Stephen King's Skeleton Crew: The Monkey (1980).

A while back I wound up delivering an article I didn't, in the strictest sense, intend to write.  A short story like "The Monkey" is one of those stories I knew I was going to have to get around to sooner or later.  It's been one of those long-term items on a hypothetical list of artworks that would have to get their day in the spotlight on this site one day.  The only catch was that for the longest time I was operating under the assumption that such a seemingly simple short story like this, while maybe popular among Stephen King fans, was still not the kind of high profile idea that a place like Hollywood would have all that much interest in these days.  I'd have thought this went double for an industry whose soul focus (both at the time and even now) still seems to be squarely fixed on the kind of properties that were best guaranteed to be the next major tentpole franchise.  If it wasn't a comic book or a major Fantasy or Sci-Fi franchise, then it didn't exist so far as the current incarnation of Tinseltown was concerned.  So of course I was proven wrong somehow.  It just seems to be one of the grand unspoken laws of the universe, or something, to always cheat the next would-be prophet to come along.  Whatever the case, I'll be honest, I was just as surprised as anyone to discover that Neon Pictures had snapped up the adaptation rights to what was otherwise considered to be this small and insular bit of latter day pulp fiction.  For the longest time, I thought its popularity was limited to the confines to Horror fandom.  In other words, while I thought it was good, I never would have guessed that it had any kind of shelf life awareness outside its own unique circles of and within the confines of the Horror genre.

Apparently, Hollywood was eager to prove me wrong.  So when the first trailer for the film adaptation dropped it came as a genuine surprise.  Though if I'm being honest, I was also cautiously optimistic.  A lot of the reason for that is down to a basic understanding of the kind of narrative we're dealing with here.  The idea of a plot revolving around a supernaturally possessed demonic toy was an old one even before King got his Inspiration for this particular work.  It's a concept that I've been able to trace as far back to a 1920s literary ghost story by M.R. James.  And even long before him, the very notion of a spectrally animated inanimate object probably owes its ultimate origin to ancient works of folklore, such as the Golem legend.  So it's not the most original concept King's got a hold of here, yet it can be fun whenever the writer manages to do it right.  In a case like this, what we're dealing with here is the kind of narrative that can be made to work in at least one of two possible approaches.  It can be played straight, or else done tongue-in-cheek.  King narrates the whole thing straightforward, while Oz Perkins decided to see if he could try hand at this material in a more humorous, parodic route.  This is something that's pretty obvious from the way the body count stacks up in the film adaption.  You can tell this even from just a casual glimpse at what we're shown in the trailers.  Where it's apparent that with few exceptions, all the deaths are handled in a clear tone of macabre humor.  Almost each moment of supernatural violence is never once displayed with anything like a complete straight face.  Instead, it's like watching a series of jokes being setup and told in a series of grisly, yet amusing punchlines.

This was all something I could pick up on just from the trailers, and like I said, I greeted it all with a note of hopeful caution.  That's because while I had experienced a straightforward rendition of this idea, I was also well aware of just how possible it was to turn this same concept into a complete genre send-up.  There's a lot of humor that's still left waiting to be mined in a notion like this.  It was this gut level understanding that made me somewhat eager to see what Oz Perkins could do with King's original material.  I've already written up my thoughts on the final results in an earlier post.  It can all be read about here.  To summarize a long story, the biggest reason why I have to call the film version a failure is because it's clear the mind of the director is being pulled in two directions at once, and he can never make up his mind what sort of tone he's supposed to tell the story in.  This means the narrative proper has to suffer from a lot of forced comedy that has this hollow, artificial quality to it.  This is an element that refuses to jibe and meld with the more serious qualities that lurk just underneath all the attempts at humor.  It's pretty clear that what we've been given counts less as an honest adaptation, and is better described as an unfortunate snapshot of the film's director in a moment of personal crisis.  It's clear enough that Oz Perkins was going through a grieving process of his own while making the film.

