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Inspired by Springfield and Sesame Street: Osgood Perkins on The Monkey
Theo James and Osgood Perkins on the set of The Monkey “Everybody dies, and that’s life,” one character proclaims in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, approaching the inevitability of suffering with a wink and a grin. In between executing a real-estate agent via shotgun blast and setting fire to an occupied baby stroller, this more deliberately comedic outing from the writer-director behind Longlegs is all about the strange catharsis of helplessly laughing through life’s horrors.
Adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, The Monkey follows twin brothers Bill and Hal (Christian Convery in childhood, Theo James in adulthood), who discover a sinister wind-up “organ grinder” monkey toy among their absentee father’s belongings; turning the key in its back, they inadvertently set in motion grisly events involving their babysitter later that night. A morbid pattern emerges, and the twins eventually go their separate ways, only to reunite years later after the toy resurfaces, its twirling drumsticks triggering another spate of gruesome, inexplicable deaths.
For Perkins, the surreality of death and the cosmic absurdity of coincidence are painfully familiar subjects. Both of his parents died in awful ways: his father, Psycho star Anthony Perkins, from AIDS complications after a lifetime in the closet; his mother, actress and model Berry Berenson, less than a decade later in the 9/11 attacks. For 18-year-old Oz and his younger brother, Elvis, their father’s passing was a time of deep grief and confusion, complicated further by their parents’ public denials up until his death that Anthony had been gay. Berenson’s death as a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, was obviously traumatic to Perkins—but also profoundly bewildering.
Since making his feature directorial debut with The Blackcoat’s Daughter, released in 2015, Perkins has explored deeply personal tragedies within coldly atmospheric horror films populated by lost children who can’t go home, parents struggling to rectify past wrongs and forces of darkness preparing to consume families whole. The lives and deaths of his parents, and the shadows that their presence and absence still cast over Perkins’ life, has become a frequent source of inspiration. (As an actor, their work also informed his; Perkins’ acting debut was in Psycho II, playing a 12-year-old Norman Bates.) I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is dedicated to his father, its New England ghost story unfolding in a home like the one Perkins inherited from him; Longlegs, dissecting familial dynamics within a serial-killer thriller, ultimately becomes a film about the lies parents tell their children.
With a budget in the $10-11 million range, The Monkey is the biggest film that Perkins has directed to date, and its outrageous cavalcade of carnage—involving electrified swimming pools, hibachi knives, vengeful wasps and buses full of cheerleaders—certainly reflects the more-is-more mentality of a filmmaker scaling up. But, as with his previous films, Perkins is still exorcising personal demons; aswirl with existential dread and cruelly inventive absurdity, The Monkey extrapolates away from its source material for a macabre meditation on the inevitability of loss, albeit one delivered with scathing, sardonic cheek.
Filmmaker: There’s such a cheerfully mean-spirited sense of humor to this film; that The Monkey is so playful and comedic almost makes it feel reactive to Longlegs, which is also quite funny but in a more guarded, opaque manner. Do you see it that way?
Perkins: You know, I don’t. I wrote The Monkey before I wrote Longlegs, and when we shot The Monkey, we didn’t know Longlegs was going to make such an impression on people. All of the concern—around what was going to follow what, how it was going to feel and be received, whether it was a shift—isn’t really up to me. What is true, though, is that the comic sensibility of The Monkey is very much what I like. I also think that it’s hard to achieve. I can’t think of a lot of examples recently that do it well; there’s An American Werewolf in London, Gremlins, and Death Becomes Her, which all have that flavor of [knowing] that you can entertain with horror. You can actually put forth something playful and mischievous within horror. You can dance around the mystery of death, around the inevitability and the bummer of it, and wink at it. If you get that right, it feels good.
Filmmaker: The horror films you’re referencing, for me, were very much gateway drugs, ones I saw at a young age that delighted and traumatized me about equally. What were those films for you?
Perkins: Growing up, we were one of the more lenient houses, where kids could come over and say, “Oh, there’s no rules here, you can do what you want.” “Oh, your dad’s a movie star, so it’s weird here, but it’s really nice, and everything’s kind of allowed in a way.” Everyone was high all the time—not that they were high in front of kids, but it was one of those households.
