Stephen King is among the most acclaimed horror writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and his works have been adapted into film and television many times. His short story, The Monkey, was one of the most recent stories to be announced for a film adaptation in 2025. The movie is being produced by James Wan (Saw, Insidious) and directed by Osgood Perkins (Longlegs).
The original horror story was published in 1980, during the early days of Stephen King’s career. During that time, he made freelance submissions to Gallery, an erotic magazine founded by Ronald L. Fenton. Alongside Stephen King’s stories, the magazine also published the works of Isaac Asimov and L. Flecther Prouty. The Monkey was subsequently republished in King’s short story collection Skeleton Crew, where it can still be purchased as of writing.
The Monkey Has Drawn Comparisons To The Monkey’s Paw
The Monkey has often been compared to an older 20th-century short s, The The Monkey’s Pwas written by W.W. Jacobs and published by Harper’s Monthly in 1902. In The Monkey’s Paw, a family comes across a monkey’s paw that can seemingly grant any wish, but there are always dire consequences attached. As an indirect consequence of using the monkey’s paw, the family is reduced to tatters after their son dies.
Stephen King’s The Monkey also focuses on a cursed artifact: a toy monkey that holds a pair of cymbals. The toy is designed to make some noise by banging the cymbals together, but the cursed toy featured in the story always brings about a calamity when it does so.
The short story features Hal, a man deeply traumatized by his experiences with the cursed toy monkey. He first comes across the monkey after his father’s mysterious disappearance. His life quickly goes downhill from that point, with the monkey always banging its cymbals around the time someone close to him dies, such as his friend falling from a treehouse or his aunt’s cat being run over.
Hal himself manages to survive the monkey’s curse and goes on to start a family. However, the toy monkey inexplicably finds a way back into his life, sending Hal into a paranoid fit as he starts fearing the destruction of the family he loves.
Eventually, Hal takes drastic measures to rid himself of the cursed toy once and for all. He conspires with his youngest son to place the toy monkey in a bag weighted down by rocks and personally rows himself to the deepest part of the nearby lake where he can throw the bag to drown in the depths.
As Hal does so, the monkey activates, and his boat breaks apart. Hal narrowly survives as he swims safely to shore, but a later newspaper report confirms his worst fears. Around the time Hal got rid of the toy monkey, hundreds of fish died in the lake, making him believe that the toy monkey brought about a calamity after all.
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