The Monkey (2025)

I have a policy when it comes to movie adaptations made from Stephen King's works.  It comes in the form of a number of expectations.  The first is that it's best to expect the final product to be work of pure schlock, more often than.  The second is to always keep one import fact of life in mind.  Schlock has its place.  I'm even willing go out on a limb, and proclaim that the B Grade Carnivalesque qualities not just of certain low budget films, but also of a surprising number of literary products, is in fact something of a genuine time-honored tradition of the Horror genre.  This is a critical insight that King himself appears to be aware of.  It's something he discusses in the pages of his invaluable non-fiction study, Danse Macabre.  It's where he offers his readers an important understanding to keep in mind when either reading or watching any work made in the Gothic frame of mind.  King does this through a discussion of the kind of effect that even the the most Grade Z poverty row production can conjure up if the story itself is good enough.  He illustrates how this works by telling us about the time he went to a Drive-In feature, and it was there for the first time that he saw The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  This is what happened.

"I knew, watching, that the Creature had become my Creature; I had bought it. Even to a seven-year-old, it was not a terribly convincing Creature. I did not know then it was good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, but I surely knew it was some guy in some kind of a monster suit.. .just as I knew that, later on that night, he would visit me in the black lagoon of my dreams, looking much more realistic. He might be waiting in the closet when we got back; he might be standing slumped in the blackness of the bathroom at the end of the hall, stinking of algae and swamp rot, all ready for a post-midnight snack of small boy. Seven isn’t old, but it is old enough to know that you get what you pay for. You own it, you bought it, it’s yours. It is old enough to feel the dowser suddenly come alive, grow heavy, and roll over in your hands, pointing at hidden water (103-4)".  It helps to keep in mind that what King is describing here is the emotional reaction, or the Stock Response effect that the last of the classic Universal Monster pictures had on him.  The key things to pay attention to in all of that word salad is how the film was able to get its intended effect across in spite of its limitations.  King could tell the special effects were nothing to write home about, even in 1954.

At the same time, the final product was of such a quality that it's overall schlocky nature could never really get in the way of the picture's ultimate triumph as a fright flick.  It's interesting to note that the author of Carrie is not alone in his reaction.  It seems that the Creature has managed to capture the Imaginations of audiences right down to the present moment.  It's possible enough to demonstrate at least the veracity of this claim when proof can be offered by the following video review.  That word "capture" is worth keeping in mind.  Because that's what the good work of Horror does, regardless of production value.  It's the reason King is able to say with complete sincerity that "My reaction to the Creature on that night was perhaps the perfect reaction, the one every writer of horror fiction or director who has worked in the field hopes for when he or she uncaps a pen or a lens: total emotional involvement, pretty much undiluted by any real thinking process—and you understand, don’t you, that when it comes to horror movies, the only thought process really necessary to break the mood is for a friend to lean over and whisper, “See the zipper running down his back?” 

"I think that only people who have worked in the field for some time truly understand how fragile this stuff really is, and what an amazing commitment it imposes on the reader or viewer of intellect and maturity. When Coleridge spoke of “the suspension of disbelief” in his essay on imaginative poetry, I believe he knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted with a clean and a jerk and held up by main force. Disbelief isn’t light; it’s heavy. The difference in sales between Arthur Hailey and H. P. Lovecraft may exist because everyone believes in cars and banks, but it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.  And whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of, “I don’t read fantasy or go to any of those movies; none of it’s real,” I feel a kind of sympathy. They simply can’t lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.  In this sense, kids are the perfect audience for horror. The paradox is this: children, who are physically quite weak, lift the weight of unbelief with ease. They are the jugglers of the invisible world—a perfectly understandable phenomenon when you consider the perspective they must view things from (104-105)".

This is a fundamentally Romantic way of looking at the genre and its intended effects.  If proof were needed for that statement, all you have to do is go back and see King invoke one of the key maxims of that literary Movement, even going so far as to name drop the handle of Romanticism's primary architect.  In King's favor I'll just go ahead here and say that it's easy to prove what Coleridge says about the inherent fragility, perhaps even the innate ridiculous nature of the Gothic.  The prime example I would point to is the Shower Scene from Hitchcock's Psycho.  We tend to think of it was one of the most iconic and visceral moments in the history of Slasher film.  I'm of two minds about this.  On the one hand, it's impossible to deny.  The entire sequence works as a masterclass in pacing, editing, imagery, and sound.  I also can't help being amused at how well people are affected by a scene where, in the strictest sense, no violence is ever committed, and not so much as a single drop of blood is shed.  

