Pop Culture Happy Hour - The Monkey And What's Making Us Happy

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

In the new horror-comedy The Monkey, Theo James plays a pair of identical twin brothers who get saddled with a cursed wind-up toy monkey that causes people around them to die freakish, gory deaths. It's based on a Stephen King short story, and directed by Osgood Perkins, who made last year's Longlegs.Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopcultureSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

In the new horror comedy, The Monkey, a pair of identical twin brothers get settled with a cursed wind-up toy monkey that causes people around them to die freakish, gory deaths. It's based on a Stephen King short story and directed by Osgood Perkins, who made last year's long legs. I'm Glenn Weldon, and today we're talking about The Monkey on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining us today is my Pop Culture Happy Hour co-host, Stephen Thompson. Hey, Stephen? Hello, Glenn. Also with us today is Jordan Cruciola. She is a writer and producer and the host of the podcast. feeling seen on maximum fun. Hey Jordan.

Hello, thank you so much for having me back. Always good to have you. So in the monkey, Theo James plays twin brothers Hal and Bill. Hal is an introverted nerd. Bill is a bully. As kids, they discover a seriously creepy wind-up monkey that their missing father left behind. Wind it up and it beats its little toy drum, but when the music stops, someone close to the twins dies, painfully and grotesquely. 25 years later, the brothers are estranged. Hal is a sad sack loser who's strives. to isolate himself from the world, including from his own teenage son, Petey. Bill is M. I.A.

But then people in Hal and Bill's old hometowns start dying in freakish, brutal ways, and Hal realizes that his only hope of protecting Petey from a horrible fate is by confronting the monkey and his absolute jerk of her brother. The Monkey is in theaters now. Jordan kick us off. What do you think? I am pro The Monkey. It is going for a lot tonally. Uh-huh. But once I settled in to what it was doing, then I was along for the ride. It was a very malignant progression for me.

I would say malignant hits, like, hits higher heights for me in terms of the genre cacophony and sort of a knowing B movie situation. But still, I can see people showing up and be like, what are we doing here? What's going on? But I do think if you are willing to give yourself over to which particular kind of madness, there is a lot of fun to be had. Okay. So you're talking about the comedic elements might throw people off.

Not comedy in the sense of like a Blumhouse horror comedy, but like watching Osgood Perkins do comedy really for the first time. Like, yes, I did laugh actually quite a few times in long legs. He has a gallows sense of humor, this man. It's fun to watch him get into this sandbox for the first real time in earnest. Okay. How about you, Stephen? What do you think? Well, I think on paper there's something really interesting happening here, right?

And you mentioned Osgood Perkins, the writer-director. He is the son of Anthony Perkins. And he is making this movie about generational trauma and about this burden that is handed down from the missing father to these kids. And the kids have to figure out what they're going to do with it. And I think that creates some really interesting parallels on paper. He's the son of Norman Bates. And now he's making horror movies about kind of what happens when horror is handed down to you. And I think that on paper is more interesting than the film itself.

Okay. For me, the comedic elements of this film are mostly in these extremely cartoonish deaths. These are not biologically accurate. These are like Crazy 88s, like Kill Bill kind of death? Like, are you ready for arterial spray, the likes of which you've rarely seen? Totally. If you saw gore in Wiley Coyote cartoons. That is the level and depth and kind of general idea of the kind of violence that we're experiencing in this movie.

And that's what lends it a lot of its comedy. At the same time, the other thing that is feeding it comedically is sort of this idea that boils down to L.O.L. Nothing Matters. To me, that's not necessarily my vein of comedy. As much as I can indulge in some gallows humor, when, you know, And the stakes all feel like nothing matters, everything is random and horrible. That's not entirely my vibe. And so, like Jordan, I definitely did laugh a few times during this movie. I think maybe not as many times.

There is one magnificent edit where... Then with the one you're talking about. You know the one I'm talking about where they just cut to the aftermath of like, well, this person's now dead. And I actually didn't think it needed to then back up and show you their death. It's just funnier that it's like, oh, now this person's dead. And that made me feel like I'm in the hands of somebody who is clever and knows what they're doing. But for me, the film didn't really cohere because I wanted more jokes outside of, whoa, gross. Yeah.

