What does an R-rated kids' movie look like? We might just find out when The Monkey, director Osgood Perkins' adaptation of the Stephen King short story, hits theaters.

"The Monkey is like Robert Zemeckis on ecstasy or something," Perkins tells Entertainment Weekly in an interview for his current film Longlegs. "It's a very playful comedy with a lot of really excessive gore, language. It's a kids' movie that's rated R."

First published in Gallery magazine in 1980, The Monkey is the story of twins Hal and Bill, who discover their father's monkey toy in the attic as boys. Strange deaths start occurring all around them, prompting the brothers to throw the toy away. They grow apart in the years since but are forced to reunite as adults when the deaths begin anew.

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Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth, Cocaine Bear) will play Hal and Bill as kids, and Theo James (The Gentlemen, X-Men '97) will play the twins as adults. The film also stars Tatiana Maslany (She–Hulk: Attorney at Law), Elijah Wood (Yellowjackets), Colin O’Brien (Wonka), Rohan Campbell (The Hardy Boys), and Sarah Levy (Schitt’s Creek).

When Perkins speaks with EW at the end of May, he's halfway through editing the film together and making his director's cut.

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"I wanted to embrace the humor of Stephen King," he explains. "I wanted to be more on the side of Creepshow and Misery, and I wanted the movie to feel like a Stephen King movie to really honor the guy. I mean, he's the most significant writer...ever? In any genre, prolifically, just in terms of impact. Certainly for the horror genre, whether it be literature or movies, there's no one who's contributed more. So it's time to really honor the dude. I really made a movie that I hoped he would like."

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Neon will release The Monkey on Feb. 21, 2025. First, Longlegs, starring Maika Monroe as an F.B.I. agent tracking a serial killer played by Nicolas Cage, will be released in theaters July 12 by the same distributor. He explains how it "couldn't be more of a different movie" to The Monkey.

"It was a personality that was haunting the periphery of a lot of things that I was trying to start to write or wondering about," he says of Cage's killer in Longlegs. "He was this thing that was coming in and out of shops with the ring of a bell. You'd see the guy and then he'd leave. Then I had this other thing where he would drive up to people's houses on their kids' birthdays and bring out stuffed animals and little child-sized pianos and put on a little show. He was kind of uneasy about being on people's properties. These things start to coagulate into a shape and then it starts to talk."

Read more from Perkins about Longlegs.