The monkey is an organ-grinder’s monkey toy. Wind up the key jutting out of its back, and its lips will part to reveal two rows of yellow grimacing teeth. Then its clockwork arms will wheel up and down, banging a little drum as fairground music plays. And then someone nearby dies in an extremely gory freak accident. Maybe their head will be sliced off in a knife-twirling incident at a teppanyaki restaurant and slide gently on to the grill. Maybe they’ll fall through the stairs and into a box of fishhooks and then set their head on fire over a gas hob, and then run outside and impale themselves on a wooden spike. Maybe some huge Rube Goldberg arrangement of faulty wiring and loose roofing tiles will cause their body to explode in a shower of soft crimson globs. But what’s for certain is as soon as the monkey plays the drum, someone dies.
A few decades ago, this would have been the premise of a dumb, disposable horror flick. A Final Destination film, possibly with one extra gimmick. But the genre has been in a weird spot lately. As the rest of mainstream cinema trails off into an endless stutter of reboots and sequels, horror is suddenly very respectable. The last decade has seen a series of ‘elevated’ horror movies, from David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows to Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, to last year’s Longlegs, written and directed by Osgood Perkins, who also wrote and directed The Monkey. Elevated horror looks good: lush cinematography, lots of slow and menacing shots instead of cheap jump scares.
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