Osgood Perkins’ second horror film is an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “The Monkey.” It’s immediately recognizable as a King narrative too. We have an adult narrator who is haunted by his childhood and with good reason – his father left home before he was born, his mother died when he was young and his twin brother hates him. Like so many King protagonists, he’s haunted by the moment when his childhood decisively curdled and turned sour – when he discovered a toy monkey among his father’s possessions. Very quickly, Hal (played by Christian Convery as a child) realised that if he wound up the monkey, and it started to beat, then someone in the vicinity would die a horrible death. He uses this knowledge to try and kill his twin Bill (also played by Convery) but the monkey takes out his mother instead. That forces Bill and Hal to live with their aunt and uncle, who are in time also killed by the monkey. These twins are born under a bad sign, like the Losers’ Club of It, and their curse will follow them into the adult world, where the monkey’s drum inexorably signs the return of their childhood traumas.

The Monkey also fits squarely into King’s father-son dramas. We learn in the prologue that Hal and Bill’s father, played in cameo by Adam Scott, likely died trying to destroy the monkey, which survives to be the most striking relic among all his possessions. Since he was born a couple of minutes earlier, and consumed most of their mother’s placenta, Bill styles himself as an older brother to Hal and plays the role of a perverse father-figure himself. When we cut to the present, twenty-five years later, Hal, now played by Theo James, has a son but only sees him once a year. He wants to protect him from the monkey and avoid passing on the legacy of his father to his own son. At the moment we jump to the present, James’ ex-wife has remarried Ted Hammerman, a fatherhood guru played by Elijah Wood who has written no less than seven books on how to be a good Dad. Ted blithely informs Hal that he will be adopting his son Petey, played by Colin O’Brien, and that they have a week to spend together and make some final memories before custody transfers for good.

While all this is happening, the monkey has re-emerged. After taking out Bill and Hal’s aunt, it vanishes into the texture of their small Maine town, where gruesome and unexpected deaths start to accumulate. Someone is clearly cranking the wind-up toy, perhaps with an intention to kill, and perhaps oblivious to its effects on the wider community. Meanwhile, upon learning of the death of his aunt, Hal reluctantly takes Petey to visit his old house. Their escalating father-and-son drama thereby intersects with the province of the monkey in the present. Soon enough, we learn that this is exactly what was intended by Bill, also played by James, who is now living in the town. Ever since they were children, Bill understood that Hal had tried to kill him using the monkey and he has waited until this moment in time, when Hal’s relationship with his son is at its most precarious, to enact his revenge.

If that makes The Monkey sound like two distinct films, that is how it plays out. Linking them both are the kill scenes involving the monkey, which often adopt a Final Destination-style of Rube Goldberg horror in which we are encouraged to scan the mise-en-scene for risk factors. The monkey never acts directly (we never even see it move) but instead works to engender freakish environmental accidents. As in the Final Destination franchise a grim sense of fatality hangs over the narrative which converges with the inexorable approach of the adult world that you feel in some of King’s childhood stories (most plangently in the closing moments of Stand By Me). Shortly before the monkey gets her, Hal and Bill’s mother reminds them that, when it comes to death, “it’s not if…it’s only when…some of us peacefully, in our sleep…some of us horribly.” Yet the grimness of the Final Destination franchise is undercut by King and Perkins’ dark sense of humour too. Even (or especially) the most violent deaths here have an edge of absurd comedy.

Throughout it all, Perkins’ skill as a director is evident. He has an old-school, pre-digital taste for gradations of light and dark. At one point the gleam of the monkey’s eyes appear subliminally on a pitch-black porch. At another, we follow Hal and Bill’s aunt into the basement as she struggles to adjust her vision to the thick darkness. Perkins also has a real taste for space, architecture and mise-en-scene, which is especially important here, since the monkey draws so viscerally on the physical environment for its kills and is so emphatic in its own physicality. Perkins especially excels at the textures of rural and regional America, allowing him to make King’s perennial Maine backdrop feel continuous with the washed-out backroads and boondocks of Longlegs.

The most divisive part of Longlegs is thus not the premise nor the direction but the script itself – specifically, what Osgood chooses to do with the adult part of the narrative. The childhood part plays as straight horror and revels in classical suspense. From one perspective, it’s easily the strongest part of the film. When we graduate into the adult world, the kill scenes are condensed into comically cursory asides, the plot tends to get bogged down in a middling performance from James, and horror gives way to a kind of heightened grotesquerie when Bill, the evil twin, takes centre stage. The film loses the plot a bit, moving from a slasher logic to a grand guignol setup where Bill uses the monkey to take out as much of the town as possible before turning his vengeful eye on Hal. In that sense it’s a bit like Carrie, Salem’s Lot and King’s earliest works in the way it uses horror to evoke depopulation and white flight in the Maine hinterland; small town communities that seemingly vanish overnight.

It’s hard not to feel there’s a bit of a missed opportunity here – a chance to see the monkey wreaking havoc in the modern world. But there’s also an interesting continuity with Longlegs that perhaps speaks to Perkins’ originality as a director too. Both films are effectively about a serial killer operating remotely. In Longlegs the killer uses magic to transform regular husbands and fathers into family annihilators. Here, the monkey indiscriminately kills people in its immediate orbit and vicinity. Both films traffic in spooky action at a distance – the sense that the primal contact between killer and victim is incommensurate with our digitised and decentred world. In the second half of The Monkey, as in Longlegs, interpersonal moments feel oddly vacant, irrelevant, toneless, beside the point, as if the real action is happening elsewhere. That may explain Perkins’ taste for vacancy, his gravitation towards rural locales that are physically empty but that also feel left behind by time – spaces that are no longer quite realised as spaces. When Hal returns to his aunt’s house his first observation is that it is much emptier than he remembered. Despite iPhones and earbuds, Perkins’ mise-en-scenes always feel anchored in the 80s and their enormous gulfs of blank time and space.

In this way, Perkins develops what might be described as an asubjective style of horror that works precisely to displace “naturalistic” interpersonal relationships between people and spaces. From one perspective this is what the slasher genre was always doing – the slasher is a distinctly different type of subject from his naturalistic victims, as his immobile and static mask signifies. But Perkins goes beyond that level of asubjectivity. In place of a masked slasher he presents horror tableaux that return time and again to the explosive decimation of heads and faces. Virtually every kill scene in the film targets the face. There’s a synergy here with Ari Aster’s horror vision in Hereditary and Midsommar, both of which pair facial violence with a kind of facial distancing or displacement, whereby characters’ facial expressions are removed just beyond our ability to discern or read them. Between Longlegs and The Monkey Perkins has crafted out his own niche within this subgenre of horror and it’ll be fascinating to see where he takes it next.