Stephen King's delightfully screwball stories are getting the big screen treatment since 1976but no adaptation in the past 49 years has looked quite like The Ape. That's probably because none of those other films featured Oz Perkins, the creative horror mastermind behind films like trippy nicolas cage starring "Longlegs" and the haunting slow-burn "Blackcoat's Daughter," behind the camera. Perkins is clearly comfortable with the absurdity of the King story, which featured in his 1985 book Skeleton Crew. In the latest issue of Empire magazinethe director draws direct parallels between the story's cursed toy and his own strange, tragic family life.

Perkins told the outlet that "The Monkey" actually already had a "very serious script." when he joined the projectone provided by James Wan's production company, Atomic Monster. "I felt it was too serious and I told them, 'This is not working for me,'" Perkins recalled. He decided to do his own version of the story, highlighting the inherent comedy of a cymbal-crashing ape who visits Final Destination-style killing anyone he meets. "The thing about this toy monkey is that people around him die in crazy ways," says Perkins. "So I thought, 'Well, I'm an expert on that.' "Both my parents died in crazy, major ways."

The director says he "spent a lot of (his) life recovering from the tragedy, feeling pretty bad" and wondering why his parents died in ways that seemed "inherently unfair". After all, Perkins is the son of famous "Psycho" actor Anthony Perkins and actress and photographer Barry Berenson. The elder Perkins died in 1992, keeping his HIV/AIDS diagnosis a secret until his death, according to his LA Times obituary. In the same memorial, Anthony Perkins is quoted as saying he feared he had killed his father after wishing him dead shortly before he suffered a fatal heart attack. The actor best known as Norman Bates was only 5 years old then.

Osgood Perkins' mother also suffered a shocking fate: she was a passenger on the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In her obituary for The GuardianBerenson's own work — photo work for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, plus roles in films like "Cat People" and "Remember My Name" — has been overshadowed by a lengthy explanation for Perkins' death. The column also mentions her grandmother, Elsa Schiaparelli, a surrealist Italian fashion designer who worked with Salvador Dali (but, thankfully, wasn't strangely murdered). All of this, no doubt, contributed to Perkins' strange connection to King's source material. "Now I'm older and you realize this happens to everyone. Everyone dies," Perkins tells Empire. "Sometimes in a dream, sometimes in really crazy ways, as I experienced.

"The Monkey" certainly seems willing to laugh through the pain, and Perkins says King himself has seen the new film and "loves it." A brand new trailer with red stripe it also underscores the strange casualness of the story's premise. "The monkey that wants to kill our family?" It's back,” Theo James' Bill tells his brother Hal (also played by James) over the phone in the latest clips. He is perfectly dead as he says, "It must be won." We also see some flashy (but darkly funny) kills, from a Scooby-Doo-esque scuba diver suit harpooning someone in an antique shop to a scorpion crawling into a coffee mug. "It's that, 'Our time is short, the world is hard, rotten things happen,'" Perkins concludes. "But you have to move forward. You have to laugh. What else can you do?"

Monkey will hit theaters on February 21, 2025.