Osgood Perkins is still walking on his “Longlegs” high.
After the horror writer/director made history at Neon with the highest-grossing film released by the distributor (even surpassing Best Picture winner “Parasite” at the box office), Perkins unveiled the trailer to his follow-up Neon feature, “The Monkey.”
The film is based on Stephen King‘s 1980 short story of the same name. Perkins wrote and directed the adaptation, which stars Theo James as twins Bill and Hal who discovery of their dad’s monkey toy in the attic. Of course, murder ensues.
Elijah Wood, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, and Sarah Levy co-star.
“The Monkey” is produced by James Wan, Dave Caplan, Michael Clear, Chris Ferguson, and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones.
And while horror staples Wan and King are behind the film, Perkins told The Hollywood Reporter that “The Monkey” is his most comedic feature yet.
“It’s feeling more like an old John Landis movie or a Joe Dante movie or a Robert Zemeckis movie,” Perkin said. “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? And to come at it from a tragicomedy kind of voice felt like it fit.”
Perkins continued, “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.”
Perkins previously told IndieWire that out of his films including “The Blackcoat’s Daughte,” “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House,” and Brothers Grimm adaptation “Gretel & Hansel,” “Longlegs” was his most personal. “Longlegs” also was Perkins’ first feature with Neon.
“Everything I try to do, I try to make it about myself, only so that it creates a truth for me and an honesty, and I know I’m never full of shit if I’m talking about myself,” Perkins told IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio. “As coded as it might be and as many layers of other stuff on it that there are, at the end of the day, all the movies I generate are essentially based on my experience, and that tends to be my experience with my parents.”
He also added of his own film tastes, “The good news is, the horror community wants to see fucked-up things. I don’t watch contemporary horror pictures. It’s not something that interests me. I don’t have Netflix so I’ve never seen any of the serial killer things, ‘Haunting of Hill House,’ I’ve never seen those things, so I don’t know what’s going on. I think I’m OK with that.”
In addition to “The Monkey,” Perkins also has a third film set at Neon. Details remain under wraps, however.
“The Monkey” premieres February 21 in theaters from Neon. Check out the trailer below.
