There have been a lot of movies and TV shows based on the works of author Stephen King, but there are also still a good number of King stories that have slipped through the cracks and never received an adaptation. For example, the short story The Monkey has been around for over forty years, but it’s only just now getting the big screen treatment, with Neon planning to give a film based on The Monkey a theatrical release on February 21, 2025. With that date just a few months away, we figured this would be a good time for us to put together a list of Everything We Know About The Monkey.
King’s short story was first published in 1980, in the pages of the adult magazine Gallery, giving subscribers something to read amidst the pictures of nude women. The story was later revised and included in King’s 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. In its original form, The Monkey centered on a man named Hal Shelburn, who has been tormented by a cymbal-banging monkey toy since he was a child. He was only 4 years old the first time he saw it, finding it in one of the boxes left behind by his missing father. It was just a souvenir his dad picked up during his days as a merchant mariner… but this monkey toy is possessed or cursed. Every time it bangs it cymbals together, someone around Hal turns up dead, killed by sudden health emergencies or in what appear to be accidents. And Hal can’t seem to get rid of thing. If he tosses it in the trash, it will make its way back to him. If he drops it in a well, it will somehow get out.
The idea of building a horror story around a cymbal-banging monkey toy may seem silly to some… but these toys have been around since at least the 1930s, and they have never not been creepy to look at. It makes sense that they would get King’s imagination working.
The film adaptation of The Monkey has been written and directed by Osgood Perkins, whose previous directing credits include The Blackcoat’s Daughter (a.k.a. February), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Gretel & Hansel, and Longlegs. For his take on the story, he seems to have expanded the role of Hal’s brother Bill, who was a minor character in the source material. He has also made them twins, which they were not in the King version. The film has the following synopsis: When twin brothers Hal and Bill discover their father’s old monkey toy in the attic, a series of gruesome deaths starts occurring all around them. The brothers decide to throw the monkey away and move on with their lives, growing apart over the years. But when the mysterious deaths begin again, the brothers must reunite to find a way to destroy the monkey for good before it takes the lives of everyone close to them.
The monkey in the movie does not have cymbals to bang together; he’s a drummer instead.
Theo James (The White Lotus) plays twin brothers Hal and Bill in later years, while Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth) plays them in their younger days. Also in the cast are Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings), Tatiana Maslany (She–Hulk: Attorney at Law), Colin O’Brien (Wonka), Rohan Campbell (Halloween Ends), and Sarah Levy (Schitt’s Creek).
The Monkey is not only a Stephen King adaptation from Osgood Perkins, but it also happens to have been produced by another one of the biggest names in the horror genre these days: James Wan, whose credits include Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring. Wan is producing the film through his company Atomic Monster, alongside Michael Clear. Jason Cloth and Dave Caplan of C2 Motion Picture Group are also producers on the project. Executive producers include Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Fred Berger of Automatik, Peter Luo and Nancy Xu of Stars Collective, John Friedberg of Black Bear, and Chris Ferguson. Atomic Monster and Stars Collective developed the project, and C2 Motion Picture Group provided the financing.
Wan previously said, “Stephen King is the godfather of the horror genre. He had a huge influence on me as a child and throughout my career and it’s always been a dream to help bring one of his stories to life. The Monkey is a personal favorite, with its simple, iconic, and incredibly marketable conceit. And I can’t imagine anyone better than a visionary and lifelong genre fan like Osgood to bring this to life.“
This is Wan’s second King adaptation, as he also produced the Salem’s Lot movie that was written and directed by Gary Dauberman.
Jason Cloth and Dave Caplan provided the following statement: “We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Osgood, James, Brian and our friends at Black Bear International to present Stephen King’s The Monkey. It perfectly checks the box of what is working in the marketplace right now and will be a hot property. We can’t wait for audiences to see Theo James in this role – he is really going to knock it out the park with an amazing performance.“
So, we’ve acknowledged that the idea of a monkey toy being responsible for horrific events could come off as silly – and that’s something that Perkins was fully aware of when he was making the adaptation. During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Perkins was asked to confirm that The Monkey is “the funniest movie he’s ever made.” (Which wouldn’t be a tough hurdle to clear, since his movies up to this point have been far from being comedies.) Perkins confirmed that it is, “By far. It’s deliberately comedic. It’s feeling more like an old John Landis movie or a Joe Dante movie or a Robert Zemeckis movie. I saw an opportunity to make a wry, absurdist comedy about death. It’s about the very basic fact that we all die — and how funny and weird and impossible and surreal is that? And to come at it from a tragicomedy kind of voice felt like it fit. At the end of the day, if you want to reduce it, it’s the haunted toy or evil toy subgenre, and I couldn’t imagine doing a serious one of those. To me, it rang utterly false to approach it that way, so I just went in the other direction. For me, the movie is a smile from top to bottom, and I’m really looking forward to people seeing it.“
We’ve seen some posters for The Monkey, and the fact that the marketing department has gone with the tagline, “Everybody dies. And that’s messed up,” (or a more vulgar variation of that) is a clear indication of the film’s sense of humor.
Neon released a short teaser trailer for The Monkey back in August:
And that was followed by a more substantial teaser trailer in October:
If you’re familiar with the short story, you can see some traces of it in the teasers, but it’s also clear that Perkins took the concept and ran with it. Most of the imagery doesn’t match up with what King put on the page – but it looks like the film adaptation is going to be a gory, good time, and there might even be some Final Destination-style death scenes in there.
That covers everything we know about The Monkey for now, but with the film’s release date swiftly approaching, we’re sure to learn more about it very soon.