Osgood Perkins’ Stephen King Movie The Monkey Won’t Be Similar to Longlegs

The Monkey release date has been set for February 21, 2025.

Stephen King’s The Monkey film adaptation will take a different cinematic approach. According to director Osgood Perkins, the movie won’t follow the route he chose for Longlegs, which is an upcoming horror thriller he also wrote and directed.

The White Lotus star Theo James has been tapped to lead the upcoming adaptation of King’s iconic short story. The Conjuring Universe creator James Wan will produce the film through his Atomic Monster banner, with Perkins — the filmmaker behind The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and Gretel & Hansel — serving as the film’s writer and director.

How will The Monkey differ from Longlegs?

Longlegs, which will star Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe, has already been established as a terrifying horror thriller with its creepy marketing campaigns, including the recent website featuring graphic details about the titular fictional serial killer’s victims. The film is set to hit theaters on July 12.

Though The Monkey is also a horror feature, it will feel less like Longlegs, according to Perkins. During his recent appearance on Bloody Disgusting‘s Boo Crew podcast, the director described The Monkey as a Robert Zemeckis-directed ‘80s-’90s King adaptation on “acid.”

“It’s gonna feel more like Misery or Creepshow or Gremlins or American Werewolf. It couldn’t be less like Longlegs. To me, if you’re gonna make a movie about a toy monkey, you can be serious about it. But so much of King is funny and nostalgic feeling. So we tried to make a movie that felt a little bit more like something from the late ’80s – ’90s. It’s sorta like, if Robert Zemeckis had just like a little bit of acid and made a Stephen King picture about a monkey toy,” said Perkins.

He continued, “For me, ideally it’s the movie that kids and their parents wanna go see together. People blow up, people explode; it’s very extreme but it’s very funny. It’s very father-son redemption, it’s very touching, it’s very nostalgic, it’s very Stephen King.”

What is The Monkey about?

The plot will center on twin brothers Hal and Bill, whose possession of their father’s old toy monkey resulted in a number of horrifying incidents. In addition to James, other stars include Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, and Sarah Levy.

“When twin brothers Hal and Bill discover their father’s old monkey toy in the attic, a series of gruesome deaths starts occurring all around them,” the logline for The Monkey reads.