I finally got to the theater to see The Monkey, which is surprisingly lively and enjoyable. Though it opened in February, it goes right on playing week after week, quietly making a lot of money while so many other films tank in a rotten year for movies so far. It’s become the first horror film hit of 2025.

Writer-director Osgood “Oz” Perkins had a sleeper hit with Longlegs late in 2024, and this is his fast and funny follow-up. Though The Monkey is really more of a gory dark comedy than a horror film, it’s based on horrormeister Stephen King’s 1980 short story “The Monkey” and bears some similarity to George A. Romero’s 1988 film, Monkey Shines.

Romero’s movie failed at the box office but is now regarded as something of a cult classic about an athlete named Allan who becomes a quadriplegic after an accident and relies on his service animal, a Capuchin monkey named Ella. But Ella is being treated with a serum derived from human brain tissue that both boosts her intelligence and radically increases her bond with Allan — and her dangerous possessiveness. Soon she’s anticipating his every wish, including fulfilling his unspoken rage and revenge fantasies, as well as eliminating perceived “rivals” for his love.

The human id, loaded with aggressive and forbidden impulses, is frequently represented by the monkey figure in Gothic horror, tales signifying a return to animal levels of primitive instincts that can’t readily be expressed in society. Though in the case of Monkey Shines, barbaric scientific experiments on an innocent monkey also represent the destructive capacities of human rationality that victimize Ella and spread mayhem everywhere. Soon Allan will have to find a way to conquer and kill Ella before she destroys everyone he knows.

The Monkey seems like a cousin to Monkey Shines, because the monkey in question has also formed a frighteningly intense attachment, though in this case it’s to a family rather than an individual. It’s also virtually impossible to get rid of. Though the monkey this time is a toy: a genuinely alarming old-fashioned toy monkey with fixed, glaring eyes, a wide grin baring too-human teeth, a red coat, and a toy drum. And when the monkey raises one arm to strike that drum, “all fucking hell will break loose.”

When we first see the toy monkey in the opening scene of The Monkey, it’s 1999 and louche pilot Petey Shelburn, played by Adam Scott (Severance, Parks and Recreation) in a nice dark comic turn, shows up at a seedy vintage store and tries to get rid of it by donating it to the man behind the counter. The skeptical man doesn’t want the monkey because it appears to be broken. But then, unfortunately for the skeptical man, the monkey starts drumming with grotesquely lethal consequences. The last we see of Petey Shelburn, he’s turning a flamethrower on the monkey and screaming, “Take that, you son of a whore!”

Through the voice-over of Hal, one of Petey’s small sons, we find out that Petey deserted the family shortly afterward. Hal is the sweet, nerdy, bespectacled son, whereas his twin brother, Bill, is an overconfident bully who torments him both at home and at school: “He’s the kind of guy who offers to shake your hand and then pulls his back at the last second and pretends to slick his hair.” Christian Convery plays both boys extremely well.

Their beloved but outspokenly embittered mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) raises the boys alone. When they ask if they could try to find their father, she says a likely place to look for him would be “under a hooker.” She has no knowledge of the toy monkey the boys find in their father’s closet, enclosed in a box describing the monkey as “like life.”

“They meant lifelike,” scoffs Bill. But later, when a bizarre violent death occurs to someone close to them, their mother explains, entirely too frankly in a memorable dark comic monologue, that death is coming for them all because “that’s life.” This makes the monkey-box description take on a more sinister connotation.

Soon the boys are orphaned, and the trauma of losing their mother leads Hal to dismember the monkey and dispose of it in the trash. He’d told the monkey he wished for the death of his sadistic brother, who’d been making his life hell at school, but apparently the monkey uses its own perverse logic when it chooses who dies.

The boys move to Maine — King’s favorite horror story territory — to live with their off-putting Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) and Uncle Chip (Perkins demonstrating expert comic timing). Uncle Chip explains to Hal in another far-too-frank monologue that he and Ida will try their best to raise the boys, but will probably do it badly, adding, “We’re swingers, by the way.”

The monkey reappears, intact, and soon there’s yet another gruesome death. Together the boys throw the monkey down a well.

