Genre filmmaker Osgood Perkins is on a roll after the moderate success of 2020’s fairy tale terror Gretel & Hansel, as well as the summer phenomenon that was 2024’s supernatural serial killer thriller, Longlegs. Now this week sees him tackling a story by the king of horror himself, Stephen King, with the comedic splatter film The Monkey. It’s looking to be another ace in the hole for the rising director too.
The Monkey was partly shepherded by Conjuring Universe impresario James Wan as a producer through his Atomic Monster banner. Wan is one of those guys like Jordan Peele, John Carpenter, and—quite long ago—Alfred Hitchcock whose very names became a brand for genre fans. Perkins can already see himself as one of those dependable genre “names above the title,” and he says he owes it to his recent benefactors who turned Longlegs into a $126 million global-grossing smash. This is all the more remarkable, too, once you know how that working relationship began…
“That’s kind of happening,” Perkins admits to us during a recent interview. “It’s sort of happening because Neon has treated me so well, right? Neon first called me and my producers when we were still shooting Longlegs and said, ‘We want to buy Longlegs, and not only do we want to buy Longlegs, we’ve never seen it. Can we see any of it?’”
The mid-shoot Perkins said yes… provided they’re okay with seeing a single shot of the lead actor.
“We showed them a shot, one shot of [Nicolas] Cage in his makeup doing his voice. Then they said to me on this phone call, ‘Well, what we want to do is make this our biggest movie ever.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, okay. That sounds nice.’ Turned out to be more than true [though]. ‘And we want your name above the title from now on.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s also super nice and cute, but I’m far too niche a guy for that.’ But they’ve done it! So yeah, you could say I have a beautiful partnership with them. I love those guys and gals and people, and hope to make a thousand movies with them.”
Something name filmmakers like Carpenter, Wan, and Peele have in common is they all consistently leveled-up to bigger and bigger movies as their careers progressed. In other words, they grew their brand. Perkins was already deep into making The Monkey for Neon when Longlegs had its success last year, and now he’s wrapping up another small-scale horror film called Keeper (also for Neon and again featuring Tatiana Maslany). While he would like to keep up this prolific pace, Perkins is slightly hesitant to make something on a significantly bigger scale.
“I think I can probably do both, but bigger scale is a tricky one,” he admits. “I don’t think anybody wants me making an Avengers movie. I don’t want to do it. I don’t think they would want me to do it. Frankly, that seems like a bad recipe, so I’m not looking to get into that. I’ve had really good luck with original material. I consider The Monkey original enough, because I personalized it to myself and was able to ride the coattails of the greatest author ever. That helps authenticate me in a really nice way. I think the next thing will be bigger, but not too big. Big budgets are nasty. That makes people nervous and everybody gets uptight. It’s hard enough to do with a little money, right? More money seems harder to me. I’m not that into that. Too much money doesn’t necessarily work out. You never hear anybody say, ‘Wow, that movie really worked well because we spent so much money on it.’”
Perkins concluded by talking about the long period of being in the wilderness of development between Gretel & Hansel and Longlegs where he “was in everybody’s office” but “just not clicking.” After chasing greenlights for years, the success of Longlegs and soon The Monkey suggests he doesn’t need to chase anymore.
“I’ve lucked into this weird time where my weird voice is all of a sudden worth money,” he acknowledges. “It’s gnarly, dude. It’s very much through the looking glass, and I guess I’ll take it.”
Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey opens in theaters everywhere on Friday, Feb. 21.
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