While The Monkey isn’t being quite as much of a drawn-out tease as Longlegs—which started its deliciously weird marketing campaign months before anyone knew what the hell Longlegs was about—the next film from director Osgood Perkins is promising a similar blend of shriek-inducing terror. Need convincing? Watch the latest trailer for what looks like the freakiest Stephen King adaptation we’ve gotten in some time. Be warned, it is a redband trailer, and they mean it.
The other big name attached to The Monkey is producer James Wan, so you’ve got quite the horror trifecta working together here. Theo James has a dual starring role as twin brothers who discover that a toy monkey they find in their father’s attic—which is already creepy just to look at—is most definitely cursed by something cruel and homicidal. Tatiana Maslany and Elijah Wood also star.
The trailer—whose originally scheduled release was delayed a bit, presumably out of respect for the fires in Los Angeles—came after last week’s eye-popping social media tease that all but insisted The Monkey‘s trailer would inundate your eyeballs with gruesome imagery galore:
THE MONKEY. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language throughout, and some sexual references. Trailer Wednesday. pic.twitter.com/LDH7SrjFV7
— NEON (@neonrated) January 6, 2025
If “bowling ball smashing child’s face” made it into the trailer, imagine the gushy stuff Perkins is holding back for the film’s release! See for yourself when it hits theaters February 21.
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