A grisly horror movie death can be so much more than just useless carnage — if it’s well-written

If you asked my parents to describe what I was like as a child using only one word, they’d spit out “anxious” before you even finished the question. Like any burgeoning homosexual child, I came equipped with the gay starter pack that included talkativeness and flamboyance. But those were hardly defining characteristics when my anxiety came into play, trampling my other traits like they were all vying for the top spot in a Riverdance tournament. I walked through life like animals do, with an abundance of caution and a hasty turn in the other direction the moment I perceived a threat. There was fleeting comfort in movies, which I’d use to get out of my head for a bit and enjoy living a couple of hours in someone else’s shoes. But my persistent underlying anxiety meant that one genre remained a blind spot for far too long: horror. 

As a kid, I spent enough time twisting the shadows of trees cascading through my window from the outside into the shapes of serial killers or bloodthirsty monsters, why put concrete images of those things into my head? I avoided horror at every turn. When I was 10, I missed the first half hour of a movie because I was hiding in the movie theater bathroom to avoid seeing the trailer for “Blade: Trinity.” (Someone did come to check on me, yes. I claimed bowel irregularity, typical 10-year-old stuff.) Another time, after managing to get through most of “The Ring” alongside an older cousin — in broad daylight, at my request — I sprinted out of the house the second the movie got around to Day 7, when Naomi Watts’ character was supposed to die. There was no horror movie I couldn’t avoid. After a while, I became the MVP of a game where I was the only player.

Over time, I grew out of this deep-seated fear of, well, being in fear. But it wasn’t without the proper exposure therapy (and a bit of good, old-fashioned maturation) first. When I try to locate the turning point, I am taken back to a fateful night watching “Final Destination 3” with some peers. Grisly, unpredictable, horrific death is the hallmark of the “Final Destination” franchise, in which sexy co-eds manage to thwart an untimely end, only for death’s iron hammer to track them down and execute their fate one by one. Strangely enough, turning death into an invisible force as opposed to some night stalker with a protean face dissolved some of my usual apprehension. I still winced and covered my eyes, but by my own measure, I was doing a great job handling it. By the time the movie got to one of the series’ most famous kills, the tanning bed death, knowing exactly what was to come allowed me to have fun with a horror movie for the first time in my life. It still gave me nightmares, sure, but they didn’t follow me into waking life.

In the years since, I’ve developed a real soft spot for horror films that successfully take common fears — like an anxious kid’s dread that death is waiting around every corner — and turn them into haunting thrill rides. The horror space does not necessarily demand ingenuity; there’s an audience for even the worst drivel at the bottom of the barrel. But when the genre turns out something fresh and truly clever, horror can transcend entertainment, becoming an outlet for our real-life terror when we have nowhere else to put it.

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I’d hoped that Osgood Perkins’ new film “The Monkey” might provide that same kind of release. Based on a Stephen King short story of the same name, “The Monkey” promised a revival of the convoluted deaths from the “Final Destination” series by way of a splatter gore midnight movie. The concept is that a cursed toy monkey causes lethal havoc on someone every time the key in its back is wound, and by accepting that the monkey can’t be destroyed, the characters acquiesce that death is inevitable no matter how much they fight it.

If there were any time for a gratuitously bloody metaphor for how difficult it is to persevere knowing that you have no real control, it would be at this moment, when every day brings a new fire to contend with — often too literally! “The Monkey” certainly has a simple enough premise to deliver on that metaphor. If history repeats itself, maybe this could provide the same chilling solace that “Final Destination” did for people like me during the Bush administration.

Theo James in “The Monkey” (Courtesy of Neon)Or, at least that’s what I told myself before the film’s first act all but squandered that promise. “The Monkey” has no shortage of grisly deaths, but they are by and large unmemorable, save for a couple of kills that feel like Perkins was “yes, and”-ing with himself as he wrote the screenplay. (A nest of yellowjackets sits in front of a car, and a gun shoots through a windshield, and it shoots the nest, and the insects fly through the hole in the windshield, and they fly into someone’s mouth and eat them alive.) A movie that begins with a disembowelment should have nowhere to go but up. And yet, it’s from that death, which appears in the film’s opening sequence, that the movie plateaus. Perkins does not expound upon his theory that we’re all profoundly screwed. Instead, he sits in it, content to let the rot fester around his film and its audience until death comes for us too. To put it plainly: It’s a hopeless, humorless movie about death that’s so damn boring you’ll wish you could die just to be somewhere else.

But it’s Perkins’ nihilism that really grates. The horror subgenre where death’s hand chooses a seemingly random victim has the potential to be invigorating because it reveals the intrepidity of the human spirit. Even when we’re faced with the fact that we will die, our natural desire to change our fate — or at the very least prolong it — is what makes us people. This will to live is what sets us apart from animals and insects; it’s what drives our empathy and makes us special to one another. It’s also what makes those films from the “Final Destination” franchise so much fun: Some will perish, and one or two others will avoid balconies and heavy machinery for the movie’s duration. The persistence in those films puts Perkins’ to shame. “The Monkey” is not a movie about accepting that death will come for us all, it’s a movie about giving up.

