Neon has just dropped the first teaser trailer for The Monkey, Longlegs director Osgood Perkins’ next project. The horror film, which stars Theo James alongside Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell and Sarah Levy, debuts in cinemas on February 21st, 2025.

The film centres on twins Bill and Hal (both played by James), whose discovery of their dad’s monkey toy in the attic leads to a string of grisly deaths. Perkins both writes and directs The Monkey, which is based on the Stephen King short story of the same name, first published in 1980. Dave Caplan, Michael Clear, Chris Ferguson, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and James Wan are aboard the project as producers.

During a recent interview with THR to promote Longlegs, Perkins said that The Monkey will be far more comedic than any of his previous work. “It’s feeling more like an old John Landis movie or a Joe Dante movie or a Robert Zemeckis movie,” the filmmaker said at the time. “I saw an opportunity to make a wry, absurdist comedy about death. It’s about the very basic fact that we all die — and how fucking funny and weird and impossible and surreal is that shit? And to come at it from a tragicomedy kind of voice felt like it fit.”

Perkins continued, “At the end of the day, if you want to reduce it, it’s the haunted toy or evil toy subgenre, and I couldn’t imagine doing a serious one of those. To me, it rang utterly false to approach it that way, so I just went in the other direction.” 

Watch the brief teaser for The Monkey below: