Theo James Gets Bloody in Neon’s ‘The Monkey’ Teaser From ‘Longlegs’ Director Osgood Perkins
Neon is taking advantage of its Longlegs momentum with a first glimpse at director Osgood Perkins’ next project.
Neon shared the first teaser trailer for The Monkey Monday, ahead of the horror movie’s Feb. 21, 2025 debut in theaters. The spot features Theo James, who stars in the film alongside Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell and Sarah Levy.
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In the brief video, a snare drum apparently played by a toy monkey is suddenly splattered in blood, as is James. Carnival-style music accompanies the footage.
The film centers on twins Bill and Hal, both played by James, whose discovery of their dad’s monkey toy in the attic leads to a string of grisly deaths.
Perkins wrote and directed The Monkey, which is based on the Stephen King short story of the same name that was initially published in 1980. Dave Caplan, Michael Clear, Chris Ferguson, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and James Wan serve as producers.
James’ recent credits include the series The Gentlemen and The White Lotus, in addition to a voice role on X-Men ’97.
Perkins is riding the success of Longlegs, the genre film starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage that hit theaters last month and has surpassed Parasite as Neon’s highest-grossing title ever. During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote Longlegs, Perkins said that The Monkey will be far more comedic than any of his previous work.
“It’s feeling more like an old John Landis movie or a Joe Dante movie or a Robert Zemeckis movie,” the filmmaker said at the time. “I saw an opportunity to make a wry, absurdist comedy about death. It’s about the very basic fact that we all die — and how fucking funny and weird and impossible and surreal is that shit? And to come at it from a tragicomedy kind of voice felt like it fit.”
Perkins continued, “At the end of the day, if you want to reduce it, it’s the haunted toy or evil toy subgenre, and I couldn’t imagine doing a serious one of those. To me, it rang utterly false to approach it that way, so I just went in the other direction.”
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