back to the end of history
the monkey and the inescapable 1990s // loss of innocence at the oscar-nominated animated shorts
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, plus some seasonally appropriate commentary on other film events and interests. This week we’ve got Osgood Perkins’s new comedy-horror film The Monkey, followed by some notes on the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts. My greatest hope right now is that I’ll get it together enough to put these out every Wednesday. Maybe next time.
Are we ever going to escape the 1990s? The horror genre especially seems trapped in an eternal loop that begins with Scream and ends with Scream 2. It’s not so bad: the economy is booming, OK Computer keeps coming out, and even though there’s a killer on the loose he keeps winking and reminding us that it’s only a movie.
Osgood Perkin's The Monkey is our latest loop in the long spiral of meta-narratives on the ‘80s-’90s slasher flick. Based on a C-tier Stephen King story and not really about anything that could be called an idea, The Monkey rambles through a series of outrageous kills brought on by a wind-up monkey that symbolizes either family trauma or the inevitability of death, depending on what part of Perkins's script needs buffing. Set in 1999 and 2024, the whole thing has an eternal 1997 sheen that is somehow still trendy after coming back in style ten years ago. We had 15 glorious years of not the '90s before we flew too close to the future and crashed back into Empire Records.
If we want to throw historic shade, are Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson guilty for bringing about the self-referential slasher genre? I wasn’t actively watching scary movies in a world before Scream, but surely people used to be occasionally surprised by what they saw when they walked into a horror film. Then again, the slasher film has probably always been post-structural, from Evil Dead 2 to Halloween and all the way back to Black Christmas. Brutalizing teenagers is only palatable when the camera winks and lets you in on the un-reality.1
Scream pushed our tolerance for meta-narrative into overdrive, but it wasn't until the 2010s that every other horror films seems to have become a retro comedy more interested in ironizing tropes than creating new ones. Off the top of my head we've got Jennifer’s Body (2009), Cabin in the Woods (2011), It Follows (2014), The Final Girls (2015), Summer of ‘84 (2018), and an entire series of Fear Street movies (2021). I’m sure there are more. Even Longlegs, last year’s Perkins offering, is set under the gaze of Bill Clinton and models itself as a camped-out Silence of the Lambs. I’m less annoyed by the irony of it all than I am about being frozen into the early-internet era, one generation’s version of nostalgia forced onto people whose parents hadn’t even met when 9/11 happened. Why are we stuck here? And why are we so convinced that the only thing to do here is to further expose the tropes? It's the Stranger Things-ification of the cinematic universe where everything collapses into one Fukuyaman aufheben, the true end of history a film that encompasses bits of every film ever made into all one. Maybe it’s time to reassess the legacy of Friedberg and Seltzer’s Epic Movie.
The Monkey is hardly alone in it’s guilt, and I don’t want to harp on it more than it deserves. Osgood Perkins is an intelligent director who could get out of this soup someday and make something decent if he stopped writing stupid scripts and stuck to his directing instincts, which are sometimes pretty good. The editing beats of The Monkey are solid, and a few of the visuals are genuinely inspired. Something happens in a sleeping bag that I never could have conceived of and will probably never forget. The cast is beautiful and everyone seems capable of giving a good performance.
But in the end I don't think this film needs to exist. In an interview with Bloody Disgusting last week, Perkins said:
“I tell it to my kids all the time, ‘Yep, dad’s going to work now. I’m going to make a bunch of shit up. I’ll be back later.’ And that’s really what it is. Some people go and drill teeth, I put words next to each other to make shit up. When you’re writing stuff like this, I’m just trying to entertain somebody. Do you know what I mean? That’s the goal of the movie, which is to entertain a theater full of people because we need theaters full of people.“
He's being glib; it’s obvious he takes his work at least a bit more seriously than he’s putting on. But his movie, just like the story he adapted it from, isn’t much more than a bunch of winks and splatter slapped together. There are computer programs these days for that. If the point of the movies is to fill the theaters, ChatGPT might as well write the scripts and let the tickets get bought up by scalping bots.
