‘Not all horror films are meant to be scary, The Monkey is goofy fun and knows it’

Not all horror films have the same intentions. Some horrors well and truly want to rip your soul to shreds, like The Exorcist or Candyman. Others want to create a classically chilly atmosphere, making you look into the corners looking for ghosts, like The Others or Paranormal Activity.

There’s films that want to play around with body parts like they’re playdoh, like the recent The Substance or anything by Stuart Gordon or David Cronenberg. And then there’s some that just want to make you giggle.

After the hype machine of last year’s Longlegs, a supernaturally infused serial killer thriller with an unrecognisable Nicolas Cage being allowed to go full weird, the expectation for Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey was clear: f**k us up. But the director, who went from having four-year gaps in between films to producing three in the span of 18 months, is having none of it.

Based on the short story by horror maestro Stephen King, Perkins has shifted gears completely into horror comedy. While the story itself is classic King: three generations of sons dealing with the deadly inheritance of a toy monkey that can, and will, kill people whenever it claps its cymbals. Under the surface, the story is about the trickling down of familial disappointment.

This sounds like peak Perkins territory, whose previous film dealt with the turbulent emotional landscapes of parenthood and familial lies and regrets. Instead, he chose straight comedy.

Let’s get real here for a minute: it is nay impossible to make a toy monkey, with its little red jacket and its coked-out eyes, be scary. No Dutch angle in the world can make it truly threatening, so why not embrace the silliness and run with it?

The Monkey is goofy. Even its gore –and, boy, is there gore– is mined from comedy. There are dismemberments, fish hooks to the face, bodies get stomped into mince, others are exploded into goo. It’s a smorgasbord of extreme deaths, but none of them are meant to be scary.

“It’s an exploration,” Perkins told me when I interviewed him on The Final Girls podcast recently, “about this wild and woolly fact that everybody dies.” An idea delivered, in glorious deadpan, by Tatiana Maslany, telling her twin sons “Everybody dies” before gruesomely dying herself.

Horror comedies walk the tightest of tightropes. The timing and precise execution needed for both genres make them siblings, but the public expectation could not be more different. Horror and comedy are saddled with this same, simplistic expectation, sometimes unaided by promotional campaigns that are trying to simplify the film to get bums in seats.

In the simplest of terms: comedy should make you laugh, and horror should scare you. If they don’t achieve that, they are bad films.

That shouldn’t be the only metric. Comedies can have an underlayer of horror to them, and even the most serious horrors can take elements from comedy (in our conversation Perkins insisted that another King adaptation, Misery, was shot as a comedy.) All films are prototypes, and we should judge them based on the barometers that they set for themselves.

If a horror film wants to scare you, and it doesn’t, it has failed. But if we go into a horror comedy, like The Monkey, a film that wants to make you laugh by using absurd, extreme horror imagery to do it, we can’t measure it with the same horror stick we apply to, say, The Conjuring.

I want to prime viewers to avoid disappointment: The Monkey is not supposed to be scary. Neither is Heart Eyes, the anti-cupid killer targeting couples on Valentine’s Day, or even Companion, about an AI girlfriend turned violent, both recently released in cinemas.

Horror comedies aren’t looking for jumpscares, they’re aiming for confused, exhilarated giggles instead. With their fast cuts and escalating gore, horror comedies are an exhilarating escape from the doomscape that lurks outside of the cinema.

Should I be laughing at someone accidentally shooting themselves in the face and spraying our hero in blood? Only at the movies.

The Monkey premieres in cinemas on Friday, 21 February.