USA TODAY's Watch Party newsletter has all the best recommendations, delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now and be one of the cool kids. Almost as long as that legendary master of horror Stephen King has been keeping book lovers up at night,

Stephen King is one of those prolific writers whose scope of work is so vast, and whose better projects are so beloved, that it’s easy to forget about the stuff that isn’t so good. The same is true for all the movies based on his short stories and novels—so many of them,

As far as tone is concerned, Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is unlike any Stephen King adaptation audiences have ever seen. There have been King films in the past that have funny lines and funny scenes, but the 2025 movie is the first to go all out and consistently use extreme horror as a vehicle for comedy.

Horror movie icons Osgood Perkins and James Wan connect to make this Stephen King story an outrageously fun time. "The Monkey" is lowbrow and wild.

Stephen King entered the zeitgeist of American storytelling a half-century ago, and he has not left it since. Decade after decade, Hollywood has returned to the well that King created and continues to fill it with stories that tap into the fears all around us.

The legendary author has been slowly mastering crime fiction in recent years, and adapting one such story to the screen could prove it to audiences.