Editorials
Accidents Happen: Ranking The Six Gnarliest Kills From ‘The Monkey’
The recurring line in director Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey sums it up well: “Everybody dies, and that’s life.”
Perkins’ adaptation of Stephen King’s short story from 1985’s Skeleton Crew, now streaming on Hulu, uses its source material as a loose framework for a Final Destination-like, gory romp filled with a nonstop onslaught of over-the-top, elaborate deaths.
The plot centers around twin brothers who find a mysterious wind-up monkey, triggering a series of outrageous deaths that will tear their family apart. When the Monkey’s arm winds up, get ready; a brutal death occurs whenever the cursed object bangs his toy drum. It’s always at random, too. Per the wind-up toy’s box, it is “like life,“ after all.
And in this movie, death comes fast and furious in morbidly funny fashion. So much so that there are over two dozen gruesome demises packed into The Monkey’s runtime, all highlighting the gallows’ humor with gore. However, many of them are shown in fleeting montages or featured in the background, especially in the film’s final act when the cursed object’s reign of terror unleashes chaos.
Now that The Monkey is on streaming, we’re highlighting six of the horror-comedy’s standout kills beyond the quick montage and background deaths. Spoilers ahead, of course…
6) Hibachi Grill Decapitation
The first time Hal Shelburne (Christian Convery) winds up the Monkey, he doesn’t know what it does or what’s to come. That the audience does means a suspenseful build-up as Hal and his twin brother Bill (also Convery) get treated to dinner by their babysitter, Annie (Danica Dreyer), at a Hibachi restaurant. The chef at the trio’s tableside grill strikes up a flirtation with Annie while attempting to impress with cooking flair. It spectacularly backfires; a quick flip of the wrist with a sharp spatula winds up decapitating the babysitter instead. While The Monkey quickly reveals itself to be rather fond of decapitations, Annie’s freak accident is the twin brothers’ first tangible brush with death. More noticeably, the babysitter’s full name, revealed at her funeral service, makes for an amusing joke in itself: Annie Wilkes, as in Misery‘s Annie Wilkes.
5) Uncle Chip Mince Meat
Of the deaths on this list, Uncle Chip’s is the briefest for good reason. It’s arguably the goriest of the bunch and only shown in quick flashes. After Hal and Bill’s mom dies from an aneurysm courtesy of the monkey, they’re taken in by their swinging Uncle Chip (Osgood Perkins) and Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) in Casco, Maine. Somehow, the wind-up monkey finds its way to them and promptly triggers another freak accident. This time it claims Uncle Chip, who was decimated off-screen by a horse stampede in his sleeping bag while on a camping trip, but Perkins does give a gag-worthy look at the mince meat aftermath that earns a spot here.
4) Wasp Face Ricky
When Bill finally connects the dots on the Monkey’s M.O. as an adult, he hires Casco local Ricky (Rohan Campbell) to find and retrieve it so he can enact vengeance upon his brother. Ricky becomes obsessed with the wind-up toy, holding Hal and his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) at gunpoint under Bill’s orders. Just before the final confrontation between estranged brothers, the monkey bangs his drum once again, sentencing Ricky to an outlandish demise courtesy of one massive hornet’s nest whose pissed off inhabitants charge straight into his mouth to rearrange and mutilate his jaw.
3) Pawn Shop Harpoon
Talk about a great hook for an opening. The Monkey begins in 1999, where the twins’ blood-drenched dad, Petey (Adam Scott), frantically makes his way to a pawn shop to offload his cursed object. The skeptical owner isn’t interested in the children’s toy or Petey’s insistence that it isn’t one. That’s when the Monkey’s arm comes banging down, setting off a chain of events within the shop that causes a harpoon gun to fire, landing straight into the pawn shop owner’s belly, revealing just how long the small intestines can coil in a brutal disemboweling. It’s the type of scene that warns to buckle up for an absurdly wild ride.
2) Going to Pieces Over a Night Swim
Hal and Petey’s father/son bonding trip derails almost immediately, thanks to Bill’s murder scheme. The pair stops at a motel not unlike the famous Bates Motel, where the deeply broken a/c signals the grim reaper is lurking near. It arrives shortly after Hal steps outside to take a phone call, where he begins to notice the telltale signs that something is amiss. The faulty a/c unit slips from the roof, crashing into the wet pool area and electrifying the water just as a woman takes a dive. Hal is helpless to warn her; she doesn’t even hit the water as she explodes mid-air. It’s as nasty as it is funny, only further underscoring the random cruelty of death.