My brother and I rode that a little bit into this place where we would invite kids over, when we were young, to have big sleepovers in the living room. We’d put a bunch of mattresses, blankets and pillows down, and rent movies that we definitely should not have seen. We showed The Toxic Avenger to a bunch of kids, and we probably shouldn’t have done that. So, that milieu was definitely going on for us. That edge—it’s meant to entertain, it’s kind of ghastly and inappropriate, but isn’t it so fun?—is the spirit of this movie.
Filmmaker: Your brother, Elvis Perkins, composed the music for The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House and Longlegs. He didn’t work on The Monkey, but this is a film directly about the relationship between two brothers bonded by horror.
Perkins: It was much more about my real-life relationship with my brother and our real-life relationship to tragedy, drama and death. The idea was that my brother and I experienced the same deaths, that of my mother and father; the event was the same, but our experience, processes and paths that spun off from that couldn’t have been more different. As you get older, sometimes those differences don’t work so well, right? You’re on your own path.
What was compelling for me about the brother [element of the] story here was that I was able to do a reconciliation between these brothers. Both Bill and Hal are me; neither is Elvis. They’re both aspects of myself: some of my better aspects, some of my darker aspects, some of my more charming aspects and some of my shitty aspects. The idea was to see if I could reconcile these characters in the wake of tragedy.
Filmmaker: In the cosmic chaos of The Monkey, all the bizarre brutality and timing involved in the fates of its characters, was it satisfying to lean into the unfathomable nature of death as you do? I appreciated, even in scenes of characters attempting to comfort each other, how you play up the ridiculous things people tell you in their misguided efforts to make sense of losses that will never make sense. They never get within spitting distance of saying something helpful.
Perkins: The ultimate example of that, of course, for me, was losing my mom on 9/11, which became this thing everybody owned. Everybody thought they had a piece of it. Everybody had a bumper sticker and everybody went to the [crash] site; it became a museum. It makes sense: we all need to process it, and it did affect everybody—me and my brother, and thousands of other people—in a specific way. But you’re right: when death occurs to you, there is nothing to say, right? There’s no fix. When someone I know now experiences a death and I reach out to them, it’s always with that acknowledgement: there’s nothing I can say. I know how you feel. It’s not about what I’m going to say to you. It’s just that I feel you, that I’m here. The stunning and immovable madness of someone close to you dying is what’s at the center of this movie, obviously. It’s only because what happened to me happened long enough ago, and lots has happened since then, that I’m able to approach it with humor and surreality. If I had tried to make this movie in 2002, it would have been a really dreadful exercise. There’s the absurdity of things being impossible to time. Sometimes, the ball goes in; sometimes, the ball goes out. That’s really what the movie has to offer. It’s what the priest has to offer in his attempt at a eulogy. It’s what Mom has to offer in her attempt at, “Let me tell you about life and death.” There’s no language that matches the experience, but it’s fun to try.
Filmmaker: I loved the priest, as well as the roving band of cheerleaders, the real-estate agent, the stoners, all these side characters. Tell me about building that world around Hal, all the passersby and people he meets who reinforce the absurdity of it all.
Perkins: We all have our formative influences, works of art that connected to us and unlocked a part of our creative selves, in a really satisfying way. For me, that’s The Simpsons. That’s true for so many people, because it was such a fresh take on culture, such a fresh take on neighborhoods, towns and the people in your lives. If I could name anything as being the inspiration for the populace of The Monkey, it’s Springfield. Why not have a great character who has two lines, and you get them right away, because you know what type of archetype they are for the people in your neighborhood? Sesame Street was also a big one for me when I was little, and with my older kids also. It was meant to make the world feel big and weird and random and beautiful.
Filmmaker: Plus, it brings in that idea of mass casualty, that death’s design could involve ghastly fates for most of these characters. I thought about Final Destination; the first film was 25 years ago, but that franchise anticipated this feeling of death around every corner, a lack of safety in modern life, not to mention the Rube Goldberg machine-esque convolutions you have versions of here.
