In 1968, The New York Times dismissed Night of the Living Dead as a revolting little item cobbled together by “some people in Pittsburgh.” The review was myopic; the film was visionary. George A. Romero’s low-budget account of everyday Americans under siege by a moldering silent majority was probably the keynote B movie of its era, leading to a series of worthy descendants filtering politics through pulp. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre brilliantly skewered capitalism and conservative family values alongside its characters; John Carpenter’s They Live unfolded as a veritable how-to manual about the necessity of discerning subtext beneath cheap surfaces. That influence extended all the way to Jordan Peele’s Get Out, another meditation on perception featuring sinister power brokers hidden in plain sight.
These days, it seems that everybody making horror movies wants to be Romero or Peele—except maybe Damien Leone, the creator of the popular and ultraviolent Terrifier series, who recently ignited controversy on social media by insisting that his trilogy was “not, in any way, shape, or form, a political franchise.”
The catalyst for Leone’s comments was a series of posts by Terrifier stars David Howard Thornton and Lauren LaVera criticizing the cruelty unleashed online under the second Trump administration. “If you’re going to come on to my page, claiming you’re a fan, and then insult the LGTBQ community, then you can f@ck all the way off,” wrote Thornton, whose portrayal of the dead-eyed, rictus-grinning serial killer Art the Clown has turned the character into a 21st-century horror icon. Without referring specifically to Thornton’s post—or the comments that led up to it—Leone tried to play peacemaker. He was also, possibly, playing dumb. “I’m all for freedom of speech and expression,” explained Leone, even as it was clear he didn’t exactly appreciate his collaborators speaking their minds. “I did not get into filmmaking to become a politician, or promote any political agendas or ideologies, especially through a killer clown movie,” he added. “I fell in love with horror movies as a form of pure entertainment and those are the films I like to make.”
Whether Leone was being clueless or careerist is hard to say. Either way, it’s unfortunate that a filmmaker with a certain talent for going too far seems determined to stake out the rhetorical middle ground. There’s no such thing as pure entertainment, of course, and the Terrifier movies don’t have to be partisan to touch a nerve. Somewhere, there’s a paper on the relationship between sadism and authoritarianism being written with Art the Clown’s name in it. What makes the movies potent—and fascinating to analyze—is the way they lay bare Leone’s agenda, which is basically extremity itself. There’s no need to separate Art from the artist since they’re operating in the same register; Leone’s bogeyman is endearing because he’s so eager to please. The giddy delight that Howard’s carnivalesque antihero takes in his brutal craft works best as an extension of his creator’s exuberance in turning multiplexes into grindhouses.
Leone is within his rights to believe that his own movies aren’t worth thinking about too deeply. He’s also not alone. Last summer, Osgood Perkins—riding high before the surprise box office success of his occult thriller Longlegs—singled out the Terrifier series for dismissal, telling The Hollywood Reporter that Leone’s movies were “the opposite of what I want to be putting into my brain.” Perkins’s choice of words is interesting insofar as Longlegs is a movie about what happens when people’s headspaces are penetrated by malign influences, which is what makes it enjoyable as a supernatural thriller and bogus as social commentary (in this version of Middle America, men who commit acts of domestic violence can literally claim that the devil made them do it). Meanwhile, a case can be made that the Terrifier films and The Monkey are effectively kindred spirits as exercises in jaw-dropping gore-ography.
Perkins has a bigger budget and a literary pedigree. The Monkey is an adaptation of a 1980 short story by Stephen King about a vintage toy that carries a terrible curse; it was shot before Longlegs made Perkins—whose early features were small-scale slow burns—into a brand-name horror director. But where Longlegs was marketed cryptically as a kind of cinematic mystery box, The Monkey is going for the hard sell. “It is a film chock-full of bloody violence and death,” reads the film’s poster. “All of these deaths are outrageously gory and thoroughly gratuitous. And while some are deserved, others are a case of ‘wrong place, wrong time.’”
