Stephen King’s 1980 short story “The Monkey” (which can be found these days in his outstanding 1985 collection, Skeleton Crew) tells the story of Hal Shelburn, a man who is obsessed with an old toy from his childhood, a wind-up monkey that seems to cause death whenever it claps its cymbals. The tale is in many ways vintage King, with incidents and/or cursed objects from someone’s past re-emerging into the present to haunt that person once again.
The Monkey, writer-director Osgood Perkins’ adaptation of King’s story, makes a number of structural, character, and narrative changes to the tale while keeping the basic premise intact. For one, the monkey beats on a drum instead of knocking two cymbals together. But more importantly, Perkins (who terrified us less than a year ago with Longlegs) develops a huge shift in tone for his film: while King’s story is relatively somber and suffused with dread from its opening lines, Perkins—perhaps sensing that a killer toy monkey might not work as well on the screen—jumps headfirst into sheer absurdism, turning The Monkey into a full-blown horror comedy.
The deaths in the story are all tragic but plausible: they seem as if they could really happen, adding a layer of psychological doubt to Hal’s memories. On the other hand, Perkins makes every kill in his movie more outlandish than the last, filling the screen with exploding, burning, and disintegrating human bodies in set pieces that take the “accidents” in movies like Final Destination and play them strictly for howls of grossed-out laughter.
But Perkins also connects Hal and his brother Bill more directly to the monkey and its hideous power, expanding a bit more on their characters than King does in his narrative, although in the end, the monkey symbolizes the same thing in both versions: the random, sudden, inescapable nature of death, and the way it follows all of us around whether we realize it’s constantly there or not.
How Stephen King Tells His Story
In King’s story, Hal Shelburn is a family man: he’s got a wife named Terry and two sons named Dennis and Petey. They’ve had a rough couple of years: Hal got laid off from his job as a computer software designer and, while he found another one, he’s making less money and the family was forced to relocate from California to Texas. It’s implied that this has put some pressure on the family, with Terry popping Valium and Hal’s relationship to both her and his sons somewhat strained.
Hal and Bill’s merchant marine father vanishes from their lives when the boys are young (like King’s own dad) and is not present in the story; in the movie, we briefly meet their father, a pilot (played by Adam Scott), in a prologue where we learn that he’s the one who obtained the monkey originally—probably on his travels—and is desperate to get rid of it, which does not go well for the proprietor of the pawn shop to which he brings the toy. As in the story, Pete Shelburn disappears after that.
King opens his story in the present, with Hal and his family going through the belongings of Bill’s Aunt Ida, who has passed away from a stroke. As in the movie, Aunt Ida and Uncle Will (also deceased) raised Hal and Bill after their parents died. Dennis finds the monkey in a box in Aunt Ida’s attic—the same box that Hal and Bill found the monkey in as children. Except that Hal, as we find out via flashbacks, threw the monkey down a well on the property decades earlier.
Even after Hal and Bill discover the monkey hidden in a closet of their father’s things and shove it back in there, it manages to find its way onto one of the boys’ shelves. It also manages to kill Hal’s friend (broken neck from a fall), Bill’s pal (hit by a car), and the boys’ mother (an aneurysm), along with Uncle Will’s dog, Aunt Ida’s cat, and eventually, it’s implied, Aunt Ida herself. When it comes back years later, Hal and Petey drive out to a lake, where Hal shoves it in a bag weighed down with rocks and drops it into the deepest part of a lake. Although he almost doesn’t make it back to shore as his boat comes apart and the water begins to literally seethe around him, he does survive—and the monkey is possibly vanquished.
The movie makes one important change
Osgood Perkins takes a number of liberties with King’s story as he expands it for the screen, and as we mentioned, he plays The Monkey as much more of a black comedy than a straight horror tale. But he does make one crucial change: in King’s story, the monkey often activates itself—it doesn’t need anyone to wind it up and set it in motion. In the movie, someone has to turn the key in the monkey’s back, as Hal and Bill (who are twins in the film, played by Christian Convery as kids and Theo James as adults) find out to their horror. There are two more wrinkles: even if you wish for someone specific to die, the monkey picks its victim(s) of its own volition, while the person who winds it up is spared.
In a key scene, the socially awkward Hal—fed up with the cooler, brasher Bill’s constant teasing and torment—turns the monkey’s key and wishes for Bill to die. Their mother (Tatiana Maslany) dies instead, filling Hal with unbearable guilt and Bill with pathological rage when he finds out what his brother did. This drives a wedge between the two, who are estranged as adults after being raised by Uncle Chip (Perkins himself) and Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), portrayed here as dissolute louts and not the kindly people in the story.
Bill remains behind and becomes a recluse, while Hal marries and has a son—although he eventually leaves his family in order to keep them as distant from him as possible, alienating his son in the process, for fear that the monkey’s curse still follows him even though he tossed the toy down the well. When Aunt Ida dies, the monkey is found in her house and included in an estate sale—where a local wastrel named Ricky (Rohan Campbell) buys it (in a new subplot that is one of Perkins’ less effective additions).
Bill calls Hal, telling him that the monkey has reappeared and they must find it and get rid of it again. Hal returns to their hometown with his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) in tow, the two having been on a rare vacation together. But it’s Bill himself who hired Ricky to purchase the monkey for him, part of a plan all along to lure Hal back to town, where he wants to use the monkey to murder his brother as revenge for their mother’s death. At the end of the film, Hal and Petey finally confront Bill and the monkey—but it’s Bill who ends up dead. Hal and Petey leave town, taking the monkey with them as a precaution, even while it leaves a trail of destruction in the town behind them.
The monkey takes on new meaning
King’s original story makes the monkey almost a force unto itself—as we said, it doesn’t really seem to need winding in order to work its malevolent magic. The monkey in the story represents not just death, but Hal’s past, his guilt, and possibly his own destructive impulses—when the monkey is around, he becomes increasingly agitated and even violent toward his family. In the movie, however, one has to consciously wind the monkey to set it in motion, making its symbolism as a vehicle for one’s own vengeance more direct, even if that vengeance has unforeseen consequences when the monkey kills of its own accord and not according to the user’s wishes.
Hal wishes his brother dead and ends up killing their mom instead; Bill, unable to forgive Hal and driven insane by it, wishes Hal dead even though he knows it won’t work and that the monkey will act on its own—as it does when it kills many of the people in the town around him. The consequences of one’s own actions, and whether one accepts or denies responsibility for them, becomes just as much a theme of Perkins’ film as the unavoidable nature of death itself and generational trauma (the brothers’ father bringing the monkey home and then leaving his family behind creates all these repercussions).
By the end of the film, as he and Petey drive away, Hal has learned to accept both his own responsibility and the fact that the reaper eventually comes for everyone—something Bill was unable to do. He and Petey are back on good terms, and he realizes that the monkey will never leave their lives entirely, so he decides to keep it with them, where at least no one (hopefully) will get their hands on it. In the story, Hal is still uneasy after throwing the monkey in the lake, imagining that someone might fish it out one day, even as he and his family get back to normality. In the movie, Hal accedes to a new normal, one in which he’s no longer weighed down by fear, even if that damn monkey is still with him.
The Monkey is in theaters now.
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