He'd lost first his famous father way back in the 80s, and then just recently his mother sometime before he commenced work on this aborted attempt at a King adaptation, and it left a mark the director.  This is obvious enough once you realize the way the film telegraphs Perkins' inability to know just what to do with the clashing emotions and thoughts that were running through his mind as he tried (and hence failed) to assemble the pictures he'd made into a coherent narrative.  It's pretty clear that was something of an impossible task for someone who still couldn't figure out how to handle his own grieving process.  It's the sort of situation where the artist really should have just taken time out for himself.  Get a better grip on his feelings, and see how things looked once he's had time to process his experiences into a more rational framework.  I almost want to say the film version of the "Monkey" is less a film, and more a textbook snapshot of the artist's inner turmoil once he's discovered that he's having a harder time time dealing with the loss of his parents than he might have expected.  That's a serious matter, one that needs to be handled with greater care than Perkins allowed himself to have.  For this reason, while I can't call the movie a good adaptation, I am willing to let it slide and to wish the director well.

That just leaves us with the original source material to talk about.  Like I said, I knew I'd have to get around to this story sooner or later.  I just always thought that time would be somewhere further down the line.  The failure of Perkins' efforts, however, has sort of forced my hand in the matter.  It now seems like I'm going to have to go out of my way to point out what it is about this simple short story that has made it popular enough to get the attention of Hollywood, and why it's still cited as one of the minor yet genuine classics in King's career.  This, then, is a close look a the tale of "The Monkey".

Wait Until Dark (1967).

There have been films which act as turning points in the history of cinema.  It doesn't happen often, yet when it does occur, most audiences are quick to notice.  Perhaps one of the biggest movies to break new ground, and bring a different sensibility and outlook to the big screen happened a long time ago, in 1960.  That's the year Alfred Hitchcock debuted a neat and concise little thriller known as Psycho on the big screen.  The way it worked was down to a number of factors.  On the one hand, a director lauded for his work on such high concept films like Notorious, Rear Window, and North By Northwest was starting to get fed up with the way audiences had begun to pigeonhole his efforts as the work of a genre artist.  Hitch never minded working in what might be termed the Gothic Noir field.  From pretty much the first to last, it's what was solid for him.  It was the one type of story which allowed him to keep his enthusiasm for filmmaking alive and well.  What bothered him was that he didn't like the way tastemakers and critics were trying to fence him in, and section his work off from what they were ready to label as the more legitimate forms of storytelling.  It's a criticism as old as the 19th century, or thereabouts.  It's also one that the Horror genre in particular has had to grapple with due to its constant reputation as the black sheep of the popular genres.  It seems to have been an awareness of this reputation which led Hitch toward a desire to see if he could take the pulpiest concept and material associated with the genre, and make Art out of it.

There's a hell of a lot more to that story worth telling someday, yet for the purpose of this article, that's one of the basic building block motivations behind the creation of Psycho.  I think the fact that audiences are still talking about that film all these years is a testament to just how well Hitchcock has been able to achieve his goals.  The story of Norman Bates represents a film which was able not just to break itself out the pulp ghetto to which other works like it had been consigned.  It also functions as one of those tales whose impact turns out to be so big that it kind of rewrites the rules for how films in general, and stories like itself in particular were made and viewed.  When I call Psycho a turning point, there's no real exaggeration in that statement.  Nor am I at all alone in making such a judgement call.  It's a film that's been described as a turning point in Hollywood as a whole.  A good way to describe it is to call it a story which functions as both a beginning, and an ending.  On the one hand, it marked the end of the sort of classical approach to filmmaking which was something of the high standard during Tinseltown's Golden Age.  By proving that it was possible to take a fundamentally B-level Drive-In premise, and give the whole thing a solid A-list treatment, Hitchcock proved not only that Horror has its place, it can also make a valid claim for itself as a legitimate form of Art.  The fact he was able to succeed in this endeavor marks Psycho as a cinematic beginning on a number of various levels.

For the purposes of this review, the one aspect of the film that needs to be singled out is also the one most audiences are still familiar with.  I've heard Psycho described as the first Slasher flick, and there's plenty of good reason for that assessment.  It's not because there's any originality to had in terms of the story proper.  The figure of the deadly serial killer who lurks in the shadows, just out of the line of sight, was already something of a standard trope by the mid to late 1930s.  A good example of just how old the idea is as a creative concept can be gauged by going back to two films which share the same antagonist.  One is a legit forgotten B flick known as House of Horror, and the other is a Basil Rathbone, Sherlock Holmes vehicle called Pearl of Death.  Both films hail from the year 1946, and each features the same character as the antagonist.  He was this homicidal maniac known as the Creeper (no, not that one) and I guess the best way to describe him is that he was the closest anyone ever got to being the Freddy Krueger of his era.  The fact that no one remembers this cinematic psycho slasher today stands as a testament to just how little of an impact the Creeper left on filmgoers, even back during the 40s.  

