THE MONKEY

OZ PERKINS MARCHES TO THE BEAT OF HIS OWN DRUM IN STEPHEN KING ADAPTATION

- NICK SETCHFIELD

EVERYBODY DIES.

No, that's not a nuclear-level spoiler - unless you have a seriously underdeveloped sense of mortality, that is. For Oz Perkins it's both a reality check and the creative engine of The Monkey, his take on one of Stephen King's most primally unsettling tales.

"Everybody will die," the writer and director gently reminds SFX. "It's said in the movie: you'll die, I'll die, all your friends will die, all your parents, all their parents, your pets...

Everybody dies, and the basic madness of that concept became the root of the movie." For Perkins a King adaptation is a kind of homecoming. "In my childhood Stephen King was definitely something that haunted the spaces," he recalls, summoning the "imprinted memory" of the Pet Sematary cover - "The snarling cat face!" - and a summer spent at Cape Cod, reading Misery with his father, screen icon Anthony Perkins.

"I would read a chapter and then I'd pass it over to him, and he'd read some. We went back and forth. So that became important to me." Part of King's 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, "The Monkey" is a story with the power to scar your dreams. In a family attic a man named Hal Sheldon unearths an unwelcome totem of his childhood, a cymbal-clashing clockwork chimp with glazed eyes, moth-eaten fur and "huge gleeful teeth". For Hal and his twin brother Bill this toy is a cursed object, one whose malevolent presence seemingly triggered a spate of mysterious deaths.

Defying all attempts to dispose of it, the mangy curio continues to haunt Hal's life, "grinning its old familiar grin" - just as King's tale embedded itself in the furthest, darkest eaves of readers' minds.

While the short story has a steady, inescapable chill, Perkins - who recently scored a box-office hit with serial killer horror Longlegs - opted for a different tone. If there's a lighter side to "Everybody dies" he's out to find it.

TOY STORY