Stephen King New Horror The Monkey Wraps Filming With Impressive Cast

Stephen King first published The Monkey in 1980, and the short story was originally featured in Gallery Magazine. The revised and finalized version of the story that we’re more familiar with didn’t make its rounds until 1985 when King published his collection of short stories entitled Skeleton Crew. Since its publication, there have been loose adaptations of the story, including a Season 5 episode of The X-Files called “Chinga,” which was scripted by King and involves a cursed doll that terrorizes its subjects in a similar fashion.

While some Stephen King adaptations end up taking on a life of their own and deviating substantially from the source material, the synopsis for The Monkey on IMDb indicates that the storytelling will remain somewhat faithful to the original short story. The story will center on twin brothers Hal and Bill, who encounter their father’s cymbal-banging monkey toy in the attic. When they uncover the toy, a series of brutal deaths occur, forcing them to discard the haunted artifact and go their separate ways as they approach adulthood.

But since we’re talking about a Stephen King haunting, this will only be the beginning of The Monkey’s conflict. When another string of unexplained deaths takes place, Hal and Bill reunite because they have reason to believe that the monkey is up to its old tricks and needs to be eliminated once and for all. Theo James (The White Lotus) will be portraying both Hal and Bill on the adult timeline, and Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth) will be portraying the twins on the earlier timeline.

Though it has been announced that Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, and Rohan Campbell are a part of the cast, it has not yet been made clear what characters they will portray in Stephen King’s The Monkey at the time of this writing.

If you have your doubts about whether this Stephen King adaptation will live up to its hype, it’s worth noting that The Monkey was written and directed by Osgood Perkins, who is currently generating a healthy amount of anticipation with his upcoming Nicolas Cage-starring horror film, Longlegs. The Monkey is produced by James Wan, who is best known for co-creating the Saw and Insidious franchises as well as creating The Conjuring Universe, which has scared our pants off for over a decade.

As for the release date of this Stephen King-inspired story, we’ll have to wait for further developments because The Monkey is still in the post-production phases. But if the cast and crew are any indication, we’ll soon bear witness to a terrifying tale about a toy monkey that will surely exceed our expectations.