The murderous mechanical monkey and his cymbals of horror are back, this time in an official adaptation by the director of “Longlegs” and the producer of the “Saw” saga. And with a superb cast to top it all off, it promises!
The horror news from the 80s, The monkey, by Stephen King is heading (again) to the big screen with an official release date set for February 21, 2025 in the US and UK. This was announced by the production company Neon on X (formerly Twitter), sharing at the same time a disturbing poster to promote the film.
While the image doesn’t reveal much about how this new adaptation will present the novella to moviegoers, it does set the tone with a creepy look at its titular mechanical toy with its vacant stare and spine-chilling smile – plus its killer cymbals, of course!
Besides Stephen Kingwe find big names behind the project: on the production side, we have James Wan, the horror veteran to whom we owe the Saw, The Conjuring and Insidious sagas as well as the blockbusters Aquaman and Fast & Furious 7. On the directing side, it is the filmmaker of Longlegs, Oz Perkins – and son of the star of Psycho, Anthony Perkins – who is taking on the task.
In a recent interview with Bloody Disgusting, Oz Perkins has also spoken on the subject and explained that, even if his horror film Longlegsstarring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, is set to terrify audiences when it releases next month, its adaptation of the Singe promises something different.
“It will be more like Misery or Creepshow or Gremlins or American Werewolf“, did he declare. “This couldn’t be further from Longlegs. To me, if you want to make a movie about a toy monkey, you can take it seriously. But a large part [de l’œuvre de Stephen] King is a funny, nostalgic feeling. So we tried to make a movie that felt a little bit more like something from the late ’80s and ’90s. It’s kind of like Robert Zemeckis had [pris] just a little acid and made a Stephen King movie about a toy monkey.”
The news of Stephen King tells the story of Dennis and Petey, sons of Hal Shelburn, who find an old mechanical monkey with cymbals in the attic of the house where their father spent his childhood. The toy terrorized Hal during his childhood: every time he hit its cymbals, someone around him died. And now this nightmarish object is back despite Hal’s attempts to get rid of it…
The film’s cast includes Theo James (the Divergent saga, The Gentlemen), Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings, Yellowjackets), Tatiana Maslany (She-Hulk: Lawyer, Orphan Black), Rohan Campbell (Halloween Ends, The Hardy Boys ) and Sarah Levy (Schitt’s Creek, SurrealEstate).
“For me, ideally, this is the film that children and their parents want to see together,” Perkins adds.People are exploding, it’s very extreme but it’s very funny. It’s very father-son redemption, it’s very touching, it’s very nostalgic, it’s very Stephen King.”
The short story has already been “adapted” to the cinema in 1984 with The Devil’s Monkey (The Devil’s Gift) directed by Kenneth J. Berton. However, the name of Stephen King not being cited in the credits, the film was considered more of a plagiarism than a true adaptation.
The Monkey of Oz Perkins will be released on February 21, 2025. In the meantime, you can discover Longlegs which will debut in our French theaters on July 10.
