Says Perkins, “I have a distinct memory of holding his fat paperback copy of Pet Sematary with the cat’s face and the misspelled title, and the kid’s handwriting. For whatever reason, whatever age I was when I held that in my hand, I can’t even tell you why it had such a profound impact on me but I never will forget that moment of seeing the vibe coming off of that book. The title treatment and the misspelling of the word, I thought was so great. Creepshow, the comic book with the Bernie Wrightson artwork, the playfulness of that element of Stephen King, those are my gateways through the visual… weirdly more than through the text.”
The Dark Humor (and Autobiography) in Tragedy
Yet when it came time to finally adapt King as a filmmaker, Perkins found himself drawing on a vibe that was much lighter than Pet Sematary’s tone, if an intensely perverse way. There have of course been plenty of Stephen King film adaptations with a great deal of levity, including Stand By Me or Misery, but The Monkey is straight up, front-to-back gallows humor comedy. But as Perkins tells us, he found the kernel of absurdity in the original story via the title simian doll itself.
The filmmaker explains, “I was given an opportunity to work with the material, and it was exciting immediately because the monkey itself is such an iconic, instantly uncanny thing that, for whatever reason, just stirs in the human mind. ‘There’s something about that thing I don’t like.’ We showed our monkey doll to one of the stand-ins for one of the kids, and his response was, ‘Oh, I hate that so much.’”
Perkins notes that unlike other dangerous movie dolls, your M3GANs or Chuckys, the Monkey doesn’t technically do anything. It’s just a totem, but that is one place where the film’s dark humor springs. “It felt like the leer of Gremlins,” he muses. But while thoroughly funny, the plot of The Monkey threads several childhood traumas for its twin protagonists, including the death of a parent. Perkins drew from many tragedies in his own life. (While he does not confirm these are the influences, Perkins’ father died from AIDS in 1992 and his mother Berry Berenson died as a passenger during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.)
Learning to cope with those tragic events helped him process the lighter side of mortality.
“The monkey doesn’t do things, it just exists, so it represents the fact that everybody dies,” said Perkins, echoing one of Tatiana Maslany’s lines in the movie. “The Monkey just happens to be there when people die in insane ways. I connected that to my own personal experience with some pretty shocking tragedies in my life, which felt—at the time—very cursed and so far out of the realm of possibility. I connected to The Monkey as being, ‘Oh, it’s just how life goes.’ I was like, ‘Oh, well, I’m an expert on that.’ Life sometimes goes into this insane place of death.”
