Longlegs writer, M3gan creator are making Stephen King’s The Monkey

Neon released the first trailer of James Wan and Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, a feature-length adaptation of Stephen King’s award-winning short story. Wan is producing, and his past work in horror includes everything from helping create Saw and M3gan, to work on The Conjuring, Annabelle, and Insidious.

Related: Longlegs Review: Nicolas Cage Crawls Under Your Skin in This Hypnotic, Unnerving Tale

Perkins is directing The Monkey. His past credits include writing Longlegs, along with Gretel and Hansel, Psycho II, and Legally Blonde. We do love a bit of style diversity.

King’s story follows the tragedy of Hal, a man who finds a cursed cymbal monkey that kills someone every time it claps its symbols, which is one of the most Kingian sentences you could ever write. The monkey works its way through Hal’s family until he finally finds a way to get rid of it – or he thinks it does. It’s all very classic horror and slightly reminiscent of M.R. James or Susan Hill, but judging from The Monkey’s trailer teaser, it looks like Neon has something rather bloodier and more gruesome in store.

The brief moment we see Theo James in the trailer, he’s covered in blood and so is the room he’s in. The monkey also has a drum instead of cymbals, though that’s probably irrelevant.

Feature-length adaptations of Stephen King’s short stories tend to be hit and miss, with 2022’s Mr Harrigan’s Phone a pretty big instance of a miss that tried too hard to stretch scant material into a full movie. Granted, director John Lee Hancock (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Saving Mr Banks) didn’t quite have the same strong horror background as Wan and Perkins – or any horror background at all, really.

Anyhow, The Monkey is set for theatrical release sometime on Feb. 21, 2025.

Related: M3GAN Spinoff in the Works at Blumhouse