Interviews
‘The Monkey’ Director & Star Talk Dual Roles, Gory Kills & Surprising Tom Hanks Inspirations [Interview]
Despite creating some moody, atmospheric, and scary horror movies like The Blackcoat’s Daughter or even last year’s Longlegs, writer/director Osgood Perkins doesn’t enjoy making people feel bad. The filmmaker also really loves to laugh. Enter his latest, The Monkey, an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story that goes for broke in terms of outrageous gallows humor dialed up to gory excess.
The Monkey let Perkins go full throttle on the humor, delivering a crowd-pleaser that prefers raucous entertainment over brooding chills. So much so that it feels like a natural progression of Longlegs, which also featured similar themes of family and traces of the same absurdist humor.
While the overlap in themes speaks more to the filmmaker’s sensibilities rather than a narrative or worldbuilding connection between films, Perkins’ reflection of this highlights a surprising fact: he finds Longlegs to also be a comedy like The Monkey.
“They’re in conversation with each other because they’re both made by me, and I’m sort of figuring out the same shit on all the movies,” Perkins tells Bloody Disgusting. “If all this stuff is just an expression of me, then it’s just an expression of me, and the various things that circle my psyche, and that trouble me, or that I’m trying to loosen up, or untie the knot off. I think it’s like you see painters who paint the same, essentially, picture a thousand times.”
Perkins continues, “I might be a little bit in that school, I think, where I’m working out the same garbage all the time, just in slightly different forms. But I thought Longlegs was funny as shit. I laugh more than anybody. I’m a notorious laugher at the monitor, and I’m overheard laughing a lot. Maika Monroe had a hard time with me on Longlegs because I laughed through most of her scenes, to be honest with you. I just found that character to be so adorable and hilarious.“
In Perkins’ gory comedy The Monkey, Theo James pulls double duty as twins Hal and Bill Shelburne, estranged brothers whose family seems doomed by the mysterious toy monkey that seemingly claims lives with ruthless randomness. Hal and Bill couldn’t be further apart in every way, from personality to style, providing James with two distinctly different characters to explore. More impressively, the dual roles let James showcase different types of humor, between Hal’s browbeaten milquetoast type and Bill’s abrasive yet oafish behavior.
Photo Courtesy of NEON
That humor extends beyond the screen. It was comedy that resonated with James when taking on the dual roles. James says, “Oz and I found quite quickly that we have a similar sense of humor.”
“Thank God,” Perkins interjects.
James affirms, “Thank God. That just means day-to-day shooting the shit and making shit jokes. But in terms of playing the characters, we wanted the same thing out of the humor, if you know what I mean. That was lucky. But in terms of the moment that made me realize or connect to them, because honestly, Oz, our first chat was him relating his own, a bit of his own personal story to the existential elements of The Monkey, i.e., what the monkey represents. Again, it’s a comedy; it’s entertainment, but The Monkey is more than just the toy. It’s the legacy of the monkey on your back and how a piece of trauma follows you through your life.
“Oz described it as points in your life: do you feel like you can’t shake this thing, whether it’s a literal curse or just something that has followed you through your life, and can you ever get rid of that shadow, or is it always going to be there. That made me understand the whole story and both characters in a much more complex way and helped me unwrap them.”
“The touchstone that I put to Theo was, ‘Remember when Tom Hanks was just the goofy everyman before he became the savior of the world and everybody’s hero?'” says Perkins. “He was just the goofy guy in Money Pit, for instance, a beleaguered Joe. When we laid into like, ‘Oh, yeah, we have shared affection for beleaguered Joe Tom Hanks,’ then that became code.”
“Yeah, that was definitely a touch point. It was Tom Hanks in Money Pit, and I watched that film. Also, the style of comedy with Hal was the idea that he’s experienced it a lot. You always talked about how he’s not shocked all the time,” James says to Perkins. “He’s like, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, this is happening again.’ But then back to your point about the solidity of him, we also were keen to make him relatively real as possible, because if you make him too nonchalant, or too silly, or too knowing, as you said, with the wink in the eye, then the movie loses a bit of its heart, and it loses some of the stakes. So there had to be a real emotionality to him to an extent, right?”
Perkins recounts a small moment of humor and pathos that stands out in James’ performance. “One of my favorite bits in the movie is when he’s in the hotel room with his son, and his son is filling out his family tree thing, and says, ‘What’s your mom’s name?’ I said to Theo on that day, to Hal, the character, I said, ‘Think of it as you’ve never said your mom’s name since she died. You’ve never said it out loud since she died. You don’t dare to say your mom’s name. And he’s just asked you what your mom’s name is.’ I must say, beautifully done, beautifully done. When you rewatch the movie, you’ll see he is barely able to get out the word Lois. It’s very beautifully done. Those little moments of real human agony, as quiet and underplayed as they are, really make the rest of this stuff work. Good job.”
As for the titular killer toy, there’s no question that the design is effective. The Monkey may be a gory comedy-horror movie, but that little wind-up drummer is creepy. Perkins reveals that it didn’t take very long at all to arrive at its design: “Because it’s written in the script, and I wanted to join the expected look because I feel like people look at toy monkeys and they’re like, ‘Oh, there’s something creepy about that. I don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s something uncanny and weird about a toy monkey. There’s something unsettling about that.’
“So, I wanted to lean into that and not deviate from what was expected. But at the same time, because it’s a supernatural presence, I wanted to give it this question of like, ‘Is it real? Is there a real thing to it?’ So, its teeth are smokers’ yellow. They’re real teeth-looking things. Its feet and the way it grips the drum underneath look like they’re real. I wanted it to have this somewhat anthropomorphic vibe, like, ‘Does it move by itself when it’s not being watched?’ But once we locked into that, the concept guy got it pretty fast.”
Amazing cast and creepy toy monkey aside, the element of The Monkey that will have audiences buzzing the most are the inventive and endless kills. So many that even the packed trailer can’t highlight them all. “A lot of them were there from the very first inception, but some of them changed. But yeah, you’re just dipping into Oz’s fucked mind,” James teases of the kill count.
Perkins cracks, “My job is just to make up. I tell it to my kids all the time, ‘Yep, dad’s going to work now. I’m going to make a bunch of shit up. I’ll be back later.’ And that’s really what it is. Some people go and drill teeth, I put words next to each other to make shit up. When you’re writing stuff like this, I’m just trying to entertain somebody. Do you know what I mean? That’s the goal of the movie, which is to entertain a theater full of people because we need theaters full of people.“
The Monkey releases in theaters on February 21, 2025.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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