The Monkey (2025)
Directed by Osgood Perkins
When twin brothers find a mysterious wind-up monkey, a series of outrageous deaths tear their family apart. Twenty-five years later, the monkey begins a new killing spree forcing the estranged brothers to confront the cursed toy.
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47 films that influenced The Monkey
What critics say influenced The Monkey
The deaths rival Final Destination in creative gore, the blood spatter is plentiful…
Influences from King’s other work, 2020s “elevated horror,” and even a little Final Destination allow The Monkey to spread its black comedy wings…
Think “Final Destination,” minus the monkey, and you’ll get the idea.
This opening sequence perfectly sets up the tone of the movie: this is FINAL DESTINATION dialed up to WTAF with a hefty dose of midnight-black humour and some gorgeous visual poetry to pore over for good measure.
Speaking as a sicko who loves convoluted death scenes, getting this the same year as a new Final Destination film is heavenly.
Think Final Destination meets Re-Animator, with a splash of Drag Me to Hell thrown in for good measure.
Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), and Misery (1990) all remain enduring classics not because of their frights but because of their psychological complexity and unnerving atmosphere.
Some are sprawling prestige dramas (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), others lean into psychological terror (Misery, Gerald’s Game), and then there are the delightfully deranged oddities (Creepshow, Maximum Overdrive).
Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer sharing Kathy Bates' character name from King's "Misery")…
…one example is Babysitter Annie who is later revealed to have the full name of “Annie Wilkes”. Yes, like in Stephen King’s Misery.
And at the funeral of Hal and Bill’s babysitter (Danica Dreyer), a monkey victim who dies in a horrifying hibachi accident, we learn her name is Annie Wilkes, like the antagonist in Misery.
The Babysitter Annie (Danica Dreyer) has a last name: Wilkes, which feels like a shoutout to “Misery.”
For audience members with little interest in subtext, there is enough batshit-insane gore, Saw-esque death traps, and chaotic imagery to satiate less patient viewers who crave a fun, if gross, Popcorn Horror.
If the “Saw” movies kept their gore but were repurposed as farcical comedies, they might look a lot like “The Monkey,”…
James Wan (co-creator of Saw and creator of The Conjuring)…
…produced by James Wan (The Conjuring, Saw)…
You can have comedy with horror (“Tucker and Dale vs Evil”).
Comedic elements are less silly than the Zombieland films or Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil (not that these are bad films) because the fictional place these characters occupy simply and unapologetically exists…
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It captures the macabre playfulness and irreverent energy that have long drawn audiences to the author’s work, earning its place alongside Creepshow (1982) and Maximum Overdrive (1986).
Osgood’s death scenes are rather like the campy ones you’d expect in an installment of “Tales from the Crypt” or “Creepshow”—pretty boring stuff, however complicated.
Some are sprawling prestige dramas (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), others lean into psychological terror (Misery, Gerald’s Game), and then there are the delightfully deranged oddities (Creepshow, Maximum Overdrive).
…or the way that Gordon brought his background in era-defining Chicago theatre to raise Re-Animator above its splatter peers…
Think Final Destination meets Re-Animator, with a splash of Drag Me to Hell thrown in for good measure.
You can have horror with comedy (“Scream”).
James’ voice as Bill calling Hal feels like a “Scream” franchise reference.
A 1958 Plymouth Fury, room 1408 at The Dolphin Hotel, and here an Organ Grinder Monkey…
In the present day, there’s a punk called Thrasher, played by Halloween Ends’s Rohan Campbell, who feels decades out of date with a Ramones-adjacent ’70s-punk aesthetic, like the anachronistic high-schoolers of Christine but more consciously goofy.
Employing a dramatic, even jarring shift in tone from one narrative feature to the next is practically a horror filmmaking tradition, indulged by luminaries such as George Romero (Season of the Witch to The Crazies), John Carpenter (Christine to Starman), and Tobe Hooper (Lifeforce to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2).
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And yet, unlike Final Destination and similar splatterfests of yore—Omen sequels or even a handful of Nightmare on Elm Streets—this thing is working hard to let us know how pleased it is with its schlocky self.
…we’ve been seeing these kinds of death scenes since the Omen movies…
Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), and Misery (1990) all remain enduring classics not because of their frights but because of their psychological complexity and unnerving atmosphere.
The bullying Hal endures in the first part of the film is comically heightened — he comes home covered in bananas at one point — a sillier version of the over-the-top bullying in Carrie.