Cut to the present day: grown-up Hal, a hapless loner who works at a convenience store, is long estranged from his reclusive brother Bill (both played, again very well, by Theo James). He’s also estranged from his own teenage son, Petey Jr (Colin O’Brien), only seeing him once a year in order to prevent any bad juju from continuing on in the family lineage. Though he means well, as perhaps his father did in disappearing, he’s come pretty close to replicating Petey Sr’s abandonment of his kids.

Hal sees Petey Jr so seldom that his ex-wife (Laura Mennell) and her new husband, an obnoxious expert on fatherhood who’s written several bestsellers (Elijah Wood in another of the film’s colorful cameos) are planning to adopt Petey and cut Hal out of the boy’s life for good. Hal is granted one last week with Petey to build up enough good memories to last a lifetime.

Then more crazy deaths start happening among the locals. The monkey has reappeared once again at a yard sale and is seemingly causing ludicrously horrible deaths at random until he forces the Shelburn boys to come to him. It seems adult Hal and Bill will have to reunite in order to save their family and community from the monstrous monkey they inherited from their father.

In its gory, slapstick comedy way, The Monkey follows a classic literary horror preoccupation with what was perceived as the too-close family resemblance of apes and monkeys to humans. The fear of regression to the primitive instincts of a beast powered Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

The high-minded and repressed Victorian Dr Jekyll’s chemically induced alter ego, Mr Hyde, was described in vague but uncanny ways as conveying a “strong feeling of deformity,” somehow appearing to have “something wrong” with him, but in films this is frequently literalized in portrayals with simian characteristics. After drinking Dr Hyde’s potion, Jekyll becomes more hair-covered and ape-like as he transforms and then slavers around London attacking women and committing violent murders.

Even more pertinent is J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s celebrated short story “Green Tea” (1872), in which a minister and religious scholar suffers from late nights and overwork and a reliance on the title beverage. It’s another “potion,” this one associated with British colonial imports from the Far East. Green tea was sometimes suspected of containing drug-like stimulants that made respectable people refuse to drink it. For the minister, too much green tea seems to result in the appearance of a demonic, devolved simian alter ego. The minster suddenly begins to see a red-eyed monkey invisible to everyone else that creeps along with him wherever he goes. The story notes that the minister’s father was also haunted by ghosts, which suggests a guilty legacy of supernatural torment, like the inheritance from Petey Sr in The Monkey.  

“Green Tea” is a surprisingly scary horror tale of an ambiguous haunting that doubles as a portrait of a minister’s unraveling sanity, with the monkey getting closer and growing in boldness and volume, starting to chatter furiously whenever the minster tries to work on his religious scholarship or preach a sermon. Finally, it sits screeching directly in his face, squatting profanely on the open pages of the Bible. Unable to rid himself of the monkey, the minister kills himself, violently slitting his own throat with a straight razor.

Probably the best-known monkey-related horror story is W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902), all about a mummified paw with a curse on it, a barbaric token belonging to a British officer returning from his colonial exploits in India. It seems that if you tell your desires to the paw, it grants three wishes, but they’re all granted in a twisted way that turns the fulfillment of the wish into a hideous calamity.

Naturally, the officer’s friend “Mr White” gets a hold of the paw and decides to try his luck, with ghastly consequences. He wishes for two hundred pounds and is then notified that his son has been killed and his body badly mutilated in an accident at work. The company denies any wrongdoing but pays compensation. The amount: two hundred pounds.

You may have heard of “The Monkey’s Paw” in another context. Writer-director Jordan Peele, who specializes in horror films such as Get Out, Us, and Nope, named his company Monkeypaw Productions.

There’s a touching point in The Monkey when Hal bonds with Petey Jr by saying that first they must acknowledge “the monkey is ours.” By integrating the monkey into their family life and history, a terrible inheritance that can’t be treated as something “other” to be expelled, they can hope to avoid the always-tragic endings of the classic Gothic horror tales.

It’s quite inventive and open-ended. We don’t see what it will mean, acknowledging and even embracing the monkey as “part of the family.” But regardless, it could hardly end up worse that all those attempts to deny and destroy and run away from the monkey.