American writer and leading voice of horror literature Stephen King would know what Danse Macabre is. This is the title of his book about the ways of horror literature. Danse Macabre is a French medieval term and artistic genre regarding the dance of mortality—the living dancing with the dead.
Dancing and the macabre are very much the ligature in The Monkey (2025), adapted to the screen and directed by Osgood Perkins. In the movie (based on a Stephen King short story from 1980), after a weird death tied to a toy monkey left behind by a wayward husband, the strained single mother discusses death with her young boys, and she suggests that they dance anyway.
King has a connective tissue through his work of children dealing with trauma intertwined with the supernatural (Pet Sematary, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, Carrie, and so on). The Monkey’s centrifugal pull is a demonic wind-up monkey. There is no story of the provenance or origin of the monkey. However, as with all cursed objects, the monkey is the source of murder and such creative ways of mauling. Trust Osgood Perkins to be more than suitable to handle this.
After his directorial stint in 2024’s Longlegs, Perkins (who is the son of Anthony Perkins, famous for playing Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) is one of those directors who perfectly coincide with the textured filmmaking needed for adaptations of King’s works.
Longlegs has this veneer of gritty Polaroid, and so does The Monkey. While Longlegs has some gruesome bits, this does not come close to the massive rockslide of jangling limbs, blood splatter, and distended innards that The Monkey has so much in spades.
The young boys in the film adaptation are the best actors in this film. Their adult version of the twins, played by Theo James, seemed tepid in his role, in which he is either the frazzled twin or the crazed one. The only thing that distinguishes one from the other is that one is wearing a horrid hairpiece of what seems to be a mullet with bangs.
James’s best work is in TV series like The Gentlemen and The White Lotus. He used his dapper, rugged handsomeness to the hilt there. In The Monkey, Theo James is a weird pick as the lead. He cannot do strain. He is just reacting from one fumble to the next.
Characters in this movie strike as one-dimensional and just talking and screaming heads for the tableaus of violence. The absolute strength of this movie is the elaborate violence. For those with a dark sense of humor, this movie promises to be a knee-slapper in absurdity. It is like watching Looney Tunes cartoons in terms of violence but with deadly consequences. If you are curious about what happens to a body after a stampede, this movie offers such answers with generous help.
Watch this for the hilarious-shocking violence. It’s too bad that Osgood Perkins did not write and direct a memorable story. This movie will be praised and remembered for the abandoned wanton of human suffering amidst cartoon-like contraptions and series of events. Even the wind-up toy monkey’s crazed eyes are not as menacing as the final stare into the audience his father did at the end of Psycho.
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social