‘The Monkey’ Director Oz Perkins on His Unusual Relationship to Horror, the Genre He Was Born Into
Editor’s Note: The following story contains some spoilers for “The Monkey.”
When you are the son of Anthony Perkins, and physically resemble the man who played one of the most iconic and recognizable characters in the history of the genre (Norman Bates in “Psycho”), your career path into horror is maybe to be expected. But its writer/director Osgood “Oz” Perkins’ relationship with the genre and the unique position he now finds himself working inside it are both unexpected and uncharted.
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“The way I have come to look at my trajectory, if anybody gives a fuck about my trajectory, it’s born into horror, right? Born into a royal family of horror, right?,” said Perkins in a recent interview with IndieWire about his new film “The Monkey.” “And you kind of uneasily pursue it, because that’s what some of us do — we follow the footsteps of the father, we’re sort of intrigued by that path, and we can connect with the father through the follow. So there’s that, but I don’t love horror movies.”
Make no mistake: Perkins is a full-fledged cinephile. Even by the high standards of a profession that includes Scorsese, del Toro, and Tarantino, Perkins can nerd out about movie history and filmmaking with the best of them. It’s just that horror is not his cup of tea.
“I don’t sit around and think about horror movies all the time,” said Perkins. “I certainly don’t see a lot of the ones that are supposed to be the ones. Something like ‘Terrifier,’ for example, so successful, so well done, absolutely unappealing to me, like in every possible way. True crime, horrible to me. I would never ever dabble in true crime because I’m not interested in real pain. That doesn’t do anything for me.”
That’s not to say he doesn’t love his job, or his movies. Perkins has just worked hard to not only make the genre work for his own interests, but also the audiences — the breakout success of “Longlegs” making him a name-above-the-title brand that distributor Neon is banking on by backing the director’s next two features (“Keeper” comes out October of this year).
“Being inside of horror, things we’re born into, it feels like what is happening, happily, now is I get to keep zooming out a little bit,” said Perkins. “‘Longlegs’ is this pop impression of a horror movie, and ’The Monkey’ is almost just laughing at the horror genre a little bit, but in a very affectionate way.”
When James Wan’s producing team came to him about “The Monkey,” Perkins correctly assumed that this zoomed, unconventional vantage point was what they were looking for. According to Perkins, they had a script, but didn’t feel like they’d found the way to crack the movie version of the Stephen King short story they owned the rights to.
“The script was very serious, and I was very put off by that. I was like, ‘It’s a toy monkey, for one thing.’ It has this impish quality to it from the get-go, so it should have a sort of a sense of humor. The monkey would have a sense of humor,” said Perkins. “I know everybody loved the ‘Joker’ movie so much, but I was like, ‘I don’t like this because you know what? The Joker wouldn’t like this movie.’ The Joker would be like, ‘What are you kidding me? What is this self-serious thing? What is this drama?’ And it’s the same thing with the monkey.”
From the start, Perkins saw “The Monkey” as a comedy, not a horror film. The blood spatter would work as the punch lines, not jump scares. He also wanted to embrace the spirit of King himself, who he credits as being “the guy who made horror pleasurable, the one who introduced the concept [that] you can have a good time, it’s entertaining to be horrified like this.” But he also found his own personal way into the material.
“Maybe ‘The Monkey’ is supposed to be the sort of super textual look at horror,” said Perkins of how he started to think of “The Monkey” from 20,000 feet. “Every horror movie is about everybody dying, right? Whether it’s ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre,’ or ‘The Monkey,’ everybody dies… Horror was around me. I’ve lived through some of the real stuff, and I’m older than that now, and I’m kind of getting this different view of it.”
Perkins is, of course, referring to his own experiences with death. As the writer/director has talked about in other interviews, including with IndieWire for “Longlegs,” his early adulthood was shaped by the unexpected and unusual circumstances surrounding the death of his parents. Anthony Perkins, a closeted gay man, died of AIDS in 1992, and his mother Berinthia Berenson-Perkins was on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center during the September 11 terrorist attacks. The two deaths had a profound effect on Perkins, but years later he has come to see them, and death in general, from a POV best captured in “The Monkey.”
