Around eight months ago, I wrote a defense of “vibes-based horror” to try and compliment what Osgood Perkins was doing in Longlegs because I could feel the old criticisms bubbling up to the surface even before the first reel ended. You know the familiar refrains: “That was bullshit”; “That didn’t make any sense”; and, worst of all, “The marketing lied. That wasn’t scary at all.” It’s true: For all of his style and skill, Perkins never had his breakthrough moment until NEON blasted out carnival-barker hype about Maika Monroe’s elevated heartbeat during filming and the usual “scariest movie ever” assurances, which are impossible to live up to given the subjective nature of experience itself. What Perkins makes are exceptionally creepy movies, painstakingly constructed to preserve an otherworldly atmosphere and the feelings that tone imparts (hence, “vibes”). To misquote Vonnegut, the viewer is trapped in the amber of the discomforting moment. There is no way or any acceptable take on the other four Ws beyond the tritest specifics: Mood matters more to him, as it should, given that Perkins has so thoroughly mastered it. This is why his latest, The Monkey, is so interesting, as it plays up another one of his strengths — bleak, black-as-fuck comedy — without totally abandoning that carefully crafted sensibility.
The concept is beautifully simple: An evil toy monkey kills somebody after a poor chump turns its key. One crash of the cymbals, as in the text, or bang on the drum, in Perkins’ take, and someone somewhere is gonna meet a fucking terrible end at the hands of fate. In Stephen King’s original short story (published in Skeleton Crew, which ranks among the best-collected editions in all literature, genre or otherwise, and, since the story is older than I am, I’ll leave it to you to read rather than recap), the situation is both vaguely folksy (as is King’s way) and a source of immense dread in its Poe-esque persistence as a reoccurring feature in the protagonist’s life. The sins of the past are haunting him in the present, and no matter what he does, he can’t outrun this creepy monkey. It works like clockwork in the hands of a storyteller like King, who can suspend your disbelief and make the ordinary-if-a-bit-discomfiting things in life into suspicious harbingers of a grand supernatural cosmology that dwarfs us. Perkins, on the other hand, recognizes how funny of a concept that is stripped away from the seriousness of King’s world, and plays with the larger plotting possibilities that it might hold: What if a nutcase got ahold of the monkey? What happens if you wind it up and let it bang away for a few minutes? Is the key-turner saved from the carnage he unleashes? For a filmmaker so committed to vibes, it’s wonderful to watch him try to extend this story to feature-length by complicating the simplicity.
Gore-hounds will bark like seals for this one because Perkins unleashes the full brunt of his imagination on his mutilations. Between this and the next Final Destination movie out this summer, It’s lovely to know that, after gathering dust in the corner, filmmakers are once again feeding quarters into the Rube Goldberg machine of precisely staged “accidental” deaths. There’s a perverse pleasure in watching how these situations unfold with their complex mechanics, exceptional timing, and coup de graces at the end. Take, for instance, the first kill, happening to a poor shop owner — the key is turned, and a rat chews through a rope suspending a spear gun in a diving-goods display. It fires, piercing the guy through the belly, which is bad enough, but then retracts a moment later, pulling his guts out as the line recoils the spear into the barrel. It’s the cartoonish nature of this — the creepy monkey’s grin, Adam Scott’s horrified-yet-unsurprised reaction, and the quick cuts from Scott to a for-sale flamethrower on a shelf to him setting the toy ablaze Rick Dalton-style — that makes it so goddamned funny.
But again, the tone holds everything together: Each part of Perkins’ repertoire is repurposed. The aloof, estranged protagonists? In Theo James’ hands, his dark and bitter narration is a source of constant humor (the man should narrate audiobooks for the rest of his life). The suspenseful misdirects? They’re used to make bloody punchlines land harder or to heighten the emotional impact of certain scenes (yes, this movie does have a heart, as blackened as it might be by hellfire). The piercing jump scares? They’re Raimi-like exclamation points punctuating a moment for emphasis (such as one absurd kill at a swimming pool following James’ plot-initiating phone conversation with his estranged brother). It’s a wholesale embrace of the absurd, which is what Perkins has been asking of his audience for his last few features in which one doesn’t just have to roll with it — it’s actively encouraging you to enjoy the ride instead of appreciating how it feels. I think this is the kind of expansive step forward that the best artists in the “elevated horror” space make, in which their films expand the audience enough to include former haters as much as they invite in new ones.
The Monkey has all the trademarks of what should be a letting-off-steam feature, a lighter companion to the heaviness of Longlegs, and I’d agree — this is a “fuckin’ around” b-side compared to the last feature. But you’d be stunned to discover how many classic songs were consigned to the other side of the 45, at the least the first go-round: “Rock Around the Clock,” “Into the Groove,” “How Soon is Now?,” “We Will Rock You.” So, yeah, I love “William, It Was Really Nothing,” too, but I know a true blue classic when I hear it. Likewise, The Monkey is a great and absurdly entertaining time at the movies, requiring no explanations or disclaimers for you to enjoy. Just turn the key and see what happens.