“Stephen King’s work is once again poised to bring terror to audiences around the globe with the upcoming release of The Monkey, a new supernatural horror film based on the author’s 1980 short story.” (Mitchell, 2024)
Before seeing the film for myself I found the monkey from the advertisement to be reminiscent of the monkey from Toy Story 3.
Overall, I found this movie to be quite underwhelming. Besides a few cool death scenes, the lackluster story dragged this film to the middle of the road. This film was ultimately nothing special. Throughout the film there are various death scenes reminiscent of the Final Destination series, while this film offers a differentiating twist wherein the cause of all the death is a windup monkey.
This film is an adaptation of a short story by Stephen King, also titled “The Monkey.”
This film approaches its story and horror through absurd comedy and ultimately “The Monkey shouldn’t be taken seriously — at all. That’s because it rarely takes itself seriously.” (Abdulbaki, 2025) And this fact is exemplified throughout the film as each character death is more ridiculous than the last. As an example, partway through the film an air conditioning system falls into a pool as a female character takes a dive off the deep end resulting in her body quite literally exploding like a tomato hitting a wall.
Each death scene seemingly falls deeper into absurdity. Especially when a character is killed while sleeping in a sleeping bag as animals crush him to pulp during a stampede.
The aspect that peaked my interest and inspired me to see this film in theaters is the fact that it is produced by James Wan, a man who has brought us some of the most iconic horror films in recent years as he led the production of the Saw Franchise, the Insidious franchise and The Conjuring universe of films. With James Wan’s name attached to the film I allowed my expectations to rise which unfortunately led me to overwhelmingly be disappointed by the film.
