The editor’s note: The following story contains some spoilers for “The monkey. “
When you are the son of Anthony Perkins and physically resembles the man who played one of the most iconic and recognizable characters in the genre (Norman Bates in “Psycho”), your career path to horror may be expected. But its writer/director Osgood “Oz” Perkins’ relationship with the genre and the unique position he now finds that works in it is both unexpected and unknown.
“How I have come to look at my course, if someone gives a fuck about my course, is it born in fear, right? Born in a royal family of horror, right? “Said Perkins in a new interview with IndieWire about his new film “Monkey.” “And you are uncomfortable to persecute it, because that is what some of us do – we follow the Father’s footsteps, we are a bit fascinated by that way and we can join the father through the following. So that’s it, but I don’t love horror movies. ”
Makes no mistakes: Perkins is a full -fledged cinephile. Also, according to the high standards for a profession that includes Scorsese, Del Toro and Tarantino, Perkins can be nerd about film history and filmmaking with the best of them. It’s just that horror is not his cup of tea.
“I’m not sitting around thinking about horror movies all the time,” Perkins said. “I really don’t see many of those who are going to be. Something like ‘Horror,“For example, so successfully, so well done, totally appealing to me, as in every way possible. True crime, horrible to me. I would never ever dab in real crime because I’m not interested in real pain. It doesn’t matter to me . ”
It is not to say that he does not love his job or his movies. Perkins has just worked hard to not only make the genre work for their own interests, but also the audience – the outbreak’s success for “Long“To make him a name for the title that distributor Neon knocks on by supporting the director’s next two functions (” keeper “comes out October this year).
“Being in fear, things we are born in, it feels like what happens, fortunately, now I am that I should continue to zoom out a bit,” Perkins said. “”Long“Is this pop impression of a horror movie, and” The Monkey “almost only laughs at the horror genre a little, but in a very loving way.”
When James Wan’s producing team came to him about “The Monkey”, Perkins correctly assumed that this zoomed, unconventional vantage point was what they were looking for. According to Perkins, they had a script, but did not feel that they had found the way to crack the film version of Stephen King -Novellen they owned the rights.
“The script was very serious, and I was very discouraged by it. I was like, “It’s a toy sup, for one thing.” It has this impish quality for it from the start, so it should have a kind of humor. The monkey would have humor, “Perkins said. “I know that everyone loved ‘The Joker“Movie so much, but I was like,” I don’t like this because you know what? The Joker would not like this movie. ‘The Joker would be like:’ How are you kidding me? What is this self -serious thing? What is this drama? ‘And that’s the same with the monkey. “
From the beginning, Perkins “The Monkey” saw as a comedy, not a horror movie. The blood spray would act as the punch lines, not jump scares. He also wanted to embrace the king’s spirit himself, which he credits as “the guy who made horror pleasant, the one who introduced the concept (that) you can have a good time, it is entertaining to be frightened like this.” But he also found his own personal way into the material.
“Maybe ‘The Monkey’ is meant to be that kind of super textual look at horror,” Perkins said about how he started thinking about “The Monkey” from 20,000 feet. “Every horror movie is about everyone who dies, right? Whether it is the ‘Texas chain saw the massacre,’ or ‘monkey’, everyone dies … Horror was around me. I have lived through some of the real stuff, and I am older than that now, and I get kind of this different view of it. “
Perkins, of course, refer to their own experiences of death. As the author/director has talked about in other interviews, Including with IndieWire for “Longlegs,“His early adulthood was formed by the unexpected and unusual circumstances surrounding his parent’s death. Anthony Perkins, a closed gay man, died by AIDS 1992, and his mother Berinthia Berenson-Perkins was on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks on September 11. The two deaths had a deep impact on Perkins, but years later he has come to see them, and death in general, from a pov best captured in “The Monkey.”
