Welcome to Revenge of Graphic Content, tonight we’ll be talking about The Monkey (2025). It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, I recently saw The Monkey, the latest film directed by Osgood Perkins, and I loved it. Like all art I love, it sent me off into a spiral of thought, and I am going to brainstorm here.
The film is an adaptation of a Stephen King short story, written and directed by Osgood Perkins, and produced by James Wan. I highly recommend it.
Oh, and there will be spoilers. Avoid reading further until you’ve seen the film.
Hereditary Illness, Curses, and Drumming Monkeys
One element that one can quickly latch onto when watching The Monkey is the reading of the film as an exploration of hereditary illness. In humankind’s earlier periods, where the understanding of hereditary disease wasn’t quite there, they would be seen as curses. Today too. The spiritual and religious elements in society have made a great effort to build on this correlation. Even a Google query about the idea turns up a lot of healer hokum and scriptural explanations. The language of curses applied to hereditary conditions is still very much applied today.
We’re more enlightened as a society, now, I’d argue. But that does not mean hereditary disease is completely removed from the reading of a curse on one’s family. Sometimes these conditions are passed along from generation to generation, skipping a generation here and there, but they persist. is it any wonder they can be read as curses?
The Monkey, I feel, leans on that to a degree, exploring this tension with the metaphor of the chaotic and cruel drumming monkey toy.
The central plot device, a literal toy in The Monkey, is not a hereditary condition, necessarily. It doesn’t account for the incredible amount of death present in the film. But metaphorically it is worth considering the circumstances between Hal, Bill, and Lois. There is a certain madness present in the central family, and there is an anxiety of passing down something. it is what shattered the relationship between Hal and his son. The drumming monkey looms heavily over the mind of the twins. A cloud of something dark within their family, inherited from their father, perhaps killing their mom. Perhaps not. The film presents something interesting there.
Hal and Bill see the toy as a curse, and they are not wrong. But in the heightened world of the film, the monkey toy stands for a kind of inexorable randomness in life; sometimes a family ends up with a bum hand and the death persists through no fault of their own. Passing down heart disease, cancers, and aneurysms must feel like a curse. How could they they not? Something you’d want to shield the next generation from. But with these things, it can be a coin flip, a dice roll, or the beat of a drum.
At the climax of the film, Hal and Bill reunite among the murder-by-monkey-spree at Bill’s hand. During this moment, Hal reiterates a lesson from Lois, their mom. Everyone dies. It’s an inevitability, one can’t run from it and the universe will do as it does, in so many words. At this moment, we see again the death of Lois, but rather the grotesque display that is in style with most of the deaths in the film, it is peaceful. Lois meets death with a calm acceptance of the inevitable. Perhaps not just the inevitability of death, but maybe something in the brain?
Earlier in the film, following the death of Lois, Hal’s narration mentions some sort of “boomerang aneurism.” We see a boomerang among the possessions of their pilot father who is no longer with the family, which is interesting to note. And, well, what do you know aneurysms can run in families. Just as Bill perceived his mother dying from a shower of gore erupting from her head, and Hal dreamt of such, Bill dies in a head-centric shower of gore; his head smashed and bashed by Lois’ bowling ball.
Then of course, what to make of the Pale Man on the horse at the end? Hal and his son, Petey, named for his disappeared father who brought the monkey into their lives, carry this burden of walking with looming death. They are cursed to carry the potential for death – though a curse could also just be in how we address hereditary conditions that may weigh on us.
This isn’t a clean metaphor yet, mind you. This is all free association of images and themes I have seen from a movie within the last two hours, as I thought about it on the drive home from the theater. But I do think there may be something there. It’ll just take another viewing to parse.
But, what do you think? Did you pick up on any associations between the concept of curses and hereditary disease in The Monkey? Let me know in the comments. Let’s beat this drum together.
The Monkey is currently in theaters as of 2/21/2025.
