Stephen King adaptations comes in all varieties. There are few prolific authors whose catalogs can produce films that vary so wildly in tone. Sure, there’s shades of horror in all the stories, even if The Shawshank Redemption doesn’t have literal demons, it does have Bogs Diamond. Even if the one adaptation King ever directed himself, Maximum Overdrive, was set in North Carolina, most of the other films based on his work make their way to the state of Maine eventually.
One of the aspects of King’s stories that doesn’t always translate to the screen that is present in most of his work is his pitch-black sense of humor. Maximum Overdrive is filled with insane dark humor that borders on nihilism, one of the few screenplays King ever directly contributed to was the horror anthology Creepshow, which is filled to the brim with fiendishly evil jokes.
Besides Creepshow being one of my favorite horror movies of the 1980s, it was the King adaptation that came to mind the most while watching The Monkey. Not just because The Monkey feels like it could have been a segment in a Creepshow movie by originally being a short story published in the collection Skeleton Crew, but that The Monkey embraces Stephen King’s dark comedy tendencies in a way that no adaptation has in decades, and it’s better off for it.
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