1) Fish Hooked
The randomness of death doesn’t just apply to who dies, but how they die, too. Some are lucky to receive a swift death, while others inexplicably suffer protracted fates of immense suffering. The worst of it befalls poor Aunt Ida, whose insanely elaborate death reignites a new wave of annihilation 25 years after the twins thought they’d destroyed the Monkey for good. The perky but quiet woman, living alone, succumbs to a bizarre chain of events that sees her falling through basement steps into a faceful of fish hooks. Ida manages to dust herself off and clean her wounds with rubbing alcohol, the move that proves fatal when she ignites her stovetop for a calming beverage, only for her newly flammable face to go up in flames. She runs out the door and impales her fiery head upon the realtor’s sign in her yard. It’s a centerpiece kill that heralds in the second half of the film, and Perkins marks the occasion with Rube Goldberg Machine-style gallows humor.
Of the three films that make up the Diabolical Trinity of classic religious horror films—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976)—The Omen is the most purely entertaining.
While Rosemary’s Baby digs into the societal shifts of the 60s and The Exorcist explores spiritual tensions between faith and doubt in an ever-shifting world, The Omen seems most interested in just telling a thrilling story. It achieves this by blending two major trends of the 1970s, the devil movie and the paranoid thriller, into one crackling adventure yarn. In the process, The Omen has sparked fear and curiosity about what could happen in the “end times” if such events are to occur.
After seeing The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard contacted writer David Seltzer and said something along the lines of, “Hey, write me one of those.” Seltzer, having never read the Bible, thought it would be an interesting challenge, so, according to various interviews, he read the Bible and several commentaries in search of a story. Then he stumbled upon a passage in the book of Revelation, the image of a great Beast rising out of the sea, that sparked his imagination. In the commentaries, he found that the sea represented politics in some interpretations of the text, and he began building his story on that foundation.
Seltzer has told this story often, and I am inclined to believe him. However, from there, much of the theological-sounding lore of The Omen was created purely by Seltzer. Many of the ideas surrounding The Antichrist in the film appear to be drawn much more from the pop-eschatology sensation of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, than any Biblical source.
Lindsay’s book was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s and re-popularized views of the “last days” that had been dying along with fundamentalism for decades, namely Dispensationalism, Millennialism, and the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. In dispensationalism, history is broken into several epochs of time (or dispensations) that culminate in the return of Christ and his thousand-year (millennial) reign.
Before this return, a seven-year Tribulation will occur in which the Antichrist comes to power and persecutes all who oppose him, culminating in a battle between the forces of good and evil at the valley of Megiddo, usually called Armageddon. Of course, in this worldview, the true believers in Jesus will be lifted out, or raptured, before all this takes place. Since the publication and popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth, this has been the prominent belief in Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian circles, though Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant denominations largely reject it.
Lindsay also did something unique that had not been the case even in dispensationalist circles before him—he posited that the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 started the countdown to Armageddon. Fans of the film will immediately realize where Seltzer ran with this idea in the first line of the poem created for the movie: “When the Jews return to Zion…”
Damien Thorn and the Creation of Horror’s “Innocent Villain”
Seltzer’s next inspiration focused on the idea of the Antichrist as a child, what he would call the film’s “innocent villain.” In watching The Omen, it is readily apparent that Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens) does not really do anything evil beyond a bit of normal kid mischief. Even the moment in which Damien knocks Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) over a second-floor railing can be read as an accident orchestrated by Damien’s diabolically connected nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). The film takes this idea of the innocent villain a step further by casting Gregory Peck, best known for playing arguably the greatest father in film history, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as Damien’s earthly father, an element that greatly satisfied Seltzer.
The New Testament itself says very little about the Antichrist and certainly nothing about his childhood. In fact, the word antichrist is used twice (1 John 2:18 and 2 John 7 for the curious) and refers to groups of people, not a particular person. There is also a passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 in which the writer (usually attributed to Paul) discusses “The Man of Lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God” and “proclaim himself to be God.”
Then there is the Beast of Revelation chapter 13 with “seven heads and ten horns” that Seltzer latched onto, which has been interpreted in a multitude of ways over the centuries. Powerful people throughout history, from Charlemagne, various Popes during the Protestant Reformation era, Napoleon and Hitler, to modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have all had the label placed on them by various circles. Even religious leaders like Billy Graham have not escaped being called the Antichrist.
Lindsay and modern dispensationalists are certain the Antichrist will be a 21st-century individual as they are equally certain that the Rapture, Tribulation, and return of Christ are imminent, likely within their lifetime. Many scholars and theologians, however, interpret these passages as symbolic representations of the Roman Empire and the first-century Caesars who persecuted, tortured, and murdered Christians and Jews who refused to submit to Imperial rule and worship them as gods. For example, that the Beast from the sea in Revelation has seven heads is symbolic of the famous seven mountains of Rome, with the 10 horns referring to rulers and magistrates of the Empire.