What allowed Norman Bates to run, where the Creeper could only walk (and then not even that far), is down to more than just Hitchcock's much touted genius as a visual stylist.  While a lot of his greatness with the camera is on display, viewers looking for anything like an actual visual feast might just come away disappointed.  The director's handling of the lens on the Perkins-Leigh vehicle is so controlled it almost has to be labeled as an example of the Spartan Thriller.  To be bothered by this particular quality is to mistake one single tree for the entire forest.  The real engine that allowed Psycho not just to run, but also discover a whole new stratosphere, lies not in the quality of its images, but rather in the script.  It's story is one that remembers that Horror can have a sophistication all its own, and Hitchcock must have been the kind of perceptive reader who was able to recognize aspects and ideas like this, because he took what is basically schlock, and made it into something worthy of being called a museum piece.  There's one particular aspect to the story of the various goings on in and around the infamous Bates Motel that adds fuel to the idea of its being a major turning point.  It marks the first time that the idea of the Stalker Slasher was, not just put front and center as the main character of such a story (and that is one of the great hidden conceits of the picture; its not that the protagonist is killed off halfway through the story, its that when we meet the real main lead, we don't recognize him as such at first).  In addition, the film also marks the first time that the Slasher is marked with a specific, recognizable, tonal quality.

I've said that Norman Bates is not a new characterization in the strictest sense.  The figure of the Slasher has been around far longer than the advent of film.  Going by a strict sense of chronology, the first modern character to codify the trope is the culprit of Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue".  Keeping this fact in mind means that one of the ironies of Norman is that he represents a leap forward in the genre by looking back to his Gothic roots.  If the peculiar Mr. Bates now functions as the first official Slasher in cinema history, then part of the reason for that is because he represents an even greater sense of artistic transition than that of going from the Old to the New Hollywood.  He's the first time the villain of what is ostensibly a crime thriller was ever painted in shades that designate him as the first major Horror figure of Hollywood's New Wave.  This is an achievement for which Hitchcock and his main star, Anthony Perkins, tend to be the ones to receive all the accolades for.  It's pretty easy to see why this is the case.  Hitch and his film were the first out of the starting gate.  Hence, they got to be the ones to break new-old-ground.  It's a simple case of "To the victor go the spoils" so far as critics and audiences are concerned.  Now, to be fair, all of that praise is more than well earned.  What I don't believe it should do is blind genre fans and movie history buffs to the fact that Psycho counts as merely the first (albeit very major) stepping stone in a continuing line of cinematic development.  Norman was just the first modern Slasher of the movies.  There were others who followed after in his train.

This is also a generally acknowledged fact.  Where even the most die-hard fans tend to go wrong is the belief that there's this gap of a whole decade between the breakout Hitchcock performance, followed by Tobe Hooper's updating of the concept way later with 1973's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, followed up a few short years after with 1978's Halloween.  Again, to be fair, there is a clear line of descent between Norm Bates, Leatherface, and Mike Myers than can never be ignored.  What I think most cinema buffs have lost sight of, however, is the awareness that there was at least one more major film which ended up making a contribution to the development of the modern Slasher Horror movie.  Unlike the efforts of Hitchcock, Tobe Hooper, and John Carpenter, however, this is one crucial piece of film trivia which has managed to get lost in the shuffle.  If I had to give a reason for why this is the case, then perhaps a line of dialogue from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe offers the best explanation.  "One can't mind everything at once", and that seems to be what's happened here with the film under discussion today.  All of which is to say that there is this one movie in particular which has been overlooked in the development of the modern Horror film.  Much like Psycho, this also serves as something of a snapshot of the modern Horror genre in a moment of transition.  This makes it well worth a look at in terms of its meaning for the format as we know it today.  It an interesting, overlooked film called Wait Until Dark.