Warning: This article discusses major spoilers (and lots of gory imagery) from “The Monkey.”

The horror genre is off to a fast and bloody start in 2025, thanks in no small part to the wall-to-wall gore fest that is director Osgood Perkins’ “The Monkey.” The latest Stephen King adaptation is quite the swerve from what fans may have expected from the filmmaker behind last year’s acclaimed “Longlegs,” a moody and rather bleak foray into the occult. This time around, moviegoers have been bludgeoned with a tone that combines horror and comedy in equal measure — and nowhere does that feel more apparent than in the many, many grisly kills sprinkled throughout the film. Longtime King readers ought to be well familiar with the source material about a killer windup toy monkey (though, unlike the short story, this version sports a drum instead of clashing cymbals) mowing through hapless victims.

The absurdly over-the-top nature of those deaths will almost certainly end up lingering most in the minds of moviegoers, even more so than that delightful Tatiana Maslany performance or the scenery-chewing Elijah Wood cameo, or that somewhat head-scratching ending. Regardless of one’s thoughts on the movie (admittedly, I ended up in the minority of critics who were a bit disappointed), there’s no denying the fact that Perkins goes there in terms of pushing the envelope and seeing what kind of violence he could get away with. Though a far cry from Nicolas Cage’s serial killer in “Longlegs” bashing his own head into a table, “The Monkey” doesn’t hold back one bit.

So, naturally, we rounded up several of the most killer scenes the horror-comedy had to offer and ranked them according to our very scientific methodologies … which, basically, came down to what made us squirm the most. By culling this to just a handful, we had to leave certain items like the opening harpoon death, the shotgun moment splashed (literally) across all the trailers, and the decapitation of all those poor cheerleaders in the final moments as honorary mentions. Otherwise, here are the five most gruesome moments from “The Monkey” ranked for your reading pleasure.

Who doesn’t love a good ol’ fashioned family outing to hibachi? A chef cooks your meals on an open flame right in front of you, throws random vegetables at your open mouth, and all but pours sake down your throat until you’re almost drowning. What’s not to love? Well, add a certain monkey curse on top of all that excitement and the circumstances suddenly transform into a death trap just waiting to be sprung. Give “The Monkey” this much credit: I always had a childhood fear of things going horribly wrong during hibachi meals and, well, this taps right into that dread of things going horribly wrong. Young twins Hal and Bill (both portrayed by Christian Convery as kids) are fairly preoccupied by their cute, older babysitter Annie (Danica Dreyer) — you know, the kind that makes a pubescent boy declare that she’s exactly the kind of girl he intends to spend the rest of his life with.

That fantasy, uh, wasn’t to be. In a scene that perfectly sets the tone for the mayhem to come, an otherwise innocuous visit to a local restaurant goes sideways when that dastardly monkey has other ideas. In an early instance of its ability to teleport at will and follow Hal and Bill around wherever they go, the monkey pops up in their car parked right outside. A few taps on that drum (not cymbals, as established in the source material, due to a copyright issue) and one slightly misjudged swing of the knife by the enthusiastic chef (Michael Anthony Samosa) later, poor Annie’s head rolls right off her shoulders and permanently scars our main characters … along with some of the more squeamish audience members out there, too.

There are director’s cameos and then there are director’s cameos, and the one featured in “The Monkey” might be Osgood Perkins’ funniest inside joke yet. Casual viewers may not have even noticed that the hippie-looking, beer-guzzling Uncle Chip, who takes in young Hal and Bill after the tragic death of their mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) along with Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), was actually Perkins in the flesh. A friendly little pep talk relatively early in the film introduces us to this sleazy father figure, who follows up his sage advice with the reveal that he and his wife are actually swingers and that they’ll do their best to raise the boys … even though “our very best might be, uh, pretty bad.” (Neon helpfully released an official clip of this scene online, which you can check out here.)

