Streamin’ King: ‘The Monkey’ in the middle of a jam-packed year full of Stephen King adaptations
Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. In this installment, we’re watching The Monkey, Oz Perkins’ February 2025 adaptation based on the 1980 short story.
THE GIST: A family is generationally cursed by an irredeemably creepy toy monkey which incites grisly deaths—some random, some less so—when anyone turns the key in its back and gets it banging its little drum. Twin brothers Hal and Bill bear the brunt of this menace. One of the rare King tales to never get a feature film till now, a brisk 45 years after publication.
PEDIGREE: Written and directed by Osgood “Oz” Perkins only seven months after his viral success with 2024’s Longlegs. Stars Theo James (The White Lotus, Divergent), Tatiana Maslany (She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Orphan Black), Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth), and Colin O’Brien (Dear Edward, Wonka); briefly features Adam Scott, Elijah Wood, and Perkins himself. Score by Edo Van Breemen (The Hardy Boys), cinematography by Nico Aguilar (music videos for Doechii and Chappell Roan, “additional photography” DP credit on Killers of the Flower Moon).
WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Definitely. 2025 is a historic year for SK adaptations (see King Ties, References, and Miscellany) and it’s worth witnessing how it started out—very gory, pretty strong, and necessarily imperfect. Almost every King short story that gets blown out to feature length will have some flab, and this one’s no different, but it does ground itself in just enough narrative and character to merit the 98-minute runtime.
Perkins’ choice to turn the protagonist into twins is appropriate when adapting an author who has deployed twins every chance he’s had. It’s also nice to see the writer/director take a comic approach to a story that originally sported a pretty comedic conceit played out with deadly seriousness.
WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Probably. If you caught Longlegs, it’s fascinating to see how Perkins followed that serious, surreal sensation with this splatterfest full of laughs. Having not seen this year’s Final Destination: Bloodlines yet, I can’t say whether you should just go for that one over The Monkey. The deaths here are explosive in every sense of the meaning, and the writing can be surprisingly unsettling and potent at times, like Maslany’s Lois telling her young boys how they’ll all die. But the characters are thinly drawn and it’s exceedingly hard to buy Theo James as a loser.
All that said, I imagine it being tough to regret watching The Monkey once, even if it disappears from your consciousness before you can log it on Letterboxd.
9 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY
1. The Monkey kicked off a run of four new King movies this year, succeeded in June by Mike Flanagan’s exceptional The Life of Chuck. Next up are Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk on Sept. 12 and Edgar Wright’s The Running Man on Nov. 7. On the small screen, we’ve got The Institute heading to MGM+ in July and the It prequel series Welcome to Derry premiering on HBO this fall. Asked by The Kingcast co-host Anthony Breznican in a Vanity Fair feature about this big year of adaptations and being “certainly on a hot streak these days,” King answered:
“What’s weird is that I’ve almost become a franchise, like Marvel or something. I saw a poster the other day for The Long Walk: ‘based on the legendary Stephen King story’ or something like that. ‘Legendary,’ when it’s connected to a person, basically means old.”
2. The Monkey grossed $39.7 million domestically and $68.9M globally. The last theatrical King flick, June 2023’s The Boogeyman, made $43.2M in the U.S. and $67.3M worldwide. 2022’s far worse Firestarter remake only pulled $9.7M in the U.S. and $15M total, but was a day-and-date release on Peacock and left theaters quickly.
3. The most blatant (and perhaps only) outright spoken King reference is the babysitter being named Annie Wilkes, which we learn at her awkward funeral.
4. Making a repeat visit to the Kingverse is Colin O’Brien, who played the young version of Jaeden Martell (It) in 2022’s Mr. Harrigan’s Phone.
5. The amount of dudes named Bill in King’s catalog is absolutely flabbergasting. It protagonist Bill Denbrough; the novel Billy Summers; the novella Blockade Billy; the Bill Hodges trilogy; Carrie baddie Billy Nolan; Thinner sleaze Billy Halleck…I could do this all day.
6. The only other major feature film to come from Skeleton Crew is the excellent 2007 Frank Darabont adaptation of The Mist. We need The Jaunt! We need Survivor Type!
7. Though we often get fictional Maine locales in King work, the small town of Casco is very real. What’s invented is the hilarious welcome sign in the film: “Birthplace of Its Locals!”
8. In the short story, a babysitter named Beulah “fawned over Hal when Hal’s mother was around and sometimes pinched him when she wasn’t.” In King’s memoir/how-to book On Writing, he mentions a babysitter named “Eulah, or maybe she was Beulah.” The tale is harrowing: “Eula-Beulah was prone to farts—the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose.”
9. Perkins was asked on the Kingcast if he’d adapt the master of horror again, and responded thusly:
“I think I’ve established the rule now, which is that everything I do is one of one. Nothing is gonna be—we’re not gonna retread anything. … And so if there was gonna be another King thing, god, I honestly can’t imagine. [The Monkey] feels so complete. It feels like such a move that we made, we landed the plane, as it were, and people really dig it, and don’t fuck with it, you know? Don’t put your head in the tiger and lion’s mouth again.”
CRITICAL CONSENSUS: King himself wrote on Threads in January, “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.”
Critically, it bagged a 78 percent on ye olde Tomatometer with a 56 percent audience score; Metacritic has it at a 62 with a nearly equal audience rating. A frequent mode among reviewers was boredom, or lack of patience with Perkins’ satirical, nihilistic handling of the material. “It isn’t comedic enough to distract from the fact that the film traffics in rote archetypes, and it doesn’t quite pluck the heartstrings of its audience over the ragged inheritance from fathers to their sons either,” wrote Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién, deeming it “the worst thing a horror saga can be: boring.” Adam Nayman said “Perkins’s bid for edgelord glory is strangely anodyne,” writing in his Ringer piece, “It’s one thing to try to create a goofy, gory crowd-pleaser; it’s another to steadily bleed the enjoyment out of the equation by making the movie in question as smug and unpleasant as possible.” Tim Grierson at Screen Daily argued that “Perkins doesn’t have the same mastery of comedy that he does horror,” and the “heavily orchestrated random killings start to have diminishing returns,” while Katie Rife at the A.V. Club appreciated “the tension between the human need to understand why bad things happen and the cruel indifference of the universe in general.”
No matter what the critics had to say, they rarely missed a chance for a comparison to a famous horror franchise that returned to theaters in May, calling The Monkey a “demented mash-up of Final Destination and Looney Tunes” (New York Times), “closer in spirit to Evil Dead than Final Destination” (Slant), “part Gremlins and part Final Destination” (A.V. Club), and a purveyor of “Final Destination-level hijinks” (Vulture).
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR “THE MONKEY”: Published in Gallery magazine in 1980, more notably included in SK’s sophomore short story collection Skeleton Crew in 1985, giving the book its simian cover theme for many decades and versions to come.
Also in ’85, King collected The Bachman Books, four novels he’d written pseudonymously from 1977 to 1982, and penned screenplays for Silver Bullet and Cat’s Eye. Pretty wild considering the prior year was a three-booker with The Talisman, Thinner, and The Eyes of the Dragon. The year after Skeleton Crew hit? It.
Zach Dionne is Mainer writing in Tennessee; he makes Stephen King things on Patreon.