Shawnee Smith in “Saw” However, we’d be remiss if we didn’t consider the “Saw” movies, which sit at the other end of Perkins’ spectrum of pastiche. “The Monkey” combines the Rube Goldberg-ian death sequences of “Final Destination” with the splatter gore of “Saw.” For a long time, the latter franchise was considered meritless torture porn, but in recent years, the “Saw” films have seen a long-deserved resurgence. Yes, a fair share of them are gratuitous horror exploitation, but if you can get over those sights, you’ll find that even the most grisly installments try to carry on the series’ tradition of covert social commentary. Most recently, the franchise’s 2023 reboot “Saw X” was a scathing indictment of the healthcare industrial complex, which has coincidentally only become increasingly timely as more Americans find themselves trying to solve the health insurance industry’s Rubik’s cube. 

The “Saw” films follow a killer named Jigsaw who captures his victims and forces them to endure a series of potentially lethal tests of will and physical endurance. These are his way of making his hostages appreciate the lives that they have, which he believes are being wasted. (The films make Jigsaw into such a sympathetic villain that I’ve often caught myself thinking, “Wow, that Jigsaw’s views on addiction are really problematic,” before I remember he’s also torturing people.) The “Saw” movies may be blunt in their messaging and even more forthright with their carnage, but they are also surprisingly hopeful. The series doesn’t just broadly gesture at our collective cynicism, it confronts it head-on. The films also manage to spin some wry humor in the process, something “The Monkey” can’t quite wrap its head around how to do. In Perkins’ movie, a character dies by tripping and choking on the vape they can’t stop puffing on. It’s a similar reproach to the dregs of modern culture that you’d see in a “Saw” film, only far more cruel and snobby.

To be completely fair, if Perkins sought out to make a film that was brutal for brutality’s sake, I might not even be sitting here, clacking away on my keyboard. With the horror space as saturated as it is, a growing audience craves senseless splatter films. We don’t need to look much further than the popularity of the “Terrifier” movies to determine a market for the antithesis of contemporary “elevated horror.” People want to be shocked and grossed out; initial rumblings around a single over-the-top scene in last year’s “In a Violent Nature” drove viewers to seek the film out to see if it could make good on its repulsive promises. 

But that presents a problem in itself. There’s now a substantial mainstream audience for the splatter film. No longer are these movies relegated to underground, B-movie status, making the gore-forward subgenre more likely to be co-opted by those who want to get in on the action, yet don’t fully understand its appeal. “The Monkey” wears the skin of one of these gruesome slashers, with kills trying to raise a viewer’s pulse with a little bit of innovation. But a little bit does not go a long way in Perkins’ movie. He’s got too much on his mind to allow this monkey to really go bananas, and his indecision makes the movie’s nihilistic viewpoint feel all the more hollow and forced. 

“The Monkey” is filled with loose ends, ideas about absent fathers and childhood trauma that have their emotional impact shredded to bits by lawnmower accidents and shotgun blasts. Perkins is neither heartfelt nor heartless, and his lack of commitment keeps “The Monkey” from ever reaching the terrifying heights of its peers. What could be a clever comfort when we need it most is only another disappointment to add to the pile. Thankfully, a “Final Destination” series reboot is right around the corner later this spring, so all we have to do is keep our heads until then.

That’s what I found myself thinking as I exited my screening of “The Monkey” and stepped into the dreaded overhead lighting of the elevator, which promptly got stuck on the 12th floor. This has, somehow, never happened to me, despite always knowing that it could. But while others beside me seemed visibly nervous, I was surprised by how level-headed I remained in the two minutes before the machine started moving again. The 30-year-old version of myself handled it much differently than the kid who would’ve been destroyed by suddenly being thrust into his own horror movie — my anxious worst nightmare come true.

Being momentarily trapped in a tight space was still briefly terrifying and even a little thrilling, but most of all, it was real. It was a humbling reminder that things can go bad faster than we ever think they could, and it made the elevator jam a gripping occurrence. If I stayed trapped in that mindset all the time, hyper-aware of death’s inevitability like “The Monkey” suggests we be, I’d never appreciate all of life’s highs and lows as they happen. Frankly, far too many of my childhood memories are steeped in the sad knowledge that this will all end one day. That’s exactly why I find a few gnarly doses of onscreen carnage strangely comforting: They allow me to remember that this existence is finite, so I can accept that fact before moving on with living life. Trust me when I say that sitting in that bleak reality all the time wouldn’t set us free, it would make us absolutely miserable.