It has already been an excellent year for horror, despite it being only a month and a half into 2025, mainly due to Companion, the murderous android thriller that was probably the best horror film I’ve seen the entire past year.

Now, we have another contender emerging, and this is another instance where audiences and critics seem to be on the same page for once. That would be The Monkey, which combines the horror trio of author Stephen King, producer James Wan and director Osgood Perkins, who did last year’s Longlegs, probably one of the most viral horror films of 2024, though I would argue not one of the best.

With an 84% critic scores and a matching 85% audience score, things seem to be going better this time around. Longlegs did have an 86% critic score, but audiences were down to 61%. The Monkey is an even weirder concept for a film, as you can see from the synopsis:

“When twin brothers find a mysterious wind-up monkey, a series of outrageous deaths tear their family apart. Twenty-five years later, the monkey begins a new killing spree, forcing the estranged siblings to confront the cursed toy.”

The trailer shows a movie that feels somewhat akin to Final Destination, full of random “accident” deaths, albeit caused by a demonic toy monkey rather than some unseen Death Force. You can check out that trailer below:

I am really interested in this cast, which includes Theo James (The Gentleman), Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) and Elijah Wood (LOTR, Yellowjackets). None of them are consistently horror stars (Wood a few times, however, by this point), and I’m curious to see how they work in tandem here.

One of my favorite bits of trivia about the film is that the movie had to have the toy monkey playing a snare drum, as the concept of a toy monkey slamming cymbals together is owned by Disney. That is apparently a thing you can own, somehow.

The Monkey will be released in two days on February 21 in a wide release. Given that a lot of 90%+ horror films are a lot smaller, less widely-released films, this could end up being one of the best-reviewed mainstream horror films of the year, by those metrics. You can see it in theaters, but this may pull a Companion and head to streaming very quickly. Companion only had two weeks between theatrical release and PVOD, which seems insane, but that’s the market these days.

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