Perkins: I’ve seen the first of the Final Destination movies, maybe. I know there’s a lot of them, and I’m bad about keeping up with everything. I tend not to think about other movies when I’m doing a film or developing one. I do get the comparison, and it makes sense. I never looked at it; for me, it was more Chuck Jones. How many ways can you kill Wile E. Coyote in an episode and have him get back up? What distinguishes The Monkey from the Final Destination movies, as I understand them, is that nothing in The Monkey is possible, right? The first big death set piece in Final Destination is a plane crash—and that happens. Obviously. But nothing in The Monkey is really a threat. Swimming pools and electricity don’t operate like that.
Filmmaker: Given that heightened dimension of the violence in The Monkey, what was the most challenging set piece, either conceptually or in terms of technical execution?
Perkins: It’s just about whether you have a great team of people, which I had. It was the third movie that we’d made together in 14 months, so we were all feeling each other pretty well, and the rhythm was pretty good. The Beatles played a lot of clubs in Hamburg before they made a record; we were in that same kind of almost non-verbal communication with each other. We all understood everything, our prep was strong, our assistant director was strong, the schedule was really good. Nothing was hard.
The dive into the pool was complicated, because it required a lot of layers, right? Everything that happens in that sequence is practical. I mean, obviously we drew in the electricity, but everything else you see, we actually captured in plates, in layers. Ultimately, the job of the VFX artist is to smooth out those layers. It was challenging to be sitting by that pool for as long as we did—super fucking cold, in Vancouver—and getting to the point where we’re laying a bridge over the pool, so that my special-effects guy can go out in a full It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia green-man suit and toss body parts at the camera for half an hour. We’re all just sitting by the monitors like this. [Mimics a guy nodding, supportively, at another guy tossing body parts in his direction.] But I’d rather be doing that than anything else.
Filmmaker: It’s been 10 years since the premiere of The Blackcoat’s Daughter, your directorial debut. What do you recall most about making it, and what are your feelings toward it today?
Perkins: I’m very proud of it, still. I think it definitely stands the test of time. It was weird, because at the time I didn’t know anything about the job. I had no idea what the job was: writer-director. I’d never done it before. I’d never made a short, a music video, a television commercial or a student film. When I called “action” for the first time on The Blackcoat’s Daughter, it was the first time I ever said the word out loud. There was a lot of “do or die” happening. I had a few really strong collaborators on the movie, and I look back at it with pride. I wrote it as something that I thought I would like to see, and we ended up with a movie that I don’t mind watching, so that sounds like a win to me.
Filmmaker: To the point of firsts, I haven’t asked you about Uncle Chip, this bizarre character with a Jim Jones haircut and so many ridiculous lines, whom you play in The Monkey as a director cameo. What did you want from that side of being involved in the film?
Perkins: I get a lot of feedback on the street for [being in] Legally Blonde. People really love that shit. I don’t really love acting. It’s not something I think I’m especially good, I don’t really feel in control of it when I’m doing it. But, in this case, we were just having a good time. The part was written based on Randy Quaid [as Cousin Eddie] in the Vacation movies. I was like, “I guess I could do that,” and everyone was like, “Yeah, that would be fun.” And it made sense to me; saying my own dialogue was easy. The scene’s really long; what we see in the movie is a crazily truncated version. That fucking scene was like a one-act play. It turned out pretty funny. His death is pretty good, too.
Filmmaker: That abrupt cut to his funeral service is one of the funniest punchlines the film has.
Perkins: [laughs] Yes!
Filmmaker: You collaborated again on The Monkey with editors Graham Fortin & Greg Ng, who cut Longlegs. What was it like to bring in this element of comic punctuation, and to discover opportunities for that in the edit?
Perkins: It’s just what you said. We were delighted to discover the age-old truth that you can cut for a joke, right? The power of cutting two things together, that’s what all movies are and have been since the turn of the century. You put one image next to another, and you’ve got this third wonderful thing that you didn’t have before. We leaned into the classical approach of cutting something and realizing, if you cut something a little bit short and put something really unexpected next, it’s just funny. It’s simple science, and when you happen onto something that’s as elegant a solution as that, it’s a good day.
