NEONEarly on in The Monkey, twin brothers Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery) rifle through their dad’s closet. It’s been a year since their dad had mysteriously disappeared, leaving their embittered mom (Tatiana Maslany) left to raise the two boys on her own. The two boys try to piece together the memory of their father from the things he left behind — his pilot’s cap, and some postcards — but they’re mostly left puzzled by a strange toy monkey found in a box simply titled “Like Life.” It’s a scene that writer-director Osgood “Oz” Perkins might have lifted out of his own life — aside from the cursed toy monkey, of course.“[My father’s] stuff, his closets, his areas, his drawers were endlessly compelling to me,” Perkins tells Inverse. “What can I discover about this person? And so, just the idea that you can pull this story out of a closet literally was the way in.”“I realized, ‘Oh, I've had The Monkey in my life.’”Maybe all of Oz Perkins’ movies are a “way in” to his father. The director has spoken about how his last film, 2024’s serial killer thriller Longlegs, was his “most personal” film with regard to his celebrity parents. And it’s hard to escape the impact of being the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins, who died in 1992 from complications from AIDS, or his mother Berry Berenson’s death during the September 11 terrorist attacks. For Oz Perkins, death has long been a presence in his life. And that’s partly what drew him to Stephen King’s classic 1980 short story The Monkey, which tells the story of a wind-up toy monkey who seems to bring misfortune everywhere it goes.“The Monkey doesn't kill people in the way that Chucky kills people. Its presence is enough,” Perkins says. “And in its presence, people die in these insane, unexpected, impossible ways. And I've connected to that through the loss of my mom, which was as insane, preposterous, and surreal as anything could be. And so, I realized, ‘Oh, I've had The Monkey in my life.’”Hal is splattered with blood for the first, but not the last, time in The Monkey. | NEONPerhaps it was that realization that led Perkins to so confidently swing The Monkey’s tone in a more comedic direction — a huge departure from his past films like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Longlegs, which were characterized by slow-burning dread.“If you're lucky enough as a creator to feel authoritative about what you're doing, gosh, it makes it a lot easier. Then you're just writing from truth,” Perkins says. “And luckily for me, that particular event happened long enough ago in my life that I'm past the devastation of it and have distance from all things in life as you get older. And so, I was able to deliver this thing to people as a comedy.”“There was one in an early draft of the script where a person gets cut in half by a concrete saw, and they get split down the middle into two halves.”But though King’s original short story has developed a reputation for being quite dark and tragic, The Monkey star Theo James (who plays Hal and Bill as adults) thinks there’s always been a bit of a funny undercurrent to it. After all, he tells Inverse, “You can't be too serious with a killer monkey. You've got to play some humor.”The comedic tone allowed Perkins to go as over the top as possible with his adaptation of The Monkey, especially in its kills. There’s people being gutted by antiques, an absurd accident at a hibachi restaurant, and one particularly Rube Goldberg-esque death involving a falling AC unit, a pool, and an ill-timed dive from a bikini-clad babe. A few deaths are so elaborate that they defy belief. But were there any that were too ridiculous to make it to the screen? Perkins has one in mind.“There was one in an early draft of the script where a person gets cut in half by a concrete saw, and they get split down the middle into two halves. We deemed that too hard to do, so that was taken out,” Perkins says.Perkins’ own upbringing provided partial inspiration for the characters in The Monkey. | NEONThe comedy-forward approach wasn’t the only major change that Perkins made to the story. The first was the design of the toy monkey, which in the short story was a classic cymbal-banging monkey and in the movie now features drums — a change they had to make due to a bizarre copyright conflict with Disney. But the biggest change came from yet another personal inspiration for Perkins: In the original short story, there was only one protagonist, Hal, but in The Monkey, Perkins splits the characters into twin brothers.“I knew it was going to be a brothers' story because my story is a brothers' story,” Perkins says. “After my parents both died, it was me and my brother. And we're very different people having experienced the same things and then reacting to them in completely different ways because we're so different. And the desire to reconcile the difference between brothers was thematically prescient for me.”Having acted himself, Perkins is also aware that playing dual roles is like catnip for actors. “I know Theo really jumped at that opportunity,” he says.James certainly does. As the withdrawn Hal, he’s demure, mousy, and socially awkward — unable to hold conversations with either his coworkers or his estranged son. He’s a classic horror movie protagonist, reacting in horror at the ridiculously butchered or blown-up bodies that start to pile up around him. But as Hal’s unhinged brother Bill, James has an absolute blast, donning a ratty mullet, an ill-fitting suit, and strangely-placed spandex to play the vengeful recluse.A hallucination of the titular monkey. | NEON“He’s proudly punkish, more fluid in terms of his gender. We totally leant into that, some of which you didn't see,” James says, with a touch of wistfulness as he recounts the outfits that didn’t make the cut: “There were outfits of him wearing halter stockings and really leaning into that, which I loved.”“I actually think it was a little too insane.”Other things that didn’t make the cut: James’ improvisations as a “more maniacal Bill.” He recalls them shooting “maybe 20 scenarios of me going completely insane to crying, to crawling around on my hands and knees and woofing like a dog.”“I actually think it was a little too insane,” James remarks dryly. As they were shooting these scenes of Bill getting increasingly more unhinged, James started to suspect that it wouldn’t make the cut. But he was grateful that he had the freedom to try. “If you feel like you have the freedom, then you're not going to feel self-conscious in any way.”Tatiana Maslany will reunite with Perkins in Keeper, out later this year. | NEONThere’s certainly no sense of self-consciousness with The Monkey. It’s a no-holds-barred gorefest, in which more than one person explodes in a bloody barrage of guts and viscera. It’s wildly different from Perkins’ last movie and will be different from his next film, Keeper, which reunites Perkins with his Monkey star Tatiana Maslany.“Keeper is about grownup people in a grownup, romantic relationship,” Perkins says. “I'd say it's a subtler movie. It's a quieter movie. The Monkey is really a crescendo of splatter, and music, and hilarity, and absurdity. And Keeper is a much darker, quieter, more sophisticated piece.”But that’s the appeal of The Monkey to Perkins. There are no hidden devils in the frame, like in Longlegs. No sense of evil looming in the distance. It’s right there, and it looks like a toy monkey.“The Monkey pretty much wears itself on its sleeve. It's not too tricky that way. It's sort of meant to be,” Perkins says. “Longlegs had a little bit of a recalcitrant quality to it, where it was holding back and hiding. The Monkey is more just like, ‘Here's a dinner plate with all your favorite tastes on it.’”The Monkey is playing in theaters now.