Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for The Monkey (2025)
Director Oz Perkins’ The Monkey might ostensibly be an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story, but the uproarious horror-comedy borrows one death from a much more unexpected source, The Simpsons. The Monkey is adapted from a short story in Stephen King’s collection Skeleton Crew. However, The Monkey changes King’s story significantly, turning the spare tale of a cursed toy into a twisted, blackly comic story of sibling rivalry. In Longlegs director Oz Perkins’ movie, twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburne receive a cursed toy monkey from their absent father.
Whenever the monkey bangs its drum, a random person dies in a brutal, sudden manner. The Monkey’s ending reveals that this curse ends up shaping the lives of both brothers, with Bill trying to control the monkey while Hal does all he can to avoid it. All the while, people close to them are killed in increasingly macabre, cartoonish ways, succumbing to a snake bite on a golf course, getting decapitated by a lawnmower, and even swallowing an entire nest’s worth of live hornets.
The Monkey’s Dwayne Death Scene Is Borrowed From The Simpsons
Dwayne’s Death Mirrors Sideshow Bob’s Classic Rake Gag
While The Monkey’s bloodiest scenes are gruesomely hilarious, one of the movie’s funniest deaths is almost entirely bloodless. Near the end of Perkins’ movie, Hal speaks to his manager, Dwayne, on the phone. After Dwayne hangs up, he struggles to retrieve a vape cartridge from a vending machine. Turning around, he steps on a rake and swallows his vape pen, choking to death off-screen. As absurd as it sounds, The Monkey borrows one of its weirdest deaths from a classic episode of The Simpsons.
The Monkey’s ending brings back Sideshow Bob’s classic gag when Dwayne succumbs to his absurd fate.
In season 5, episode 2, “Cape Feare,” The Simpsons parodied Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake with a story of the eponymous family relocating to a small town with the villainous Sideshow Bob in H๏τ pursuit. In one iconic sequence, Sideshow Bob unstraps himself from the underside of the Simpson family’s car after enduring a drive through a cactus patch. As if this weren’t painful enough, he steps on a rake immediately afterward and is struck in the face. For the next thirty seconds, Bob proceeds to stand on another eight rakes in quick succession.
The Monkey’s Simpsons Reference Highlights Its Best Unexpected Quality
Oz Perkins’ Horror Movie Is Far Funnier Than His Earlier Efforts
Although the writers of the episode later admitted that this sequence was just a way to pad out an episode that was a few seconds short late in production, the ridiculously lengthy gag went down in TV history as an iconic joke. The Monkey’s ending brings back Sideshow Bob’s classic gag when Dwayne, who only appeared in one short scene earlier in the movie, succumbs to his absurd fate. In the process, The Monkey highlights its greatest strength.
In an interview with Empire, Perkins admitted that he took plentiful liberties when adapting King’s source story. The Monkey is much funnier than any of the director’s earlier movies and far funnier than King’s own version of the story. This is its unlikely secret strength, as The Monkey manages to sneak in an unexpectedly profound, life-affirming message about facing death with a smile thanks to its surreal tone. The Monkey referencing The Simpsons might seem surprising, but it is perfectly fitting given the horror-comedy’s uniquely upbeat outlook.
