Get the latest gossip

The Monkey Saves the Stephen King Adaptation by Skewering It

The closer you look at The Monkey, the more you can see its deliberate subversions of the tropes that have come to define the Stephen King movie.

In Osgood Perkins’s film, the narrator’s fixation is not on the dead body of a missing kid, but on a cursed monkey toy that kills a random person when the key in its back is turned and it starts to play the tiny drum in its lap. The Boogeyman, on the other hand, takes a nasty little Stephen King story and turns it into yet another exploration of ( Jamie Lee Curtis voice) trauma, where the title demon is a metaphor for grief. In terms of the basic plot, The Monkey has a lot in common with the short story it’s based on: Both are about an adult Hal trying to destroy the title object that killed his mother, largely to protect his son.

Get the Android app