Osgood Perkins thrives in the unexpected. After delivering a nerve-shredding horror film in Longlegs, he’s back less than a year later with something stranger in The Monkey, an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella. But The Monkey isn’t a pure horror film. It’s a bonafide horror comedy. And it perfectly sets up our expectations in its wacky, silly, and frightening first scene.
Horror comedy is a complicated balance to strike; too much comedy and you lose the fear factor, and if the film leans too heavily into all-out fright, it stops being comedic. Most horror comedies tend to be a lot more funny than frightening, like Bodies Bodies Bodies, Shaun of the Dead, and M3GAN, while movies including Barbarian and The Substance are too creepy/nasty to be particularly amusing. These are all good movies, but none of them scratch the itch of fully delivering laughs and dread at the same time.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
The film opens at a dingy pawnbroker, complete with flickering lights and rats running around the unwanted merchandise. In walks a man (Adam Scott) wearing a pilot uniform, covered in blood, and holding a large monkey toy holding a drum. Visibly panicked, the man approaches the shop owner (Shafin Karim) to sell him the monkey. The man tries to put the shopkeep at ease, pointing out that it’s not his blood, a macabre joke with a dash of absurdity—anyone covered in blood is deeply concerning, and being covered in someone else’s blood is even worse.
Still, the shopkeep, maintaining a remarkable sense of disinterest, points to a sign that says they don’t accept kids' toys. It’s important to point out that this monkey figure is massively unsettling to look at, and its beady dead eyes and slightly yellowed toothy grin are enough to give you nightmares, so even thinking it’s a children’s toy is a quality gag in itself—no stable child would want this in their house. Scott’s character quickly points out that this monkey is no toy, but the pawn guy doesn’t want it, observing that the monkey appears to be broken. Its hand, holding a drumstick, is stuck at head level. It can’t even play the drums!
“You don’t want the drumstick to come down!” Scott begs. “If it does we are all f***ed to hell,” he pleads to the stone-faced man. While Scott’s character is the focus here, Karim provides a pitch-perfect straight-man foil to the troubled Scott rapidly spinning out of control, almost as if the opening scene of The Monkey is the burgeoning of a lovable buddy comedy. But a buddy comedy this isn’t. Now holding the monkey, the shopkeep starts to turn the key on its back, only for Scott to beg him not to. You can feel the horror bulging through his eyes, and a sense of unease sets in. What could possibly come of the key turning? Well, the key turns, and we’re about to find out.
Scott begins to shudder in terror—he knows what’s coming, but the shopkeep has no idea. We cut to a rat chewing on a rope that’s attached to a harpoon. The rope snaps, sending that very harpoon flying directly into the shop owner’s gut, impaling him. As if the impalement wasn’t enough, the harpoon retracts, taking with it the man’s intestines. Blood goes everywhere.
The kill is nonsensical and outrageous, a Rube Goldberg machine-esque happening of events, yet the image of intestines flying out of a man is more than enough to send a chill down your spine. We crash zoom in on Scott’s face, shaking with fear and frustration: It’s clear that he’s seen this kind of thing a lot, and nothing can stop it. But maybe there’s a way—Scott’s character notes a flamethrower for sale in the pawn shop.
Outside, the pilot places the monkey on the street, and unleashes the flamethrower upon it, screaming with rage as he hopes to finally free himself of this mysterious, cursed toy (a running gag throughout The Monkey is that this monkey is, definitely not a toy, despite looking and acting like one).
In full fiery glory, we freeze-frame on Scott’s maniacal laughing face, ending the scene. The moment is so wild that you’d almost expect a record scratch sound effect and Scott narrating something along the lines of “I bet you’re wondering how I got here,” but that doesn’t happen. We never see Scott’s character again.
What we will see is plenty more moments like this one, involving increasingly confounding and staggeringly bloody deaths. What’s really special is how carefully the opening scene blends horror and comedy together—the flying intestines are every bit as freaky as the interplay between a frenzied Scott and a blank slate Karim is hysterical. You want to laugh, and you also want to hide your face in your hands. Just like the opening of Perkins’ Longlegs sets the viewer with expectations of nonstop dread, The Monkey’s first scene establishes an exceptional kinship between horror and comedy.