Perkins has another movie coming out later this year, so we'll see if he claws his way out of history. Until then, if you're not a generative AI trying to grasp human sarcasm, you can skip the dialogue in The Monkey and wait for the kill-count compilations to take over your Youtube algorithm.
The Monkey is making money and still in theaters, including the Lagoon and the Main in Minneapolis. Go make Oz Perkins happy and see it now.
Notes on the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts screening at the Minneapolis Lagoon last weekend, w/r/t the 10-year-old child sitting directly in front of me next to his two mothers who did not seem to have noticed the "mature content" disclaimer on the event description.
Daisuke Nishio, Magic Candies (Japan).
A claymation short about a little boy who buys some magic candies that make it possible to talk to various non-speaking entities, including his father. Sweet, kind of maudlin, inoffensive. At one point, the boy communicates with his dead grandma via a bubblegum bubble. Child Sitting in Front of Me (ostensibly to Mother but really to the entire theater): "It's going up to heaven!" Audience smiles at childlike understanding of the afterlife while quietly wishing Child would shut up.
Hossein Molayemi & Shirin Shohani, In The Shadow of the Cypress (Iran).
A dark film about PSTD composed like a Nick Jr. cartoon. Features clever metaphorizations of anxiety, seizure-inducing imagery that evokes panic attacks, 2024's second-most distressing animated subplot about a beached whale. I like it. Mother looks over anxiously when blood from self-inflicted wound begins flowing from character’s forehead within first 30 seconds; Child takes it in silence like the man he will one day become.
Loïc Espuche, Yuck! (France).
A French cartoon about kissing. Character's lips glow pink when they want to kiss. Wanted to hate it but couldn't - too cute. Mother nudges Child the second the film's theme becomes apparent; entire audience cringes. The two main character's lips start glowing; Child: (gasps) "Oh no!" Later, a moment of hope: film cuts to two teenage boys in soccer jerseys. Child: "Messi!" No spoilers about what happens next, but Child is silenced.
Nina Gantz, Wander to Wonder (Netherlands, Belgium, France).
A warning comes across the screen: the next two films will feature nudity and are not suitable for children under age 14. All eyes on Child, including, very obviously, Mothers’. Will they stay? Yes. Dutch stop-motion wiener revealed within seconds. Child sinks into seat. A film about enslaved miniature people living in the aftermath of the death and subsequent decay of their full-sized master, revealed through found-footage VHS recordings. Ends with (nude) miniature licking blood off skewered pigeon. Gross. Child is silent.
Nicholas Keppens. Beautiful Men (Belgium, France, Netherlands).
A stop-motion film about hair transplants. Mother stares at child as character texts aubergine emojis while staring at his wiener. Fellatio jokes and more Dutch wieners to follow. A lot of sardonic conversation about male-pattern baldness. Makes me contemplate my future; don't like it. Child, now a man, confronts his with stony silence. He leaves his sunglasses behind on the way out; no longer needs them to meet the light of day.
Thanks for reading this week’s instalment of life is disappointing. If you found this review slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, I guess pledging me money, or (probably most usefully to everyone involved) subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but straight to your email inbox. You can probably figure out a way to send it straight to your spam so you can make it seem like you’re supporting me without actually having to read anything, which will be great for both of us. See you next week.
Jacques Rancière sort of argues that the thriller genre as a whole is self-reflexive in that it intentionally shows the hand of the director to protect the audience from getting lost in the chaos of the narrative (The Intervals of Cinema, 2019). To my knowledge he hasn’t written explicitly about horror, but his theory of the interval - the gap that the director wedges between narrative and cinematic image - would be interesting to chew on while contemplating why Halloween is a rip-roaring good time while something like Cannibal Holocaust is unwatchable.