Go back and look at that sequence again with a more alert eye, and you'll begin to notice all the ways in which ol' Hitch more or less tricks you into doing the dirty work for him.  Note for instance that we never really see the knife doing anything that would constitute as an actual attack.  It's even possible that the choreography of  "Mrs. Bates'" actions are deliberately a bit too slow to leave an impact.  Even the pacing of the moment, and the reactions of the characters in the scene count as unrealistic when you reflect on just how stylized everything is.  Perhaps the strangest compliment I can give to Hitchcock with this scene is also the greatest sounding, yet it's also the truth.  The Master of Suspense was always tasteful enough to never show us an actual crime being committed at any point in his career.  Instead, all we've got with the encounter between the unfortunate Janet Leigh and "Mother" is little else except pure thespian histrionics and mugging for the camera.  In other words, Coleridge was correct.  It really doesn't take much to defuse even the best made examples of Horror.  Applying the Romantic Poet's dictum to Hitchcock's most famous movie reveals it to be the cheapest sort of carnival trick.  I think this is also what makes it cool as hell.  When looked at properly, the Director has to be congratulated here.

It really does count as a prime example of a sleight-of-hand trick well done.  That's all Horror or any work of fiction amounts to, in the long run.  It's all just a magic act where the zipper on the monster suit is always visible sooner or later.  I almost want to say that the inability of all Horror to get away from revealing that zipper on the suit is perhaps the defining trait of Schlock.  What happens in practice then is that all Horror cinema comes down to a question.  Are you willing to grant the genre it's limitations, whatever they are, and be willing to meet any story in this mode on those terms?  It's the sort of question that pretty much every adaptation of a Stephen King story winds up asking of its viewers.  Though I'd argue it also holds true for Horror as a whole.  For my part, I make no bones about where I stand on the issue.  I'll always be more than happy to enter into the Schlocky spirit of things that underlines just about every King movie I've ever seen.  I make no apologies for the honest enjoyment I get out of this stuff.  It's just plain fun to me.  With that said, are there any moments where the ability to enjoy this sort of film comes to an end, and where does The Monkey fit in with this kind of scheme?

Swallows and Amazons (1930/2016).

They call it the Lake District.  It's something in the way of being a Storied Place.  Take a map of England, and then spread it open.  Note the location of it's central hub, in London, situated in the Southeast.  If you start from that point, and make your way on a more or less steady Northwestern line of travel, sooner or later you'll notice how all the signs of metropolitan life begin to drop off and fade away the further you get from the locations of Downing, Buckingham, and Windsor.  For a while you'll notice remnant signs of our first carbon footprint is you tread your way through the Country's industrial centers.  These are what someone once referred to as the lands of dark, satanic mills.  Most of these business establishments have overrun the countryside that used to reign like an undisputed green monarch long ago.  Now all of that has been eclipsed by factory towns like Birmingham, Liverpool, Northampton, or Manchester.  The curious traveler will have to make their way through or past some of these points of interest in order to reach the main locale I have in mind.  It's a hilly area located near the Northwesternmost edge of England proper.  It's not too long after you've past this particular region that you'll come to that demarcation point where Britain ends and Scotland begins.  Should you choose to take the travel route known known as the A591 past Helsington Laithes, you'll soon find yourself moving through the county known as Cumbria.

This is the spot on the map where are destination is located.  Even before we've reached the neighborhood we're looking for, however, the attentive traveler will begin to notice a further change in the landscape.  If you can manage to make your way past the various industrial centers that have come to make up a great part of the modern identity of Britain, and if you know where to look for it, you might just be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the land's other face.  This is true of places like Cumbria.  It's here that the signs of modernity begin to drop off in a meaningful way, the kind that forces you to notice almost without being aware of it.  One moment you'll find yourself surrounded by skyscrapers, however modest, and yet after a while these begin to fall back, and it's like someone was kind enough to introduce you to the idea of a natural landscape.  It's a process that begins well before you reach sight of Cumbria, though you'll have to make your way past places like Manchester first.  Once that's done, it's almost like watching a slow burn magic trick.  It becomes a game of first you don't see it, and now you do.  Traveling toward and then through the English Countryside is akin to starting out in the confines of real life, and then slowly entering the remnants of a storybook.

