It’s still early, but preview numbers from last night indicate “The Monkey” will be another big hit for NEON and Osgood Perkins. Deadline predicts the horror-comedy, based on a Stephen King story of the same name, will be the distributor’s second-best opening weekend ever behind, you guessed it, Perkin’s previous film “Longlegs.” The indie horror business, it seems, is booming, and Perkins may be on his way to becoming one of the genre’s biggest names.
READ MORE: ‘The Monkey’ Trailer: Osgood Perkins Describes All The Way People Die In New Teaser
Good thing then that Perkins and NEON have yet another horror pic coming out later this year. In a new interview with THR, Perkins unveiled that he shot the single-location “Keeper” outside Vancouver with Tatiana Maslany as his all-Canadian crew for “The Monkey” waited out 2023’s WGA strike. Maslany reportedly loved working with Perkins so much that she agreed to also star in “The Monkey” once the shoot was over. The turnover between films was rapid. “It’s an intimate, small, weird movie with, essentially, two characters,” Perkins said of “Keeper.” “So we wrapped that movie on a Friday, and on the following Monday, we were in the offices of “The Monkey.” That’s just the way it went.”
Perkins also revealed the made “Keeper” out of necessity; with “The Monkey” on hold due to the strikes, he needed his crew to work on something in Vancouver to wait things out. We had everybody and the crew was equally committed and wanted to keep the party going, but then the strikes set into their long haul,” said the director. ” There was that moment there where the Writers Guild strike seemed like it was never going to end and the world was going to crack. So I called [producer Chris Ferguson] and was like, ‘Well, we’ve got to keep working, man. The dream was to just go from one movie to the next, so we’ve got to figure something out.'”
So Perkins found a Canadian writer not affiliated with WGA who could pen a horror pic immediately. “The shortest version of the story is that we found a Canadian writer who could do it, who wasn’t a Writers Guild writer [Nick Lepard],” Perkins continued. “We then found Canadian actors who would wave their SAG status and work as Canadians. So we formed this movie called “Keeper” out of nothing, and we just kept working. We did it fast and on the fly. We did it with a lot of trust and good faith.”
The film stars Maslany and Rossif Sutherland as a married couple who must contend with a sinister force at their remote cabin getaway. On the latest episode of The Playlist’s “The Discourse” podcast, Perkins described the film as movie about marriage as much as a callback to “The Evil Dead.” “It’s a single-location, cabin-in-the-woods horror film, but it’s really a relationship horror movie,” explained the director. “It starts with, ‘Oh, we’re going to his country house for the first time,’ and then suddenly, things go off the rails.”
That sounds markedly different antic, pitch-black humor of “The Monkey,” but also distinct from “Longlegs” and Perkins’ earlier work. So when should audiences expect “Keeper” in theaters? NEON currently has it locked for an October 3 release, just in time for horror movie season. And if “Keeper” proves to be another hit for Perkins and his favorite distributor, expect the pair to keep collaborating for a long time.
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