Did you think one bit of Stephen King adaptation news was enough for one day? Well, me too. But we’re wrong! Deadline reports that next on the King adaptation list is a feature film take on “The Monkey,” a story first published in 1980 and then included in the 1985 collection Skeleton Crew.
This one will have Divergent and The Time Traveler’s Wife (pictured above) star Theo James as its lead—its dual lead, presumably, as “The Monkey” is about twins.
The Monkey comes in part from horror master James Wan, who created what we’re apparently calling “The Conjuring Universe,” as well as having a hand in the endless Saw and Insidious series. (And, yes, he directed Aquaman.) (ed note: AND YES HE DIRECTED MALIGNANT, THE BEST MOVIE EVER, YOU MEAN.) Wan is producing The Monkey, which has Osgood Perkins as its writer and director. Perkins wrote and directed The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, an episode of the recent Twilight Zone, and has another horror film, Longlegs, coming out next year.
The story, as might be surmised from the title, is about a monkey—one of those cymbal-bashing toys. But this one is a very special and extremely cursed toy: when it smacks its little cymbals together, someone dies.
Why don’t they just tear the cymbals off its paws? Probably someone who reads more King than me knows the answer to this. Why don’t we adapt some creepy stories by someone other than Stephen King? Yeah, yeah, I know: Name recognition! Track record! Money!
The Monkey will crash its way into our eyeballs at some point in the future.
Buy the Book
Spring’s Arcana
