone dies,” he said. “And I thought maybe the best way to approach that insane notion is with a smile.”
To his credit, King loved the liberties that Perkins took with his story. In a post on Threads, the author wrote, “You’ve never seen anything like THE MONKEY. It’s batshit insane. As someone who has indulged in batshittery from time to time, I say that with admiration.”
He wasn’t alone in his sentiment. The film earned relatively good reviews for a horror film and more than washed its face at the box office. At a time when there is no shortage of spattery gore on the big screen, throwing in a truckload of comedy was a bold move that paid off.