Did this film feel like a throwback to other you guys? To me, the dream of 80s horror is alive in this movie. Did you guys feel that? Oh, huge. I really enjoy that Oz Perkins can't help. and fully acknowledges that he needs to make movies about himself and draw on his life. There's a brother element in this movie, and there's not a brother element in the original short story by Stephen King. And so you have brothers being raised by a single mother with an absent father to the notes that Stephen was touching on,

and the single mother, you know, shaping the reality and the burdens that were put within the sort of lies or partial truths that were raised with. That's something that was heavily in long legs, and here we are now in the monkey. We are watching the sort of sordid tragic biography of Osgood Perkins lineage play out in front of us in some ways. His mother was one of the passengers on one of the flights that crashed on 9-11. This man has been subject to unbelievably bizarre, sad chance. It points in his life. And then you become a person who makes something like The Monkey. And it was crazy to watch an Osgood Perkins movie be a movie that felt like an homage, that felt like a...

throwback. He's been such a like muted stylist for so many years now. Like do not go to an Oz Perkins movie if you're in the mood for a talky picture. And this was like, I want to make my movie that made me feel like a boy who watched Back to the Future growing up and it changed my life. It was almost mind blowing to witness mass market catering from someone like Perkins. And I was like, all right, we're at a whole new ball game now. I mean, speaking of the mass market, this felt to me like Stephen King. And my relationship to Stephen King has changed over the years.

I think many people's have. Because in most, certainly not all of his work, he paints in some very broad strokes. And Stephen, you said the magic word, cartoon, this is cartoonish in a way that can't help but feel a little adolescent. I mean, and that's not a dig.

Adolescent me would have eaten this movie up with a big old spoon. Would have loved exactly how glibly it meets out these really gnarly deaths to people whose crime seems to be that they're just out here in the world live in their lives, right?

It says a kind of a sneering, take that society and your conformist ways kind of vibe, but this is a cartoon. And it sets that tone from the jump. I was happy to meet it at that level, but there's a tradeoff there.

When you are so glib and cynical about death, you kind of lose me when you try to pivot to anything remotely sincere. Or anything resembling stakes. Right. Do you want me to invest

in these data issues? Or as you said, generational trauma in the middle of your toy monkey makes heads explode movie? You can try. It's not going to take. And I got the sense, though, that the movie knows that. Like, this is all a big goof. Those moments are placeholders, that they're there for structural purposes alone because I think they realized, well, we need to do something in between impalings. What are we going to do?

Let's talk about this family. What really appealed to me about this. Like, I was having a really good time watching Theo James. I think he does a really good job. I love it when hot guys figure out that their career should be just very strange. You watch, like, Theo James and starting out in Downton Abbey, not that he hasn't had a good career, but I remember seeing him a divergent being like, I don't know much about this guy, but I don't think he should be here.

And anybody that has the good sense to put Tatyana Mazzlani in anything, because where is she all of the time, understands that they need to give actors room to feast. And I think Oz Perka, that's an exciting thing. to me about him going a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger is watching actors actually get to kind of like feast in his movies as opposed to working more in innuendo and implication and like Micah Munro is amazing in long legs. But I am always a more as more kind of girl in movie. I want maximalism. Do you know this about you. I want me some maximalism. And so a movie going into this realm, I'm just like, okay, now we are really on my frequency and I'm

going to honor you with full participation as an audience member. Stephen, I'm going to ask you to break the tie when it comes to Theo James in this movie because I think there is an elephant of the room or in this case a big sex puma in the room, which is you cannot, there is an she's all that problem here, which is you cannot slap a pair of glasses on Theo James and pass him off as someone who lives a pathetic, nebishy, lonely life. I mean, pathetic and nebishy maybe, but lonely, people would hurl themselves at that jawline. Yeah, I mean, when he's like a slubeshy, I was just like, this is the stupidest casting I've ever seen. Like, this is not who you get to play your schlub.

I felt like I got Josh Hartnett vibes. Okay. If you remember Josh Hartnett in the hilariously misbegotten trap, which was terrible, but maybe the most entertaining movie of last year. Love trap. You got, like, over-the-top handsome guy going weird. Yeah. And this at least ultimately lets him go weird. But there was definitely an uncanny valley situation where he shows up as a schlub and you're like, come on.

You couldn't get someone of slighter build to play a schlub. Look, I now live in a small town. If the guy at the counter of my local grocery store looked like that, it would be all he wouldn't talk about. There would be a Facebook group. There'd be a next door thread. It would make the local paper. But to your point, I mean, like here Theo James is playing twins. I think he does a great job with Bill, the jerk brother.

When we finally see Adult Bill, I love everything about that performance. I love everything about his look, the Junko jeans, the everything. Got a mullet. And the mullet. It's so fun. It became a cast of characters movie. And it was like, I'm going to create my little Tim Burton world. Everybody's a kook and everybody's really specific.

The boys is Aunt Nunkle. They're weirdos who you see briefly. But when you do, like, their caricatury. It's an aesthetic out of time. the aunt and uncle look like they're straight out of the 70s, and we clearly like meet Hal and Bill in the 90s. I grew up with that boys wearing those outfits in the 1990s. I know that flame shirt button down.

