Osgood Perkins doesn’t hide what his films are about. Longlegs, his 2024 smash horror hit, starred Nicolas Cage as a serial killer and Maika Monroe as an FBI detective who learns that her mother was his decades-long accomplice. Perkins’ inspiration, though, was in his parents’ ability to keep secrets: the 51-year-old writer-director’s father, Anthony Perkins, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, was a closeted gay man, and his mother, the photographer Berry Berenson, helped keep her husband’s affairs hidden from Osgood and his brother Elvis.
“Everything I do in the creative space is around family,” Perkins tells me in early February on a video call from an office in Vancouver. “I’m a parent myself. I think a lot about my own experience of losing my parents, and the kind of people they were.” Perkins’ father died of Aids in 1992 without ever publicly coming out, while his mother was killed on a plane during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The grip the story of our parents has on us can’t be ignored. I embrace it as much as I can.”
Mining absurd humour out of family tragedy, Perkins’ latest horror film is The Monkey, a smart and silly comedy featuring a succession of gory sequences whereby each death is a blood-splattered punchline. Like Final Destination with genuine heart in between the exploding guts, it revolves around a toy monkey with a drumkit. When a human turns a key on the figurine’s back and it plays its percussive beats, someone nearby meets their maker in a comically elaborate manner. For example, Perkins makes his own Hitchcockian cameo as an uncle in a sleeping bag who’s run over by a stampede of 67 horses, an incident resulting in his remains being compared to cherry pie.
The Monkey is, then, revisiting the familial themes of Longlegs – the monkey is a toy passed down from a father (Adam Scott) to his twin sons, Hal and Bill (Christian Convery as youths, Theo James as adults), who, in turn, must wonder how to prevent the curse from being inherited by their own children – but as a raucous comedy. In the 1990s, Hal and Bill are teens whose mother (Tatiana Maslany) dies in a manner that’s so rib-tickling and eye-poking, you momentarily forget the heartbreak involved. Likewise, in the 2020s, Hal’s tragic set-up – he’s a recluse who voluntarily separates himself from his son – is punctuated by bees drilling a hole through someone else’s skull.
However, Perkins counters that his films have always been comedies to some extent. “Longlegs is as funny as it is anything,” he says. “I know that makes people think I’m weird, but, to me, Longlegs is really light, funny, punk, and amusing. When I was given The Monkey, there was no way I was going to be dark about it. The monkey’s smile alone lends itself to having a good time.”
Perkins adapted The Monkey from a 1980 short story by Stephen King of the same name. With a solo screenwriting credit, Perkins describes the film as being mostly his own invention, including the deaths, each designed for “maximum glee”. Still, Perkins deems King to be “ostensibly the greatest American author ever, maybe”, an icon whose books overlap with his own thematic preoccupations: namely, family dynamics and death. “The most important thing is that I made a Stephen King movie. It’s more important that his name stands out than mine.”
The grip the story of our parents has on us can’t be ignored. I embrace it as much as I can
What’s the difference between a Stephen King movie and a Stephen King adaptation? “It’s hard to explain. When Luca Guadagnino did Suspiria, he said, ‘I can’t remake Suspiria. What I can try to remake is the feeling I had when I saw Suspiria.’ That made so much sense to me. When I got The Monkey, I was like, ‘All I can do is make this feel like when I was a kid, and I’d hold my dad’s paperback copy of Pet Sematary with the cat’s face on the cover and the misspelt title. I tried to re-enact that sensation.” I mention that Dario Argento told me he hated Guadagnino’s Suspiria. “That’s funny to me. Once you create a movie, you’ve got to let it go. It’s not for the private screening room of your mind. It’s for everybody to see, literally.”
As a director, Perkins’ earlier films, such as 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter and 2016’s I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, were positively received but relatively unseen. Before then, he was an actor, making his debut at the age of nine in Psycho II as a young Norman Bates. His other credits include Secretary, Not Another Teen Movie, and as “Dorky David” in Legally Blonde. Seeing as Perkins cites Jordan Peele as an influence – Perkins plays a director in Nope, and thanks Peele in the credits of Longlegs – was acting in Legally Blonde helpful for crafting a full-on comedy like The Monkey?
“I doubt that I laughed once during Legally Blonde,” says Perkins. “I may have laughed because of the people around me – Selma Blair is extremely funny – but I doubt I laughed at anything that happened during Legally Blonde. I’m a weird dude, I guess.” After citing Step Brothers and Napoleon Dynamite as two comedies he enjoys, Perkins claims his kids are what really make him laugh. “Could I write a sitcom? Probably not. It’d probably be pretty fucking crazy.”
In terms of screenwriting, Perkins describes himself as an instrument that receives ideas, rather than someone who generates them. “Whether it’s David Lynch or Bob Dylan – I’m someone who follows those guys – there’s a lack of ownership over the material. Bob Dylan rarely takes credit for writing his music. It happens. People ask me, ‘How do you do it?’ The answer is, ‘I don’t do it. It does me.’”
Perkins is thus adamant that horror is the genre that will dominate his career. Not because he has a second one out this year – Keeper, a supernatural thriller starring Maslany and Rossif Sutherland – but because it’s pure stylistic freedom that exists within the realm of the unconscious. “People go to horror movies to feel better, not to feel bad,” he says. “Everything’s so out of control. To see a controlled, imaginative expression of the idea that we have no fucking idea what’s happening is very comforting. It’s like a nice blanket.”
Ultimately, The Monkey taps into the fear that you can walk out of the cinema, check your phone while crossing the road, and be struck by a car while logging the film on Letterboxd. “We never know when it’s going to happen,” says Perkins. “The monkey’s not Chucky or M3GAN. The monkey doesn’t do anything. It’s just there. If you took the monkey out, you have the same problem, and that problem is called living and dying. There’s no predicting it. There’s no solving it. The monkey is a totem for the fact that everybody dies, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Or you hide yourself away like Hal, and die in a non-literal way? “Exactly. You got it.”
The Monkey is out in UK cinemas on February 21
