NEON is turning lemons into lemonade with a recent rejection for a TV advertisement for their upcoming horror film The Monkey, directed by Oz Perkins and based on a short story by Stephen King. Apparently, network Standards & Practices wouldn’t allow for just about any footage of the film to appear on television during the day. As they couldn’t run a TV ad, they did the next best thing — leaked the (meticulously redacted) email communication about it. The emails (from Jan. 22 and 23) detail NEON’s attempts to secure a TV ad to air during a weekend afternoon of sports games. “Because all our games are in the afternoon, we won’t be able to move forward,” wrote Standards & Practices after back-and-forth communications.
“The spot below would not be permitted in any programming on the … or any … digital programming due to … and excessive violence,” read one email from S&P.
“Hi, thanks for getting back to us! So that we can work on a way to make this placement work for TV, can you outline the exact issue … Thanks!” Standards & Practices then responded in a frankly hilarious (and hilariously frank) way:
“Typically, we would do that, but in this case, it’s pretty much every scene in the spot. It’s excessively violent with blood splatter, graphic images, severed heads, … etc.”
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‘The Monkey’ Already Broke a Pretty Big Horror Movie Record
Based on the response to the trailer, Osgood Perkins’ latest horror movie is going to be a hit.
You can read the rest of the email exchange (and all of it) in the images below.
Oz Perkins’ ‘The Monkey’ “Is Batsh*t Insane”
The emails clearly highlight the wild horror and violence of The Monkey, which Perkins has promised for quite a while. The great horror filmmaker found big success last year with Longlegs (also from NEON), but his previous indie films (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) are excellent. The Monkey is sure to continue that trend, though with a much richer sense of humor. As Perkins told MovieWeb in 2024:
It’s actually quite funny. It’s really quite profane. There’s kids in it. It’s about parents. It’s about dads. It’s about reconciliation. It’s hopeful, it’s funny. It ends up that it’s very, very, very much not anything like Longlegs in any way. I’m super happy to be able to say that.
Stephen King certainly seemed to like the adaptation of his 1980 short story. King said of The Monkey, “You’ve never seen anything like THE MONKEY. It’s batsh*t insane. As someone who has indulged in batsh*ttery from time to time, I say that with admiration.” From NEON, The Monkey hits theaters on February 19, 2025.
The Monkey
- Release Date
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February 19, 2025
- Runtime
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98 Minutes
- Director
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Osgood Perkins
- Writers
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Osgood Perkins
- Producers
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John Rickard, Natalia Safran, Ali Jazayeri, Chris Ferguson, Fred Berger, Giuliana Bertuzzi, James Wan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, John Friedberg, Jason Cloth, David Gendron, Michael Clear, Jesse Savath, Peter Luo, Dave Caplan