You get the impression that if you hang around a location like Cumbria long enough, you'll almost begin to understand how the ancestor's of the people who live here could believe that creatures like elves and dryads made their homes in trees and moors that surround you on all sides, or that you occupy what's left of the homes of a race of giants, and other things.  Such folkways appear to have come easy to a people of Cumbria.  They like to tell how it's the true location of King's Arthur's Camelot.  They'll be more than happy to point the tourist out to the site of the Round Table, or the home of the Lady of in the Lake.  As enticing as all of this neighborhood lore might be, it's still just the appetizer for the location in mind.  Moving further into the heart of Cumbria reveals a setting which is almost as near to that of a storybook as anyone is ever likely to achieve in whatever it is we think of as real life.  This would be not one, but rather a series of simple small towns with names like Grasmere, Keswick, Hawkshead, and Ambleside.  The one trait that each of them shares is just this.  The Lake District is an old place, and yet it's people have kept up with the times, by and large.  Odds are even if you're invited into any one of the quaint looking cottages that dot this landscape, you'll be treated to the comforting sight of what's become the standard setup of the modern household.  A widescreen TV that's barely used, and more than one Personal Computer and/or Laptop, complete with a corner Wi-Fi modem.

The funny thing is how even this doesn't seem to detract from the sense that we're witnessing a place that's always somewhat out of time.  You can't call the District a living relic, not by a long shot.  At the same time, there's the general impression that the hours of a man's hours are able to take their time here.  The pacing of daily life is, or can be slower than in London.  I'm not sure if there is any spot left where the air is clear, yet this place comes pretty close.  Also there's the general look of the towns about the Lakes.  What I'm about to say next is a cliche, yet it's true enough.  The Lake District really is perhaps the closest England will ever have to its own Hobbiton.  It's just possible that the ability to link this real life location with one of the most famous and well liked settings in the history of Fantasy fiction is also not a chance piece of similarity.  I have called the Lake District a storied place.  The full meaning of that description stems from the fact that it's also something of the birth place for the Romantic Movement.  In 1799, one of the District's longtime citizens took up residence in the somehow aptly named Dove Cottage, located in Grasmere.  His reason for doing this was simple enough.

This guy wanted to be a writer.  Not just any penny-a-page wordsmith, either.  This fellow had set his sights on being a full-time professional poet.  His name was William Wordsworth.  I'm not sure it's correct to label him as the Father of Romanticism in English Letters.  For one thing, while the authors that comprised the the group might have agreed that together they constituted a new Movement in the arts, they were generally averse to the idea of having any of one of them becoming a public figurehead.  In general, they tended to guard their artistic freedom very well, and none of them (least of all William Blake) would have taken kindly to the idea that the group should have its Inspiration subordinated to the whims of any one of them.  That would have been a recipe for disaster.  Wordsworth wasn't even the first one of them to start writing poetry.  That honor goes to the pioneering efforts of Blake.  Instead, it seems more accurate to say that Wordsworth was the one who came closest to giving the Romantic Poets something a like a spiritual home.  A place where like minds could gather and compare notes and share ideas and philosophies with one another.  This seems to have been the function for places like Dove Cottage and other spots along the banks of the District.  A collective writer's retreat which in time became something of a literary hub from which the ideas of Romanticism emerged and began to spread.

The story I want to talk about today is one that owes something of an eternal debt to the shared home of the Romantic Movement.  It's main setting is on the shores of the Lake District, and it serves as something of a love letter to the place.  It has the advantage of being written by an author who has gone on to be considered something of an honorary local son.  The kind of artist who is able to produce a work that is of such quality that he often gets a spot for himself on the same shelf as works like Songs of Innocence and Experience.  The story itself fits into the category of an ode.  It's a tribute to the kind idyllic childhood Summers when your family would take you on a vacation, and rather than any National Lampoon style nightmare lying in wait for you, everything just somehow turned out right.  It was never a matter of perfection.  Instead, it was about having the kind of experiences that you knew was always going to somehow define that part of your life.  The kind of experiences where can still recall the feel of it all, even after the memories of the events and what little photographic evidence you had of is has begun to fade.  Written by Arthur Ransome, this is the tale of Swallows and Amazons.