Osgood Perkins, the visionary filmmaker behind last year’s creepy-like “Longlegs”, still remembers the first time he was exposed to Stephen King’s Macabre World.
He was little and his parents (actor Anthony Perkins and actress Berry Berenson) had left him with a babysitter. He crawled down and what he saw frightened and pleased him. It was “Salem’s Lot”, the CBS mini series from 1979 by “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Autheur Tobe Hooper, based on King’s beloved novel from 1975. He remembers lively – still – the little vampire child floating outside the window.
And now “Monkey,” His adaptation of King’s short story from 1980 (collected in “Skeleton Crew” in 1985) has done Perkins done something that will traumatize a whole new generation of curious children with sleepy babysitters.
Perkins said that James Wan, the director of “The Conjuring” and “Saw” and his producing partner at Atomic Monster, had had the rights to history for a long time. “They hadn’t been able to crack it,” Perkins said. The scripts they had developed were not up to snuff, so they encouraged Perkins to start over. He was over the moon.
“It’s Charlie Bucket who gets the candy bar, and the damn golden ticket is inside,” Perkins said. “And you go, I can’t believe it’s actuallyIt is the happiest privilege. You get the biggest writer for the ages in space, and you get this indelible picture of the monkey, which everyone knows something about. And a creator, when you get that credit in the store, with the audience, they already know what they feel. They feel something and uncomfortable with this monkey toy. It was just extremely exciting. I am humbled by the opportunity. “
When Perkins sat down to adapt the short story, he sought and wanted to “find the key that will unlock it.” “In the end, it’s up to me. King did not expect me to honor the story specifically and I did not feel that the novel was the movie in itself, ”Perkins said. “I needed to invent the matter.” After a little while, Perkins said, he came to the realization that the monkey himself was not really do something. “The monkey is not the M3gan. It doesn’t attack you. It’s not chucky. It doesn’t stick you, ”Perkins said.
In Perkins’ The Monkey “, the Twin Brothers (played by Theo James) of this monkey as their father left behind and one who, they believe, was responsible for their mother’s unclear death (she is played by Tatiana Maslany). directly death.
As he worked on the script, Perkins began to see the monkey as almost like Buddha. “It has this almost spiritual weirdness to it, where it only happens to be there when people die in crazy ways, unexpectedly, for no reason,” Perkins said. “I’ve had it to happen to me in my life. It has happened. And when i had that moment to connect to it was like, oH, I’m expert. I am an authority for what it is like to have a monkey in your life. “Perkins linked the feelings to what had happened when his mother died in the attacks on 9/11 (she was on American Airlines Flight 11) and how he and his brother, musician Elvis Perkins, handled that tragedy in different ways. “We were so different people who shared the same experience, but could not have answered more differently,” Perkins said.
The atonement of her death and his own relationship with his brother became important, said Perkins, as was humor. “When you experience something tragic it is grossly long and then it changes. You get older and if you are lucky enough to have support and you are lucky to be in a life that can afford with help, you can grow into something else, ”Perkins said. “You get a distance from these things. And I was lucky enough to have a little ability to have a comical distance, and it felt in a kind of holistic healing, in a way. “
Yes, “The Monkey” is crazy and chaotic, with some deaths that would make the creators of the franchise “Final destination”. But there is also a real soul. It seems stupid to believe that someone other than Perkins could have adapted the king’s story so well.
“Once you have reached that place of authority, you are released in such a way, where you just write what you know is true,” Perkins said. He points to a scene where a person gives an eulogi and another where Maslany’s character tells the boys something at a cemetery, such as being possible just because he himself reached that government site. “There is no solution to any of this. Once you have entered it you will find that center. Then everything is possible.” That trust, said Perkins, is important because writing is such a “lonely, exacerbly, annoying experience.” If he has confidence he can be loose and the work will be much better. “You can actually tell yourself to yourselfT will be okay And then you let it happen. “Perkins has often repeated in interviews that how he succeeds is by not trying so hard. “When you try hard and you carry down, things tend to be a little tight, and when you let it come and you let it pass through you, it is a much happier experience,” Perkins said.
Another major change that Perkins made when he adapted the King story was to change what the monkey looked like. Part of this was actually copyrighted by the necessity-Disney the small, Cymbal-playing monkey because the toy makes a performance in Pixar’s “Toy Story 3.” Perkins’ Monkey instead has a drum, which actually adds the film’s intensity. Each time twirls one of its sticks it creates an incredible amount of excitement, because you (as an audience member) know that when the stick comes down, someone will die in some horrible way.
The monkey in “The Monkey” is also bigger, more physically significant.
“You look down the road a bit to actually make the damn movie and realize, Will people really interact with a little thing? It seemed very difficult to me, so I wanted to give it a presence, ”Perkins said. He also pointed back to the fact that it doesn’t really need do something. It does not run around and bites people’s ankles. “Its presence is what makes it a problem. And so I had to give the real presence. “The monkey is the physical manifestation of the hidden horror that the boy’s father handed over to them. It should probably be noted that Perkin’s father, actor Anthony Perkins (best remembered as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”), was a closed gay man who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992. Osgood was only 18.
All this conversation about Perkin’s past makes it seem like “The Monkey” is a Downer, Awash in trauma, which has transformed many potentially fun horror movies into introspective struck. This is not the case. “The Monkey” is lots of fun and channels the chaotic energy from the 1980s classic such as “Gremlins”, “An American Wedding Wolf” and King’s Own “Creepshow” (made with “Night of the Living Dead” Author George A. Romero). It is also, proud, much different from Perkin’s sleeping hit “Longlegs” from last summer.
“It felt very natural to me. This is obviously my humor. The references for the films were in the art that I considered, it was more “death becomes her” than it would be anything else. It felt more like me, in one way than anything else, ”Perkins said. “I don’t really like to make people feel scared, but it happens. I don’t try to terrorize anyone and I’m not out to make someone feel bad. This was an open attempt to make people feel good. “
There is a specific moment, where a shock of electricity crawls along a pool that feels like something of one of the old films. (Electricity leads to a woman who dives into a pool. The electricity makes her explode into fleshy pieces, somehow surpass the diving board’s explosion from “Lethal Weapon 2.”) Perkins said that “Wacky Bolt of Electricity” felt like everything from Robert Zemeckis to Steven Spielberg to Epielberg to Empharmor Palpop “We want to meet all the high notes and just make it fun and surprising,” Perkins said. “There is nothing serious about it. There is nothing right about it. And I think that the publication of it in a horror movie, when you are doing well with something as unlikely and unlikely as what we have, is quite relaxing. “
But did Perkins ever hear from Stephen King? The man who had frightened and excited him all these years ago?
Perkins met him the day before we talked. “He absolutely loves the movie,” Perkins said. He pointed me to his review on threadsWhere King said: “You have never seen anything like it”, followed by any more R-ranked language. (King, who escaped X after Elon Musk started acting, has then returned to the platform.) “Feel free to quote it, because I quote it every day, because his positive review of the movie is kind of what it is about,” said Perkins.
But don’t worry, Perkins is not done – he has another movie, “Keeper”, out in October, again from Neon (who released “Longlegs” and “The Monkey”). “The best thing I think I can offer someone is that ‘The Monkey’ is not something like ‘Longlegs’ and ‘Keeper’ is nothing like ‘The Monkey’,” Perkins said. “My co -artists and my producers and my distributor, we manage to reinvent things every time and not cross the same bridge twice, and just try to present good things in the theater, to fight the good fight against streaming.”
An Osgood Perkins movie that gets lost in the nebhose world of streaming? Talk about scary.
“The Monkey” is out now.
