The Monkey Has a Confusing Cameo From Another Stephen King Character

Even though it takes major liberties with the Stephen King short story that inspired it, Osgood Perkins’s film The Monkey still follows the basic premise of the original. It focuses on a guy dealing with a magical toy monkey that causes mysterious and absurd deaths every time it bangs its drum.

And yet, things get confusing. It’s not just that Perkins adds extra characters and plots to “The Monkey,” including a subplot involving a local boy called Ricky (Rohan Campbell) who tries to steal the toy for himself. Perkins also includes a character from a totally different King work, one with a cultural legacy even greater than “The Monkey.”

What is The Monkey About?

As in the 1980 story, The Monkey follows a man named Hal (Theo James) and his relationship with an evil toy monkey he first encountered as a boy. Although the toy looked harmless enough, Hal soon realized that if he wound it, someone would die in a fantastic accident when the monkey banged its drum. He is haunted by a moment of anger in which he, as a boy (Christian Convery), tried to use the monkey to kill his twin brother Bill (also Convery) and instead killed his beloved mother (Tatiana Maslany). Adult Hal now lives a solitary life.

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However, Hal did manage to have a son named Petey (Colin O’Brien). Hal loves his son, but thinks it safest to stay away from the boy. Upon learning that Petey’s mother (Laura Mennell) plans to marry her boyfriend (Elijah Wood), who in turn will adopt the boy and cut Hal out entirely, Hal jumps at the final chance to bond with his son. Hal takes Petey with him to his childhood home, in order to prepare the house after his aunt’s own ridiculous death.

When Hal and Petey arrive at the house, more and more absurd deaths happen around them, which eventually drives them to the source. Still bitter over his mother’s death and convinced that anyone who holds the monkey will never die, Hal’s twin brother Bill (also played by James) has found the toy. Worse, Bill keeps using it to try and kill Hal, resulting in the near annihilation of the town.

Where King’s story is somber and haunting, Perkins injects the story with wacky humor and gross-out gags. But Perkins does one thing to strengthen his movie’s connection to King by including a surprise cameo, naming Hal and Bill’s babysitter (Danica Dreyer) Annie Wilkes, the sadistic nurse from Misery.

Who is Annie Wilkes?

Memorably played by Kathy Bates in the 1990 film adaptation by director Rob Reiner, Annie Wilkes is Stephen King’s own worst nightmare. Misery follows author Paul Sheldon (played by James Caan in the film) after he gets into a car accident in the Colorado wilderness. At first, it seems fortunate that Annie, a nurse, finds Paul. But when he realizes that Annie is a superfan of his novel series about a woman called Misery Chastain, Paul recognizes the danger facing him.

Furious that he has ended the series in a way that she finds dissatisfying, Annie chains Paul to a bed and forces him to write what she wants. And when Paul refuses and tries to get away, Annie goes to desperate ends. Most famously, Annie breaks Paul’s legs in stomach-churning fashion.

While Annie could be seen as just another lunatic, one of a billion in horror fiction, both King and Bates manage to find notes of humanity in the character. In fact, Bates won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance, making Annie Wilkes one of the most iconic figures in King’s bibliography. Unsurprisingly, Wilkes has appeared several times outside of Misery, once in an entry from King’s metatextual Dark Tower series, and elsewhere in homages and tributes, including a portrayal by Lizzy Caplan in the television show Castle Rock.

But The Monkey uses Annie Wilkes differently than King and anyone else.

How is Annie Wilkes Used in The Monkey?

Just like in the short story “The Monkey,” Hal in the movie learns about the toy’s murderous power after it kills a beloved babysitter. In the story, that babysitter is named Beulah, who dies while at her apartment. But in the movie, the babysitter goes unnamed until her funeral. It’s only when a priest (Nicco Del Rio) tries to make sense of her death that he identifies her as Annie Wilkes.

Perkins plays Annie’s first appearance in the film for a laugh. Hal and Bill’s mother mutters with annoyance when Annie arrives, irritated that she’s a single mother and is back in the dating pool. While Hal simply goes along with the babysitter’s orders, the self-assured Bill flirts with her, confident that she’ll find him as cool as he finds himself.

For her part, Annie turns her romantic attentions toward a chef at the hibachi restaurant she goes to with the boys. She smiles in wonder at each of the chef’s cheesy cooking tricks, and he returns her admiration with his own ridiculous mugging. But the showing off goes too far when he loses control of his knife, leading to Annie’s gory death. Annie’s demise prepares the audience for what will follow in the rest of the movie: lots of people dying in disgusting yet hilarious ways.

Obviously, Perkins knows that most people watching his movie have heard of Annie Wilkes. She represents Stephen King at his most respectable, as a master of horror who creates Academy Award-winning characters.

The son of Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho, Osgood Perkins knows about expectations too. His films The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House both earned him respect and acclaim, as did his breakout film last year, Longlegs. People probably came into The Monkey ready for more high-minded horror, a combination of up-and-comer Perkins and the legendary Stephen King. But by making Annie Wilkes into a babysitter who dies early in the movie, Perkins blows those expectations out of the water. He’s setting up the viewer for a totally different ride, which The Monkey delivers in spades.

The Monkey is now playing in theaters across the country.

The Monkey

Release Date

February 19, 2025

Runtime

98 Minutes

Director

Osgood Perkins

Writers

Osgood Perkins

Producers

John Rickard, Natalia Safran, Ali Jazayeri, Chris Ferguson, Fred Berger, Giuliana Bertuzzi, James Wan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, John Friedberg, Jason Cloth, David Gendron, Michael Clear, Jesse Savath, Peter Luo, Dave Caplan