"The Monkey" is about a cursed wind-up monkey toy that causes someone to die whenever it's played.The movie from filmmaker Osgood Perkins is based on a Stephen King story of the same name.It's markedly different from the original story, with a much larger scale and more chaotic ending.If you read Stephen King's 1980 short story "The Monkey" and went into Osgood Perkins' new movie "The Monkey" expecting basically the same thing, I have some bad news for you.Perkins' absurdist horror-comedy actually takes very little from King's original work, beyond the lead characters' names and the conceit of a cursed monkey toy reappearing in two adult brothers' lives to once again cause chaos decades after they threw it into a dry well.The thin connection makes sense: The filmmaker, who also wrote and directed 2024 breakout horror hit "Longlegs," told Business Insider that he read the story a few times before setting out to write his script and then didn't refer back to it again. Instead, Perkins has made the story his own, adding multiple thematic layers to tell a story about fatherhood and generational trauma.That ethos is laid out from the very first moments of the movie, when our hero Hal says in a voiceover: "I don't know if every father passes some secret horror to his kids, but mine did."Here's what happens in "The Monkey," including how it ends, how it's different from the original story, and what that pale horseman represents.'The Monkey' is part 'Final Destination,' part parable about fatherhood Young Hal encounters the cursed monkey. NEON "The Monkey" is jam-packed with gory (and increasingly outlandish) death scenes, as every time the monkey is wound up and bangs its drum, another person dies.The catch, in the lore of both the short story and the film, is that the person who winds up the monkey can't be its victim. But that person also can't control the monkey and instruct it on who to kill. It's completely random "like life," as the inscription on the monkey's box reads when Hal and Bill Shelburn (both played here by "The White Lotus" star Theo James) find it.The monkey once belonged to the twins' absent father (Adam Scott in a very brief, funny cameo), a pilot who brought it home from his travels before ditching his family for good. In short order, we see the monkey kill the shopkeeper their dad desperately tried to return the toy to, Bill and Hal's babysitter, and their mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany).Hal is secretly responsible for their mother's death, having wound up the monkey once he had a sense of its power in an attempt to have it kill Bill, who had been bullying him at school.The first third of the movie focuses on Bill and Hal's upbringing and early traumas, including the death of their Uncle Chip (played by Perkins himself) in a freak wild-horse stampede on a camping trip after he and their aunt Ida have taken custody of the orphaned boys. Chip's death finally prompts the brothers to drop the monkey down into a dry well to escape it a gambit that seemingly works, at least until the point where the film picks up 25 years later. Theo James plays dual roles as adult Hal and Bill in "The Monkey." NEON In the present, an adult Hal works at a grocery store and has no relationship with Bill. Hal also has no relationship with his son Petey, opting to stay far away from the teenager, seeing him only once a year, in order to spare him the same type of trauma he experienced.Just in time for Hal and Petey's annual visit, Bill calls Hal to inform him that Aunt Ida died in a freak accident (it involves fire, a bucket, and a mailbox), which means the monkey has finally returned. Hal road-trips to Ida's house with a clueless Petey, convinced by Bill to find the monkey to make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. All the while, the monkey continues to kill; a realtor selling Ida's house informs Hal that another local in town has died every day since Ida's death in a variety of ridiculous manners, including a lawnmower accident and a cobra attack on a golf course. (The realtor herself promptly gets killed by shotgun blast after one falls from the closet in Ida's house and discharges.)Hal soon discovers the monkey's current handler is none other than Bill, who secretly knew Hal was responsible for their mom's death and had plotted for years to find the monkey again and use it to take revenge on his brother. The film then switches to Bill's point of view, rewinding back to the moment the boys threw the monkey down the well. Bill started getting signs of the monkey's reemergence in 2016 the year of the monkey and employed a local kid named Ricky to find it for him.Ricky found it at Ida's estate sale after her death and brought it to Bill, who wound it up repeatedly to lure Hal to him. Bill's goal is to get Petey to keep turning the key until the monkey kills Hal, so that Petey will be responsible for Hal's death the way Hal was responsible for their mother's.'The Monkey' ending (and the Pale Rider), explained Theo James in "The Monkey." NEON The original Stephen King tale ends with Hal and his young son, Petey (who's only 9, not a teenager, in the story), narrowly surviving their mission to sink the cursed monkey in a lake. There's far less bloodshed (except for the hundreds of dead fish the waterlogged monkey claims as its victims), and it ends on a relatively happy note. The monkey is defeated! They're rid of it! Not too many people died!The ending of the movie is in some ways similar Hal and Petey both still live but focuses more on the adversarial dynamic between Hal and Bill. One of the key changes Perkins made to the story was making Hal and Bill twins, and not just brothers as they were in the story, and also making Bill the villain who's coming after Hal for revenge.In the movie, Ricky, who brought Bill the monkey, wears his own deadbeat dad's police uniform to take Hal and Petey at gunpoint to Bill's hideout, an abandoned hotel he's fitted with more deadly "Home Alone"-style booby traps. Ricky, who's become obsessed with the monkey because it reminds him of his absent father, forces Petey to go into the hotel to find the monkey and bring it back to him.Unfortunately for Ricky, Bill finds Petey first and prompts him to wind up the monkey, which kills Ricky (via a swarm of wasps down the throat) next. Hal then enters the hotel and Bill becomes furious when he realizes the monkey once again didn't kill his brother. He attempts to force the monkey to drum without winding the key, which causes the monkey to go berserk, drumming uncontrollably and setting off a series of disasters around town a plane with skydivers crashes into a nearby church, with skydiving newlyweds falling through the ceiling of Bill's hideout.Inside Bill's hotel, he, Hal, and Petey are still unharmed. Hal and Bill finally hash out their differences and reconcile only for the monkey to suddenly drum once more and set off a chain reaction that ends up cannonballing Lois' bowling ball into Bill's head, crushing his skull.With Bill now dead, a not-overly-perturbed Hal and Petey leave town in their car, passing by all of the dead or dying people affected by the monkey's rampage. They resolve to keep the monkey with them, to ensure the key isn't turned again by anyone: "We keep it close. We accept that it's ours and hold on tight," Hal tells Petey.As they wait at an intersection, a ghostly man on a pale horse passes by and gives them a knowing nod. Perkins confirmed to BI that the Pale Rider is a representation of death and how death is depicted as the fourth and final of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the bible's Book of Revelation.Perkins expected the studio and producers to push back on his inclusion of the Pale Rider, thinking that the general audience wouldn't get such a literary reference. But instead, he was pleasantly surprised."Conversely, everybody was like, that's a weird thing we got to put in that people are going to either get or not get," Perkins said."And in any case, it's visual and it's sort of poetic and magical," he added. "And I just kind of felt like by the time we got to that point in the movie, it's so patently kind of surreal and absurd, I might as well really press the button."The ending of "The Monkey" is surprisingly hopeful, with Hal suggesting to Petey that they go dancing something that his mother Lois loved to do with Bill and Hall when they were kids. It's a far cry from the far more bleak ending of "Longlegs," but Perkins knows exactly what he wants audiences to feel when the credits roll on "The Monkey." "I think it's the same thing that everybody's supposed to feel when they walk away from any horror movie," he says, "which is, 'Look at me, I'm still alive!'""The Monkey" is in theaters now.