HAVING FREAKED US THE HELL OUT WITH THE TERRIFYING LONGLEGS, DIRECTOR OSGOOD PERKINS IS BACK WITH SOMETHING MORE, WELL, PRIMAL. WE GO BANANAS AS HE AND HIS CAST BANG THE DRUM FOR HORROR COMEDY THE MONKEY

WORDS TOM ELLEN

“God forbid The Monkey is a hit,” says Osgood Perkins, with a sigh. “I consider myself a decent dude, but if [I have] two hits in seven months then I don’t know what choice I have except to turn into a total prick. I’ll become impossible .”

Perkins is joking — we’re fairly sure — but his maths checks out. Back in July of last year, the director unleashed his occult thriller Longlegs, and the movie hit big. Powered by a gloriously unhinged performance from Nicolas Cage — as a Marc Bolan-loving, Satan-worshipping, foundation-overapplying killer — Longlegs garnered glittering reviews, and earned $127 million against a budget of less than $10 million, making it the highest-grossing independent film of 2024.

“I still haven’t really registered it,” Perkins says of the reaction. “The very nature of anything ‘independent’ means that it’s not for everyone, so it was quite a shock. I remember telling our costume designer, ‘If we can just end up as a Halloween costume, we’ve won. Because we’ll have created something eternal, that connects with people.’ And last Halloween I got screenshotted a lot of Longlegs costumes.”

As both writer and director, Perkins has been crafting low-budget, critically acclaimed genre pieces for more than a decade now. But Longlegs’ gargantuan success has propelled him into another realm. “Everything suddenly moves more easily now,” he smiles, over Zoom from a café in Vancouver. “It changes your confidence level, and the confidence level of the people around you. To be in a cinema at those early [Longlegs] screenings, and hear 300 people all say, ‘Oh fuck!’ at the same time... It was very gratifying.”

This February, seven months after his boxoffice-eating, Halloween-conquering, mass “ohfuck”-inducing mega-hit, Perkins is set to unveil his next movie. How, then, do you follow up one of the strangest, most nightmarish horror films to grace cinema screens in a long time?

Apparently, you make a heartfelt comedy about a toy monkey.