Horror as a genre often straddles a precarious line between terror and comedy. Sometimes it lands in that perfect sweet spot—think Evil Dead II—and sometimes it trips over its own severed foot, leaving the audience either perplexed or, worse, bored. Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, takes this balancing act and does a keg stand on it. It’s a gory cartoon, nihilistic stand-up routine, and an awkward family therapy session where everyone accidentally brings the same cursed toy to the White Elephant gift exchange.

First things first, let’s talk about Perkins. The man is horror royalty, being the son of Anthony Perkins (Psycho, anyone?), but as he admits himself, horror isn’t even his thing. “I don’t sit around and think about horror movies all the time,” Perkins told IndieWire. “I certainly don’t see a lot of the ones that are supposed to be the ones. Something like Terrifier, for example—so successful, so well done—absolutely unappealing to me, like in every possible way.”

Interesting, I suppose, but Perkins is really only known for his horror (Gretel & Hansel, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Longlegs). Nonetheless, this attitude might explain why The Monkey (or his other films for that matter) doesn’t always feel like a traditional horror movie. Instead, The Monkey is what happens when someone who isn’t obsessed with horror decides to take a sledgehammer to its conventions and throw in a few pratfalls for good measure. Perkins approached the material with the intent of making it a horror-comedy, saying, “The script was very serious, and I was very put off by that. I was like, ‘It’s a toy monkey, for one thing.’” And, well, he’s right. How do you take a murderous wind-up chimp seriously?

The story kicks off with airline pilot Petey Shelburn (Adam Scott, in a cameo that somehow makes you wish he’d stuck around longer) stumbling into a pawn shop, drenched in blood and desperate to rid himself of the titular monkey. The shopkeeper, of course, doesn’t take the warning seriously because, well, this is a horror movie, and within minutes, we get our first Rube Goldberg-style splatter fest. Enter twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn, played in their youth by Christian Convery (Cocaine Bear, Mom, Flowervale Street) and in adulthood by Theo James. The twins find the monkey among their missing father’s things, and it doesn’t take long before people around them start dying in hilariously grotesque ways—think Final Destination, but with more Looney Toons vibes and a homicidal, drum-banging chimp.

The brothers attempt to rid themselves of the cursed primate, first by dumping it down a well (classic mistake—when has throwing something evil down a hole ever worked?), but of course, this just means that twenty-five years later, the damn thing comes back. Adult Hal is now a recluse with an estranged teenage son, Petey (Colin O’Brien; Mr. Harrigan’s Phone), while Bill has fully embraced his inner psychopath. And then, the deaths start ramping up again, leading to a crescendo of carnage that Perkins describes as “a crescendo of splatter, and music, and hilarity, and absurdity.”

At its core, The Monkey is about inescapable fate, generational trauma, and the sheer, unrelenting ridiculousness of life. Perkins, who has personally experienced some of life’s cruelest random acts (his mother, Berry Berenson, was on American Airlines Flight 11 during 9/11, and his father, Anthony Perkins, died from complications related to AIDS), sees death as something both horrifying and absurd. “I realized, ‘Oh, I’ve had The Monkey in my life,’” he says. And that’s what the monkey represents: that unshakable presence of mortality, lurking just behind you, waiting for its moment to pounce.

It’s not just about death, though—it’s about legacy. Hal spends the entire movie trying to avoid being like his father, only to realize that in doing so, he’s doomed himself to a different kind of failure. Perkins captures this sentiment perfectly: “What’s going to ruin our kids? We’re going to say something, do something, model something that’s going to ding their path and send them into this little thing or put a critical voice into their mind.”

Visually, The Monkey swings wildly between stark, beautifully composed shots and absolute gonzo chaos. Perkins has been criticized before for his deliberately slow and moody aesthetic (Longlegs was practically a moving gothic painting), but here, he speeds things up, at least in the moments of carnage. The deaths are absurd, elaborate, and completely devoid of realism, a deliberate choice by Perkins: “None of these deaths can actually happen in the real world… It’s meant to have that Wile E. Coyote quality.”

That said, the writing is where the film occasionally stumbles. The humor works best when it leans into its own insanity (Elijah Wood as the overzealous stepfather steals the scenes he’s in), but the film sometimes gets lost in its own attempts at profundity. The exploration of grief and estrangement is compelling, but it never quite gels with the sheer ridiculousness of the monkey’s rampage.

The biggest strength of The Monkey is also its biggest weakness: it doesn’t take itself seriously. This makes it a riot for those who enjoy absurdist horror, but it also means that it lacks the tension and dread that more traditional horror fans might expect. Perkins acknowledges this divide: “Horror fans will either think it’s the coolest thing ever or just inanely silly.”

There’s also the issue of character depth. While Theo James does his best to inject Hal with some pathos, the script doesn’t give him much to work with. Bill, on the other hand, is delightfully unhinged, but never feels fully developed beyond “evil twin who likes to stir shit up.” The monkey itself, despite being the driving force of the plot, never really feels like a character, more like a recurring gag.

At the end of the day, The Monkey is a chaotic, blood-soaked romp that never quite decides if it wants to be a horror film or a parody of one. It’s a film best enjoyed with a group of friends, preferably at a midnight screening, where its sheer absurdity can be appreciated in full. As Perkins himself puts it, “We really tried for an adorable horror movie.” And in a way, that’s exactly what The Monkey is—a blood-drenched, nihilistic cartoon with a twisted sense of humor.

While this won’t be for everyone, The Blog Without a Face had a hell of a time watching this one. So, it definitely comes with our recommendation!