Osgood Perkins has bloody good fun with The Monkey teaser

Hey, theater chains: let us in now (to see The Monkey) and it can be nice! We’ll come back not once, not twice, but as many times as we’d like! Despite having a markedly different tone than his smash hit Longlegs, the promo for director Osgood Perkins’ next project, The Monkey, is just as bewitching.

Based on Stephen King’s 1980 short story of the same name, The Monkey relies on a premise that anyone who’s seen Planet Of The Apes, Nope or—perhaps in the most relevant case—Toy Story 3 will be intimately familiar with: monkeys are fucking scary. Especially toy monkeys like that snitching demon from the Pixar film. 

“For the longest time, there was nothing. But then, it appeared: a beast, not from this Earth, smiting the ones who deserved it, the ones who didn’t, and everyone in between,” a voiceover states at the beginning of the trailer. “Whoever controls it controls life and death—and those deaths are really fucked up.” We already know just how twisted Perkins’ mind can be from Longlegs (not to mention his previous work like Gretel & Hansel and The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and just based on this trailer, he’s continuing to deliver. Multiple people catch on fire, there’s definitely at least one hibachi-related murder, and a bloody attic is described as being “like that restaurant, Spaghetti City.” Yum!

If you couldn’t tell from the above description, The Monkey doesn’t take itself very seriously at all. Perkins recently called the film “deliberately comedic” in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s feeling more like an old John Landis movie or a Joe Dante movie or a Robert Zemeckis movie,” he continued. “I saw an opportunity to make a wry, absurdist comedy about death. It’s about the very basic fact that we all die—and how fucking funny and weird and impossible and surreal is that shit?… At the end of the day, if you want to reduce it, it’s the haunted toy or evil toy subgenre, and I couldn’t imagine doing a serious one of those. To me, it rang utterly false to approach it that way, so I just went in the other direction.”

The Monkey—which was produced by Neon along with James Wan, Dave Caplan, Michael Clear, Chris Ferguson, and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones—stars Theo James, Elijah Wood, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, and Sarah Levy. It premieres in theaters February 21.