And then if it's 25 years later, we're clearly like in present day, but people look like they could be pulled from a random assortment of eras and dropped into this main town. And so I was like, okay, in the Snow Globe universe that the monkey is inhabiting, all of these people feel possible. And yeah, I'm in when any scene can give me, Something to sort of like honestly like tilt my head sideways like a dog and make me go like, that's silly. I did tilt my head sideways like a dog quite a bit during this movie.

I appreciated the way this kind of mixed eras and fashions. That's a really good point. I grew up in a very small town in the 1980s, but that doesn't mean everybody looked like the 1980s in the small town where I grew up. They looked like four different eras kind of all coexisting. They looked like the era the last time they felt really good. And they were like, I'm riding it out. Exactly. Like that didn't bother me as much.

But I do think it does lend itself to the point that I kind of made at the top, which is that this film feels very cartoonish. And the cartoonishness is what is feeding a lot of the humor. If you go into it kind of knowing that, I think you can vibe with that. I wanted a little bit deeper meaning from a director and writer who was kind of freighted with some of the legacy that this movie is kind of trying to untangle. To me, it didn't quite cohere so much as it was like a series of cartoonish deaths. Well, that's interesting, Stephen, because you didn't find that deeper meaning in this movie. Jordan, you said you did to a certain extent. I certainly am kind of more in Stephen's camp.

I just feel like the glibness kind of keeps it from gathering any kind of weight. But if I meet it at the level of glibness and jokes and incredibly gnarly deaths, be warned. listeners. I dug it on that level. Where do you feel, I'm going to ask you an enterprise question. Where does this movie sit for you in like what horror feels like now? Where does this fit for where genre cinema is right now as you guys are kind of experiencing it? Well, I mean, Glenn alluded to this earlier, feeling like this film was very much a throwback. This feels like a throwback to like there is an object that is causing people to kill people or there is a curse that is causing people to kill people. That's kind of putting it a little bit in the smile universe, but a little bit in any

like haunted doll, chucky, whatever universe. And to me, it didn't necessarily feel like it was elevating beyond horror concepts and tropes that I had seen play out many times, even in recent years, but also in movies from the 80s and 90s. When you're talking about the horror landscape writ large, what is most interesting to me in horror right now are movies like Megan and Compact. which are managing to say something about the modern world. And aren't just horror, they're also science fiction. And there are also commentaries on the state of technology in the world today. And those movies I find so much more interesting than there is a haunted amulet, a haunted, you know, whatever that kills people.

So when I'm looking to the future of horror or what is most interesting to me in the horror landscape, I'm thinking of Megan. I'm thinking of companion. and not so much this. Yeah, and to your point, Stephen, this does feel like a throwback. It does feel very 80s to me, which in the sense that there's broad strokes in the middle, cartoonish characters,

incredibly evil characters, incredibly good characters. But I don't know. I kind of feel like this did not feel like elevated horror to me at all. And I kind of respected it for that. I mean, I kind of like, oh, this is what we're doing. We're just going to get gnarly. We're just going to make people of Yodens go,

oh, God. I admired the, the intention. integrity of that, really kind of every so often just winking at us and going, yeah, that's not really what this is about. This is about like, this guy's intestines. This is about like there's a spleen. I mean, that's where I place it. How about you, Jordan? I'm just so curious to see what momentum we are moving toward in this very amped up time of tumult. And as we know, horror cinema is the codex of our history and our anxieties and our fears. And I'm struggling so much with what I feel like is this lack of. that does not denote a lack of success, but something that I got so used to being buzz commensurate with success and those are like big horror boom years where like my test case has really been the fact that talked to me,

obviously critically, like, hailed. But that movie was as critically hailed and more financially successful than hereditary, but was it the cultural moment that hereditary was from the very same studio. So I'm trying to reconcile with where does the, what I experience, the more muted conversation around horror as a zeitgeist penetrating genre,

where does that meet what we're doing in the genre right now and its level of success and the desire for the public for what they kind of want? So I'm just, I'm thinking about this any time I see a new horror movie. I'm like, where are we now with the genre? So I wanted to hear from two great minds of pop culture. Well, you know, we went into this and I was kind of talked to the producers about how, like, this movie, the premise is the movie. The movie is the premise.

How are we going to ring a discussion out of it? But it just goes to show you have to find the right people. Thank you very much for this discussion. Tell us what you think about the monkey. Find us on Facebook at Facebook.com slash PCHH. And on letterboxed at letterboxed.com slash NPR Pop Culture. We'll have a link in our episode description.

