Stephen King’s latest film adaptation breaks a trend that surprised the author

Stephen King is a one-man handyman who creates an extensive and viable franchise universe using his imagination alone. It’s a real rarity in today’s pop culture and new TV and film adaptations of his works are planned for the foreseeable future. The sheer volume of his canon is as large as only a prolific writer can produce over the course of decades. It can even support a large number of projects, and with remakes now the norm in Hollywood, the cycle can presumably continue indefinitely. These include some of his short stories, which have been adapted as often as his longer works and present unique challenges for a film or television version.

The latest example of this is The monkey, Based on a very short paper that essentially laid out how scary mechanical toys are. The short story is pretty scary, but the prospects of filling a feature film are bleak, as many previous King adaptations have proven. Writer-director Osgood Perkins is one of the horror genre’s most exciting voices, fresh from his 2024 film Long legs. His approach to The monkey is very different and largely unheard of in King adaptations: make it a horror comedy. It could be a brilliant decision.

The brevity of “The Monkey” presents a challenge

Stephen King’s short stories work best as rabbit punches, using their brevity to hit the reader very quickly and move on. This can work very well as a short film or similarly short adaptation, but can cause problems if the material needs to be expanded to feature length. Perhaps the best example is his 1971 short story “The Boogeyman,” which is just under 10 pages long and exists solely to deliver a devastating experience twilight zoneStyle twist at the end. The story was made into an effective low-budget short film, approximately twenty minutes long, as well as a feature-length adaptation, released in 2023.

However, despite a spooky atmosphere and some good performances, the latter suffers from excessive padding and a general malaise. Plus, the majority of an entirely new story has to be re-imagined from scratch. The short film is much more accurate and scary despite the microscopic budget and indie production. The pattern applies to numerous other adaptations of King short stories. A shortened running time – for example for segments from the two Scary show Anthology films or the content of the Nightmares and dreamscapes Series – tends to result in a stronger and more faithful adaptation.

Trying to stretch out a short story to fill a feature runs into serious problems, and the ranks of King adaptations are littered with underclassmen who have tried to do too much with too little content. Such as The Graveyard Shift, The Manglerand King’s own Maximum overdrive can confirm the result: films that are bad enough to belong Mystery Science Theater 3000. King himself seemed to understand the dilemma and founded his “Dollar Baby” program, selling the film rights to his short stories for a dollar. It allowed young filmmakers to make a name for themselves while maintaining the pace of stories through short running times. The program ended in 2023.

“The Monkey” is cut from the same cloth as his other short stories. It was originally published as a supplement in gallery magazine in November 1980, although most fans probably discovered it in his 1985 collection Skeleton crew. The story’s mechanical monkey appeared on the cover of the original hardcover. Coming in at a hefty 39 pages, it is slightly longer than some of his other plays and is more suitable for a feature-length adaptation. However, the story is quite simple. The protagonist Hal discovers the toy in his late father’s possession and learns that it is cursed. Whenever it hits its cymbals, someone close to it dies. He eventually throws it into a lake, which seemingly frees him from the curse, although it causes all the fish to die, suggesting that evil lives on.

The monkey needs more than a scary toy

“The Monkey” works despite its simplicity, namely because the toy in question is extremely scary. “Jolly Chimp” or “Musical Chimp” toys evolved from earlier wind-up designs and first appeared in Japan in the 1950s. The design became the standard for a variety of similar toys until they became an institution. They have appeared in a number of films and television shows including Toy Story 3 and Netflix Stranger Thingswhere their uniquely spooky nature always makes them stand out.

The toy’s violent, repetitive movements and bulging eyes are disturbing enough, but the idea that it is somehow intended for children adds something truly horrific to the equation. King implicitly understood this, and The Ape essentially serves to confirm everyone’s secret, unspoken fears surrounding the toy. Unfortunately, it still presents significant challenges comparable to previous adaptations. The Monkey’s repetitive gimmick makes it easy to add another murder sequence to the toy’s kill list, turning the story into something akin to a slasher film with the monkey as the killer.

Alternately, The monkey could explore the toy’s background and find out how it came to be cursed along with other possible victims in the past. Neither of these results in particularly appetizing food The monkey could probably achieve a reasonable runtime in this way, they are not formulas for something more successful. Part of the problem is that the toy itself doesn’t do much more than make its cymbals clink. King could evoke the psychological discomfort that the toy creates, but when he films it, it suddenly becomes more ridiculous than threatening.

You can find an object lesson in The devil’s gift, a low-budget 1984 film that basically repeats the plot of The Monkey. The film is boring, sour and unpleasant, but never scary. In fact, his attempts to portray the toy as something worthy of horror veer toward the absurd, rendering it more ridiculous than frightening. The film was later condensed and repackaged as part of the anthology Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonderswhich itself was the target of a brutal episode of MST 3K. Without much care The monkey tends to fall into the same trap, despite a better pedigree and a higher budget.

“The Monkey” wants to combine comedy with horror

Luckily, Osgood Perkins has already established himself as a top-notch horror director and clearly has some ideas on how to make it happen The monkey work. The recently released trailer actively plays the film as a comedy, balancing laughter with a truly horrific (and imaginative) level of violence. It seems to follow the loose outline of the story, with Theo James playing twins who stumble upon the monkey and become entangled in its terrible powers.

The key to the humor – at least in the trailer – lies in the absurdity of what happened The devil’s gift. The monkey is described as “…a beast not of this earth, striking those who deserve it, those who do not deserve it, and everyone in between. Whoever controls it controls life and death… and those deaths are truly damned.” ked up.” The voiceover conveys it with stony seriousness, even as the details become increasingly ridiculous.

That of the monkey trailer, followed by surreal moments of great guignol violence, like a man staggering out of a house with his head on fire and James’ hero spitting out a woman’s severed finger in a blood-spattered room. The actor’s facial expression throughout the trailer suggests that, as in the story, he fears that the monkey is behind all the horrors and has a hard time believing that such a thing could be possible. The film clearly recognizes the fun side of cosmic horror wrapped up in such cheesy little bells and whistles, and intends to take full advantage of it.

It’s a surprise for Perkins, whose previous horror films like Long legs And The Blackcoat’s daughter were as serious as heart attacks. But they are also rightly celebrated for their keen understanding of the material and the way Perkins can evoke a deeply unsettling mood from seemingly everyday circumstances. The monkey is an opportunity to apply this to frightening material in a very different way. If successful, it would break the prevailing trend of King’s short story adaptations and prove that anything he wrote can be successfully brought to the screen with a little creativity and attention to detail.

The Monkey will be in theaters on February 21, 2025.