But this is all really of no matter to Seltzer and the story of The Omen. Instead of being concerned with any historical or theological accuracy, he instead built his own lore, which sends Robert Thorn and photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) on a globetrotting investigation into the nature of the Antichrist and how to stop him. Some of this lore includes the child being born of a jackal, the reaction of animals, the protective cult that arises around Damien, the daggers of Megiddo, and maybe most interesting of all, the peculiar flaws in Jennings’s photographs that presage the ways certain individuals will die.
All these aspects are where the paranoid thrillers come in, as films like Blow Up (1966), Z (1969), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), 3 Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) were all the rage at the time. Especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the idea of journalists (like Jennings) as ordinary heroes who could bring down the powerful, nefarious forces in the world was exactly what audiences craved. And what greater hidden evil force was there than the Devil? This is also why the device of the daggers of Megiddo is so important to a movie like this. If Damien is indeed the Antichrist, there must be a way to stop him, though in the Biblical text, the only power capable of destroying the Devil is God Himself.
The Mark of the Beast, 666, and the Film’s Most Famous Religious Symbolism
The piece of lore created for the movie with the most solid Biblical grounding is the Mark of the Beast. Revelation describes a mark on the forehead or hand of those who worship the Beast and his image. Again, this is symbolic language differentiating those who belong to the power of the Roman Empire and those who belong to Christ, who have the Mark of the Lamb. In Seltzer’s hands, the mark is very literal, a birthmark that is borne by not only the Antichrist but all his followers, meaning they are marked from before birth as belonging to Satan, and there is no escaping it. This is all rather distressing to the priest Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), who betrays his mark by warning Thorn about Damien and pays the price by memorably being impaled by a spire that falls from a church steeple after being struck by lightning.
Why is the mark three sixes? Again, this is drawn from a passage in Revelation that states that the Beast can be identified by calculating his number. In Biblical scholarship, this is believed to be the sum of the name of a man transferred into Hebrew numerology, a practice in which each Hebrew letter also represents a number. Using this method, the number of the name Caesar Nero, which many believe to be the most logical choice, is six hundred sixty-six. In the film and elsewhere, this number is changed to three individual sixes. According to the film, this represents the Diabolical Trinity (a designation also unique to the film) made up of Satan, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet. That Damien carries this unique birthmark under his hair convinces Robert that the child is the Antichrist, and it’s up to him to destroy him.
Part of what makes The Omen great is its ambiguity. Damien could be the Antichrist, or he could be at the center of a series of coincidences. Director Richard Donner stated in interviews that he believed Robert Thorn had gone insane by the end of the film, which, to Donner, is the only explanation for why Thorn would attempt to kill an innocent child. However, that enigmatic smile in the final shot suggests that Damien does embody a spirit of great evil. The sequels, however, all but erase this ambiguity.
In audiences, The Omen sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the Antichrist and the dispensationalist interpretation of the end times that continues to echo throughout the last five decades. Around the time of the film’s release, even Elvis Presley was photographed brandishing a paperback copy of Seltzer’s novelization. Dispensationalist authors like Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee have made millions publishing books and giving lectures about the Antichrist and the end of the world.
The Legacy of The Omen, 50 Years Later
Though A Thief in the Night (1972) preceded The Omen in initial release, it gained quite a resurgence (along with the ability to create three sequels) in the wake of the popularity of The Omen and went on to scar the psyches of Evangelical children for decades. Hal Lindsay was also able to release a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1978, complete with narration and a brief onscreen appearance from Orson Welles.
In the 1990s, the Left Behind series became a cultural phenomenon, spawning twelve books in the core series, a YA spinoff series, video games, and a movie series (2000-2005) starring Kirk Cameron. A bigger studio adaptation of the first book was released in 2014, starring Nicolas Cage. 20th Century Fox and The Omen got in on the renewed “end-of-the-world” vigor by releasing a remake of the original film on June 6, 2006. The franchise was revived once again in 2024 with The First Omen, which explores ideas of the Antichrist and the motivations of those in power in our current religious, social, and political context.
But despite all the sequels, spinoffs, rip-offs, remakes, and “end times” money grabs of the last 50 years, the original version of The Omen remains untouchable. Its greatest strength is that it seeks, first and foremost, to entertain. And it does so admirably.
After half a century, its influence can be felt in horror, the culture at large, and even in various faith circles. It is a testament to the power of story and film that, consciously or unconsciously, fans of The Omen and those who have never seen it alike are, to this very day, marked by the Beast.
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