To paraphrase the star of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, it might be the right time for a cautionary tale about the effects of festering psychic rage—whether Perkins is the right guy is another question. Where Leone claims to love horror movies unpretentiously, Perkins seems high-handed, which is one reason The Monkey is mostly a drag. It’s one thing to try to create a goofy, gory crowd-pleaser; it’s another to steadily bleed the enjoyment out of the equation by making the movie in question as smug and unpleasant as possible. It’s a film made in the image of its namesake, pounding away behind a rictus grin. Instead of trying to make it scary—something Longlegs succeeded at from time to time—Perkins puts everything in scare quotes. The results can be described only as “fun.”
“The Monkey” is not one of King’s best short stories, but it is sincere, enfolding anxieties around fatherhood within a riff on the myth of the monkey’s paw. King’s monkey comes with its paws attached: It’s a vintage toy of unknown origin whose makers, for whatever reason, gave it a factory setting of “evil.” One of King’s great themes is temptation, and it’s easy to imagine the monkey making a cameo in Needful Things. The twist is that it has to be wound up to work: Once the key is turned and the cymbals clash, somebody in the vicinity will die horribly, albeit in a way that makes it look like an accident.
Perkins’s screenplay takes several interesting liberties with the source material. Some of these are superficial, like swapping out the monkey’s cymbals for a drum kit (supposedly, this was to keep the producers from getting sued by Pixar, who included a Jolly Chimp figure in Toy Story 3). Some are significant, like splitting the main character into a pair of identical twins. Bill and Hal Shelburn (played as teenagers by Christian Convery and adults by Theo James) are brothers attending the same high school in 1999. Bill is a big man on campus, and Hal is an outcast. Their estranged father, a pilot, sends the monkey home as a gift—one trinket among many mailed from far-off places. Once it arrives, the monkey doesn’t so much come between the boys as deepen a divide that was already there. Hal and Bill both love their mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), as much as they hate each other. The enmity mostly seems to be Bill’s fault. He’s nasty and competitive, while Hal is quiet and withdrawn.
Hal’s loneliness means that he pays attention to what’s going on around him: He’s the one who figures out that the monkey has the power of life and death, and in a moment of weakness, he tries to use it to channel his murderous anger toward his brother. Instead, Lois dies of an aneurysm and Bill goes off the deep end, where he stays for the next 25 years. Hal, meanwhile, descends into depression, even after he becomes a father. He’s afraid of the monkey, but also of the possibility that his own estranged son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), is set to inherit a legacy of failure.
There is a core of emotion to the story, and James has the right stunned presence for a movie about a man convinced that he’s wasted his entire life outrunning death. But Perkins, who talked about drawing on his childhood and complicated upbringing while making Longlegs, ends up stranding himself in a tonal no-man’s-land, mistaking mean-spiritedness for absurdism at every term. Irreverence works only if we’re given something to believe in in the first place, and The Monkey doesn’t have the courage of its vicious convictions. Every single character outside of Hal, Lois, and Petey is presented as pathetic, obnoxious, or deeply corrupt; even the priest presiding over a funeral is made into a stammering moron. Cosmic misanthropy like this requires discipline, as in the best movies of the Final Destination franchise, which are pressurized by a delicious sense of dread. The Monkey is too full of dead air to be pressurized. Most of the jokes feel exhumed from some dank sarcophagus of early 2000s internet culture; there are scenes that seem to have been transcribed from an eBaum’s World message board.
Laughing involuntarily at horrific images and ideas is one of the most cathartic experiences we can have at the movies. During the most disgusting moments of Terrifier 2, as Art the Clown was so obviously putting his heart into what he was doing, I couldn’t help but smile a little bit. The Monkey is too lazy to be offensive, or maybe its laziness is what’s offensive about it. What makes certain horror movies powerful—and political—isn’t a specific ideology or even stated intentions but a sense of friction. For all its chunky spurts of gore, Perkins’s bid for edgelord glory is strangely anodyne. The only real guts on display have been CGI’d in.