“When you are a filmmaker who you are trying to get over with a point of view is a big part of the job to find out how this thing will work? What is the engine for this experience for the audience? And while I knew it would have a humor and would be sentimental and kind of melancholy, ”Perkins said. “That it would mean something to me and risks becoming Maudlin or self-serious, I knew what the audience would want this rhythm there, ‘yes, we will sit for the kind of strange sense of humor. We will sit for the kind of similar examination, meditation, ruminination about life and death, as long as the clock goes once in a while and the little pellet comes out filled with a firm bit where someone explodes. ‘And I think that as long as I maintain the rhythm, I entered into one of the agreement with the audience that they would eat what I gave them if it came with a spoonful of sugar. ”
In this case, the spoon of sugar would be fast, completely unrealistic, over-the-top, laughing high scenes of blood-sprayed death, Wile E. Coyote and road runner-Esque (with a pinch of Rube Goldberg). It matched both what Perkins tried to evoke from the king’s spirit, his own twisted humor and his own view of death itself.
“There is this extremist torture -porious stuff, which I suppose is not really a term anymore, but something like” terrifies “, which is so popular and is really well made. It is also so brutal, and the death set continues and continues, and they are So hard to experience. Vibe of ‘The Monkey’, the intention, was the opposite, “Perkins said. “Because it has really been my experience (of death), where you just join, and then suddenly this thing happens, and everything is different afterwards. But it is very immediately, it is very fast and it is a shock. “
Much to the first shame from his producers, perkins would not get Toy Monkey to Liv Ala ”M3gan“Or“ chuck. “The monkey is not moving (except beating its drum), nor does any direct violence affect. The missing is also the mysterious rear story, which would normally need to be unlocked or solved to return life back to normal for slippery (Theo James). Spoiler: Do not turn the key, and random, funny, shocking deaths would not immediately follow.
“(The Monkey) stands in for the unlawful immutability in the fact that we all die. And sometimes there is a monkey there, and sometimes there is no monkey there, and so I could avoid all mythology, ”Perkins said. “They didn’t have to dig it out of a hole in Antarctica and thaw it. It didn’t have any of that kind of “where is this thing from?” It is only in the same way (as) the motionless fact of life and death. “
At the end of the film, after the city has been destroyed, death passes and rides on the biblical pale horse, passes in front of Hal and his son Petey (Colin O’Brien), giving a knowledge, exhausted nod. The scene makes Perkins that crack-death looks tired and Haggard, his job is never done (especially this week), and while the Father son may have escaped this round, their ways will cross in some unknowing way in the future.
Perkins fully encompasses that the monkey, discovered in the neck absent father’s wardrobe, is an exploration of his own father’s completed secrets, “that is absolutely. There is the wardrobe and what tangles us by being kept from us, but it is also just the low -singing anxiety we have as parents, right? Where it is, we will be the ones who destroy our children, ”Perkins said, now a father himself. “There will be no child in school. It won’t be a video game. It won’t be “itchy and scraped.” What will ruin our children: We will say something, do something, model something that will dinga their way and send them into this little thing or put a critical voice in their mind. ”
It is with “The Monkey” that the writer/director connects and emphatically with his own father’s experience. “I think the protective quality is on the surface, my dad didn’t tell me or my mom what happened. And it’s more about, “Gosh, just trying to protect your children from yourself,” right? You want to give them your best, but you know you will also give them your worst. “
When Perkins develops the complex family dynamics in his head and thinks loudly, he cannot help but pause to reflect on the fact that he is talking about his new “horror” movie, his second of three with neon. The film came without pressure for a sequel or to create a franchise, but rather the expectations for him to do his own cause.
“I’ve landed myself in an extremely happy position,” Perkins said. “I think it is almost expected now, or at least after” Longlegs “to the” monkey “, I think everyone is like,” Oh right, he won’t beat the same pace twice, I don’t know what to expect. “It’s a nice thing for me and my partners, to have a studio that really tolerates a lot of bullshit for me and really represents the work for what it is, and is not trying to sell it (or) pack about it as something else. I’m incredibly Happy. ”