Up next, what is making us happy this week? Now it is time for our favorite segment of this week and every week. What is making us happy this week? Jordan, my friend, what is making you happy this week? There's only one thing on my mind that I could, in good conscience present to you, and it's the show I've been mainlining me and Mo and my wife, and that is Silo, the Apple TV show Silo, which is about a silo. An underground community assembled vertically going down of people living in a silo because they can't live outside,

because the outside is a dangerous landscape for reasons that have not yet been revealed to me for two seasons. I love a sci-fi world building. Where are we? How did we get here? Who put us here? kind of story. It's cool to see sets that feel like there are actually people in them interacting with real walls and boundaries and not, you know, tennis balls and things like that. And it's also cool to see Rebecca Ferguson being so cool. And as Moa has said, like, nobody is this strong. Nobody is as strong as Rebecca Ferguson is in this show. So if you love her suffocating men by climbing up on them like trees and wrapping her knee around their neck and suffocating them a la Mission Impossible, you have got some Ilsa Fowulfield. You have got some Ilsa Fowulfowls.

in this show. So yeah, I'm all in for this show. Rebecca Ferguson, I cannot wait for season three, which who knows when that's going to come? So on the edge of my seat for an indefinite period of time. All right. So that is Silo on Apple TV Plus. Thank you very much. Jordan. Stephen Thompson, what is making you happy this week, sir? Perhaps you, like me, are in need of something to calm your nerves. I have been seeking out music that makes me feel more calm and relaxed in a world that so clearly isn't, and I keep coming back to this gorgeous little record that came out at the beginning of this year called Weft, W-E-F-T, by an artist called Blue Lake. Blue Lake is the project of Jason Dungan, who is an American-born musician based in Denmark.

It's just gentle instrumentals. It's guitars and strings, a little zither here and there, a few homemade instruments, hypnotic drones. This track is called Oceans. I should have pulled a track that had a little bit of. more variance in it. But this is a, this is a floating on a mellow nature vibe record. That is what I need right now. It is a record to take into your weekend. It is a record for sipping your coffee or hot chocolate on a Sunday morning. It is a beautiful record. It is called Weft. It is by the artist Blue Lake. And it is one of my go-toes for lowering my constantly surging blood pressure. Okay. Thank you very much, Stephen Thompson. I'm going to keep on the soothing track that you kicked us up on there.

Dish is a British podcast where two hosts invite a celebrity guest on to interview them while they serve them a meal, often of their favorite foods. It is hosted by a guy named Nick Grimshaw, who is a radio and TV personality. It's a very British thing. He is a professional presenter, a host, right? Who hosts things and his superpower is his ability to make pleasant, light, bubbly chitch. chat with absolutely anyone. Imagine if Ryan Sechrist had a personality or at least a kind of a discernible point of view. That's kind of him. The other host is Angela Hartnett, who is a Michelin-Star chef.

She actually makes the meals. This is a very British show. The foods tend to be very British as well, but they're prepared simply and cleanly and honestly. The guests are British, and look, I'm over here as a confirmed Anglophile. And I'm only hitting about 82% recognition with some of these guests. But the thing about it is, no matter who the guest is, the focus is on the food. So it's about their memories of the food their parents would make, the best meals they've ever had.

If you ever wanted to listen to a show where people wax nostalgic about things like marmite and mushy peas, this is it. Marmite is delicious, bro. It is just a salt dispensing unit. Yeah, what if I just wanted a savory toast spread that was salt? I mean, then you both should watch. this show because you would find you would find like-minded spirits. But the thing about it is, talking about food like that seems to disarm the guests in a way. I mean, it's not, I'm not going to pretend it's anything revelatory here, but it's them talking about things you

have not seen them talk about a million times. And on one point, Angela Hartnett walks you throughout and make each recipe step by step. Then there's a series of rapid fire questions where the guest is interrogated about their favorite way to prepare a potato. This is so English. Here is why I love this. Stephen I think you'll pick up on this. This is so low stakes, no urgency. It is a comforting, rambling conversation. Yeah, they plug their projects.

But the conversation is so light and unforced and utterly frictionless that it sometimes sloshes over into the banal, right? But the pleasantly banal. And that, my friends, is the DISH podcast in a nutshell on the DISH YouTube channel. And that is what is making me happy this week. That brings us to the end of our show. Jordan Cushiolla, Stephen Thompson. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

Thank you very much. This episode was produced by Hopsapathema and Lenin Sherburn and edited by Mike Katze for supervising producer is Jessica Reedy and Alokam-in provides our theme music. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon and we'll see you all next week.