Osgood Perkins adapts Stephen King's short story about a wind-up toy monkey that kills everyone near it � and makes something genuinely deranged, funny, and deeply unsettling out of the material.
The Monkey's Paw, Upgraded
Based on King's 1980 short story, The Monkey concerns twin brothers (both played by Theo James) who discover their late father's wind-up cymbal-clapping monkey toy � which has a terrible habit of causing gory, elaborate deaths whenever it's wound. Perkins, working on a tight budget, turns limitation into an asset: inventive, practical, grotesquely funny in ways that feel genuinely fresh. Theo James in a dual role proves he's been criminally underutilized by Hollywood � his performance differentiates the twins through subtle physical choices that accumulate into something genuinely moving by the end.
"Perkins has found the exact right tone for this material � gleefully awful deaths and genuine human feeling in perfect, perverse balance."
� Bloody DisgustingThe Verdict
$112M worldwide on an $18M budget. Perkins is Hollywood's most reliably interesting horror director, and The Monkey is his most purely entertaining film. Don't wind it up. You'll wind it up.
Osgood Perkins adapts Stephen King's short story about a wind-up toy monkey that kills everyone near it � and makes something genuinely deranged, funny, and deeply unsettling out of the material.