“When you’re a filmmaker you’re trying to come across with a point of view, a big part of the job is to figure out how’s this thing gonna operate? What’s the engine of this experience gonna be for the audience? And while I knew that it was gonna have a sense of humor and was gonna be sentimental and sort of melancholy,” said Perkins. “That it was going to mean something to me, and at risk of sort of becoming maudlin or self-serious, I knew that what the crowd was going to want this rhythm where, ‘Yeah, we’ll sit for the kind of weird sense of humor. We’ll sit for the kind of like examination, meditation, rumination on life and death, as long as the bell goes off every once in a while and the little pellet comes out filled with a set piece where someone explodes.’ And I think that as long as I maintain the rhythm, I sort of entered into the agreement with the audience that they would ingest what I was giving them if it came with a spoonful of sugar.”
In this case, the spoonful of sugar would be quick, completely unrealistic, over-the-top, laugh-out-loud scenes of blood-splattered death, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner-esque (with a pinch of Rube Goldberg). It matched both what Perkins was trying to elicit from the spirit of King, his own twisted sense of humor, and his own view of death itself.
“There’s this extremist torture porn stuff, which I guess isn’t really a term anymore, but something like ‘Terrifier,’ which is so popular, and is really well made. It’s also so brutal, and the death set pieces go on and on and on, and they’re so hard to experience. The vibe of ‘The Monkey,’ the intention, was the opposite,” said Perkins. “Because that’s certainly been my experience [of death], where you’re just kind of going along, and then all of a sudden, this thing happens, and everything is different afterwards. But it’s very instantaneous, it’s very quick, and it’s a shock.”
Much to the initial chagrin of his producers, Perkins wouldn’t be bringing the toy monkey to life ala “M3gan” or “Chuck.” The monkey doesn’t move (except to bang its drum), nor inflect any direct violence. Also missing is the mysterious back story, which would normally need to be unlocked or solved to return life back to normal for Hal (Theo James). Spoiler: Just don’t turn the key, and random, hilarious, shocking deaths wouldn’t immediately follow.
“[The monkey] stands in for the immovable immutability of the fact that we all die. And sometimes there’s a monkey there, and sometimes there’s not a monkey there, and so I was then able to eschew all mythology,” said Perkins. “They didn’t have to dig it out of a hole in Antarctica and thaw it out. It didn’t have any of that sort of like, ‘Where’s this thing from?’ It just is in the same way [as] the immovable fact of life and death.”
At the end of the film, after the town has been destroyed, Death, riding upon the biblical pale horse, passes in front of Hal and his son Petey (Colin O’Brien), giving a knowing, exhausted nod. The scene makes Perkins crack up — Death looks tired and haggard, his job is never done (especially this week), and while the father-son may have escaped this round, their paths will cross in some unknowable way in the future.
Perkins fully embraces that the monkey, discovered in Hal’s absent father’s closet, is an exploration of his own father’s closeted secrets, “It’s absolutely that. There’s the closet and what messes us up by being kept from us, but it’s also just the low-simmering anxiety that we have as parents, right? Where it’s like, we’re going to be the ones to mess our kids up,” said Perkins, now a father himself. “It’s not going to be some kid at school. It’s not going to be a video game. It’s not gonna be ‘Itchy and Scratchy.’ What’s going to ruin our kids: We’re going to say something, do something, model something that’s going to ding their path and send them into this little thing or put a critical voice into their mind.”
It’s with “The Monkey” that the writer/director connects and empathizes most with his own father’s experience. “I think that protective quality is on the surface, my dad didn’t tell me or my mom what was going on. And it’s more about, ‘Gosh, trying to just protect your kids from yourself,’ right? You want to give them your best, but you know you’re going to give them your worst also.”
As Perkins works out the complex family dynamics in his head, thinking out loud, he can’t help but pause to reflect on the fact he’s talking about his new “horror” movie, his second of three with Neon. The film came without pressure for a sequel or to create a franchise, but rather, the expectation that he’s going make his own thing.
“I’ve landed myself in a supremely lucky position,” said Perkins. “I think that’s almost expected now, or at least after ‘Longlegs’ into ‘The Monkey,’ I think everybody’s like, ‘Oh right, he’s not going to hit the same beat twice, I don’t know what to expect.’ That’s a nice thing for me and my partners, to have a studio that really tolerates a lot of bullshit for me and really represents the work for what it is, and doesn’t try to resell it [or] repackage it as something else. I’m incredibly fortunate.”
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