Osgood Perkins on Making ‘The Monkey’ With Guts Cannons, Gallons of Blood and a Personal Touch
Osgood Perkins has guts – literally and metaphorically. The filmmaker knew it wouldn’t work to be precious when adapting “The Monkey,” a short story by Stephen King, hitting theaters Friday. So Perkins held nothing back. “You can’t worry about offending an audience; you can’t focus on honoring it too closely,” he notes. “There’s no pandering going on. There’s no timid storytelling. You have to have the guts to execute it.” He means it physically as well — his effects artists developed objects referred to as “guts cannons” and trucks loaded full of blood to kill people in increasingly gory and creative ways.
It’s a faster pace for Perkins, who has mastered the art of discomfort with slow-burn, atmospheric films like last year’s hit “Longlegs.” And the plot is simple: Theo James stars as twins whose lives have been cursed by the existence of a wind-up toy monkey that, if you turn its key, someone dies. Co-starring Tatiana Maslany and Elijah Wood, the result is a roller coaster ride of gristle and laughter, but also a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on trauma and grief.
Perkins is upfront about his own relationship with death; his father, “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins, died from an AIDS-related illness when Osgood was young. And his mother, actor Berry Berenson, died when she was a passenger on one of the flights involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It’s given Perkins a perspective – and humor – that is evident in his film. “I’m certainly writing from an autobiographical place, given that I sustained some pretty insane kind of deaths in my life,” he admits. “I think that if I had written this movie when I was 29, it would have been pretty sad. But now that I’m 51, it’s a pretty funny movie. Time changes everything, it breaks it all down like a silt in a riverbed. If I was going to give a movie about death to an audience, I wasn’t going to hand them a bummer – I was going to hand a delight, an opportunity to shake it off and have a smile.”
Perkins began his career as an actor, playing a young Norman Bates in “Psycho II”; he’s perhaps best remembered as the awkward law student David in “Legally Blonde.” He does appear in a cameo in “The Monkey” as the weird uncle who takes in the twins after their parents’ deaths even though, by his own account, “I’m kind of a shitty actor.” (Those who have caught his clever promotional videos for “The Monkey” may disagree.) He pivoted into filmmaking with his 2015 debut “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” carving out an admirable niche for himself in the horror genre with films like “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.” But it was 2024’s “Longlegs,” the indie thriller starring Nicolas Cage as an unsubtle serial killer taunting FBI agent Maika Monroe that made Hollywood take notice, grossing over $125 million worldwide on a $9 million budget.
It was unexpected to the director, who felt he was making a very specific movie for people like himself. “The success of ‘Longlegs’ was a shock. It’s an offbeat movie and the demographic is for weird people,” he notes, largely crediting distributor Neon, which is releasing his latest film. “They were able to position it in a way that was like a work of art. I say it to them all the time: ‘I made the movie. You guys made the movie a hit.’ I don’t know how that shit happens, but for some reason it crossed over.”
What does that mean for the auteur’s career? “It’s changed everything and nothing,” he says. “It’s given me confidence, but it’s not like I’m going to run off and make a video game movie or an X-Men movie. I don’t think anybody wants that.” So what can people expect going forward from Perkins? “You can probably just expect more of the same from me, but just made better.”
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One might assume that means more money, but Perkins quickly disabuses that notion. “I don’t think a bigger budget is ever the answer to better,” he notes. “Very seldom does someone say, ‘God, that was amazing. We spent so much money and as a result, it turned out great!’ I think there’s a sweet spot, a middle ground.” In fact, “The Monkey” was also made for around $10 million. To clarify, Perkins says, “I’m just going to get better. I’m going to learn how to do it more and get in better step with the other artists I collaborate with, who are great at their jobs. I’m learning every day and practice makes perfect.”
Perkins has certainly perfected the art of the kill, and “The Monkey” offers a series of unique ways to expire characters. He’s still not sure exactly where they came from. “I had to make all that stuff up,” he says. “I get asked a lot how I do it and there’s no button to press, no cheat sheet. I just try to open myself up to the flow of things. I don’t generate stuff; stuff is generated through me. The muse, or whatever you want to call it, passes something through me and I do my best to give it a shape as it comes.”
It helped that his imagination wasn’t bound by such silly things as realism. “The movie leads with its heart, and it’s obviously a cartoon. Every death is totally impossible to actually occur,” he states. Which might have helped him with the ratings board – he notes there was no back-and-forth on the film. “I think it’s considered a work of fantasy. It’s hard to get disapproved when you’re having a good time.”
That meant not holding back on the gore. When exploding one character, he decided to find out how much blood is in a human body. “We’d find out and I’d say, ‘OK, we better put five times as much, seven or eight times as much,’” he recalls. “My special effects guys would just come every day in their trucks with just gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons. And as long as we kept to an Itchy and Scratchy level of playfulness, we could use as much as we wanted.”
Having successfully adapted King, one has to ask if there are any other of the author’s works Perkins might tackle next. “As a kid, I was impacted by ‘Creepshow’ a lot, and I feel like if I was going to do a Stephen King thing, it would be fun to do an episodic, anthology thing. That feels like a good tempo to me.” That said, he isn’t necessarily interested in doing television. “I was raised in a very old school Hollywood household where, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there was a real divide between TV and movie people,” he says. “Now it’s all one big jambalaya.”
As for adapting a work successfully, Perkins offer this in addition to those guts: “For me, the secret to getting anything right at all times is going to be personalizing it, making it about something that you know,” he says. “Then it feels like it’s worth something. Then it feels like it’s honest. And I think Mr. King picks up on that, because he’s always writing from a very honest place.”
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