Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for The Monkey (2025)

While director Oz Perkins’ Stephen King adaptation The Monkey might be a funny and surprisingly life-affirming movie, that doesn’t stop it from being 2025’s goriest horror movie so far. Theo James pulls double duty in The Monkey, playing cursed twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelbourne. After inheriting a toy monkey from their absent father, Bill and Hal are horrified to learn that the bizarre item causes horrific deaths whenever its key is turned.

When Hal tries to use the monkey to kill his bullying brother Bill, the toy instead kills the pair’s mother, Lois. This incident drives the duo apart until The Monkey’s twist ending reveals that both brothers let the eponymous monkey define their lives in very different ways. The Monkey’s ending features an unexpectedly moving twist as Bill and Hal realize they have wasted their lives obsessing over death, with Bill trying to control the monkey and Hal trying to avoid it.

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Aunt Ida’s Death

The Monkey’s Most Final Destination-Style Death Isn’t Its Nastiest Moment

Bill and Hal’s divergent stories both illustrate The Monkey’s main theme, which is a weirdly poignant message about facing the inevitability of death with a smile. The movie’s many cartoonish deaths don’t blunt The Monkey‘s heart, but they do provide some of the most jaw-dropping gore since Art the Clown visited the multiplex in October 2024’s Terrifier 3. The Monkey’s powers allow the toy to engineer absurd accidents for its victims, as epitomized by Aunt Ida’s death.

Sarah Levy’s Aunt Ida awakes to hear the monkey’s drum beat, eventually venturing into her basement to find the source of the sound. There, she falls into a box of fishing tackles that get embedded in her face. She plucks them out painfully and dabs her face with rubbing alcohol, only to set her head on fire when she leans over the stove. Running from the house to douse her head, she instead gets her leg stuck in a vase and runs headfirst into a sign that shoots straight through her skull.

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Babysitter Annie’s Death At The Restaurant

Babysitter Annie’s Decapitation Is Sudden And Brutal

Although it might sound like a mix between a Final Destination death and a Home Alone scene, Aunt Ida’s demise is actually one of The Monkey’s less brutal deaths. Thanks to a well-timed freeze-frame, viewers are spared the sight of Aunt Ida’s head being fully impaled by the pointy signpost. In contrast, one of The Monkey’s earlier major deaths is far nastier.

Bill and Hal are seated at a Japanese restaurant with their babysitter Annie, on whom Bill has an adorably precocious crush. However, the young boy’s dreams of marrying his babysitter are destroyed when a mishap involving knife tricks causes a chef to accidentally decapitate her. Annie’s still-smiling head slowly sliding off her shoulders and onto the H๏τ plate is a tough image to shake.

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Adult Hal’s Dream About Lois

Tatiana Maslany’s Horrific Death Is Revisited In This Sequence

Although The Monkey changes a lot from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, the comedy does feature a few scenes of straightforward horror. As an adult, a guilt-ridden Hal has nightmares about his mother’s death. This results in one of the movie’s most memorably nasty moments during what initially seems like a flashback to his adolescence.

Hal asks his mother for life advice, and she obliges, with Tatiana Maslany’s warm Lois offering some pearls of wisdom in Hal’s hazily lit bedroom. However, this dreamy reminiscence turns nightmarish as blood starts to flood from Lois’s eyes and mouth, mirroring the circumstances of her horrifying death.

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The Aftermath of Uncle Chip’s Death

Director Oz Perkins’ Supporting Role Ends Badly For Him

While Stephen King has no cameo in The Monkey, director Oz Perkins does appear in a supporting role. Perkins plays Chip, the affable but incompetent uncle who raises Bill and Hal alongside Aunt Ida after Lois’s death. Chip’s well-meaning attempts to be a father figure end abruptly when he is trampled to death by a stampede of wild horses off-screen. Viewers only see the aftermath of Uncle Chip’s death, as the contents of his sleeping bag are revealed and turn out to resemble loose lasagna.

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A Woman Explodes At The Motel Pool

Hal Can’t Save This Unnamed Character

Hal learns the news that the monkey has returned via a phone call from Bill, but the nightmarish reality is soon confirmed in one of the movie’s most shocking and blackly comedic moments. As Bill and Hal argue over the phone, an air conditioning unit slips from the motel roof and lands in front of a leaking water pipe. Electrified water pours into the motel’s pool and a young woman dives just as Hal warns her against it, exploding upon impact and splattering the hapless hero with her remains.

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Lois’s Death

The Saddest Moment In The Monkey Is Also One Of Its Grossest Scenes

All director Osgood Perkins’ earlier movies feature some genuinely disturbing moments, so it is something of a shock to discover just how hilarious The Monkey is. However, Lois’s death is a rough reminder of the director’s acumen in the horror genre. When Hal tries to use the toy to kill his brother, the monkey instead gives his mother a vanishingly rare medical condition known as a “Boomerang aneurysm.”

In practical terms, this means that Maslany’s heroine is making strawberry pudding one moment and bleeding profusely from the eyes, ears, and mouth the next. Lois’s sudden, random death is all the more horrifying since her young son Bill is unable to do anything but stand and stare throughout the scene, making this the most upsetting moment in the movie by a wide margin.

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Ricky’s Death By Hornet Death

This Bizarre Fate Is Memorably Nasty

Although Lois’s death is the saddest scene in The Monkey, it isn’t the goriest. The death of Rohan Campbell’s supporting character Ricky is an even more violent scene from The Monkey, as his pistol-waving antics subvert viewer expectations in the nastiest way possible. It seems like Ricky’s wildly irresponsible gun handling will result in him shooting himself, but he instead accidentally hits a hornet’s nest and dies when a nest’s worth of angry hornets flood inside Ricky’s mouth at once. This cartoony fate results in Ricky’s jaw hanging off as the hornets get acquainted with their new home.

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Barbara’s Death By SH๏τgun

The Real Estate Agent’s Death Is Preceded By A Ghastly Montage

The death of a real estate agent who shows Bill his Aunt Ida’s remaining possessions might be sudden, but it is preceded by her describing a string of gruesome accidents that hit the small town of Casco in the preceding days. As characters are decapitated by their own lawnmowers, bitten by cobras on golf courses, and taken down by various other unlikely coincidences, Barbara remains blissfully ignorant of her impending doom. Hilariously, the sH๏τgun blast that kills her doesn’t just end her life but somehow manages to spray her all over both Hal and the surrounding room.

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Bill’s Death

Bill’s Decapitation Is The Monkey’s Second-Bloodiest Moment

While The Monkey’s mysterious ending is shockingly upbeat given the movie’s plentiful gory deaths, Perkins does save one of the nastiest surprises for last. When Bill and Hal finally settle their differences and resolve to forget about the monkey, Bill stands up and triggers the Rube Goldberg-esque trap that he set for his brother. His head is decimated by Lois’s bowling ball in an image that mirrors how a young Hal once fantasized about killing his brother long before the monkey entered their lives.

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The Monkey’s Pawn Shop Opening Scene

The Shopkeeper’s Gruesome Fate Is The Monkey’s Nastiest Scene

Technically, The Monkey never explains what happened to Bill and Hal’s father Pete although Lois writes him off as a ᴅᴇᴀᴅbeat. The movie’s opening scene suggests something more pernicious than family abandonment may be at play, as viewers are greeted by Adam Scott’s panicked Pete trying to pawn the тιтular toy off on a disinterested shopkeeper. The pawn shop owner ends up brutally disemboweled by a harpoon when he monkey chooses him as its next victim, so it is easy to guess that Pete might have been killed by The Monkey’s cursed villain not long after.