In any case, the family curse chasing the twins soon sets its sights on Uncle Chip. In one of the most darkly comedic scenes in the entire movie, we’re shown in discomfiting detail how a camping trip led to Chip’s untimely death. If a random stampede of horses while nestled in a sleeping bag sounds nasty enough, that’s nothing compared to the visual of the aftermath. The unfortunate victim is basically reduced to meatloaf when first responders peel back that sleeping bag, adding an incredibly bleak punchline to Perkins’ own well-documented brushes with tragedy. Uncle Chip might’ve been a creep and a deadbeat, but he managed to carve out a respectable place in our own rankings here. RIP to a legend.

Oh, so all of you who watched “Night Swim” thought that pool-related deaths couldn’t get any worse than that? Well, Osgood Perkins basically told everyone to hold his beer as he delivered as ridiculous a moment as any in “The Monkey.” Handpicked by the marketing team as one of those can’t-miss moments of shock and awe that apparently needed to be put at the forefront of pretty much every trailer, the electrified pool best represents the Rube Goldbergian chaos that Perkins unleashes upon us.

While attempting to protect his estranged son Petey (Colin O’Brien) and preoccupied by an ominous phone call from his long-lost twin Bill, Hal almost stumbles right into a brush with death himself. A rattling AC unit tumbling off a motel roof sets off a chain reaction of improbable outcomes that leads to the nearby pool transforming into a killer trap. Now, if only that innocent night swimmer (played by Corin Clark) had even the slightest inkling of what awaited her on the other end of that diving board. Look, I don’t pretend to know the actual physics involved in what happens when someone dives headfirst into an electrified swimming pool, but something tells me a human body probably doesn’t spectacularly explode upon impact. We’re glad Perkins opted for the nastiest possible outcome, however, leaving us burned with the indelible memory of why you should always avoid community swimming pools whenever possible.

This one’s for the babies like me out there who simply can’t handle watching some of the most mundane injuries imaginable. Yeah, I bet you’re already imagining exactly the ones I’m thinking of: stepping on a nail, getting fish hooks snagged on your face, getting your head lit on fire after standing way too close to a gas burner … you know, the usual. Oddly enough, the majority of the other kills on this list never once even turned my stomach in the slightest. This calamity of errors, however? I’m probably going to have nightmares about this one for the foreseeable future.

If you’re even distantly related to Hal and Bill Shelburn, may we kindly suggest running as far away from them as you can? Then again, that doesn’t do Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) any good. Years after the Shelburn twins grow up and go their separate ways, the widowed Aunt Ida is still living at the same old farmhouse — that is until that villainous monkey comes knocking at her door. Unknowingly at the mercy of something far beyond her understanding, Aunt Ida stumbles from one gruesome accident to another. First, those aforementioned fish hooks. Then, all manner of kitchen-related horrors. All of this culminates in Ida inexplicably leaning her face directly into her gas-burning stove and, predictably, getting her entire head doused in flames. That’s not even the end of it, though! Fleeing her house on fire like Denethor at the top of Minas Tirith in “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” Ida manages to run just far enough to get impaled by a wooden plank affixed to her mailbox.

“Everybody dies and that’s life,” the twins’ mom Lois explains over and over again. When we all go to our own respective graves, ideally decades from now, we can only hope for a slightly more peaceful end than this one.

Whoo boy. If there was anything I was hoping “The Monkey” would spare me from, it was a scene exploiting one of my biggest fears of them all … bees. Full disclosure: I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of the “Candyman” movies, and I only know that famous Nicolas Cage meme by reputation. (That said, the very real bees included in “The Beekeeper” had zero effect on me. Go figure.) I’ve been stung exactly once in my entire life, so it’s not like I have a ton of firsthand trauma here. But I did have the honor of being a firsthand witness to a bee stinging a 3rd-grade classmate of mine directly on her eyelid. (Liz, if you’re reading this, please know that I was somehow just as traumatized by this as you were.) All of that preamble is meant to provide some context as to why the #1 spot on this list so thoroughly freaked me out.

Late in “The Monkey,” local town burnout Ricky (Rohan Campbell) forces Hal at gunpoint to drive to evil twin Bill’s secret villainous hideout and send his son Petey to retrieve that monkey toy. While the two adults wait outside in the car, the camera repeatedly focuses on a nest of bees (or wasps, admittedly, since I’m no apiologist) dangling from a nearby tree. You just know that Chekhov’s nest is going to get set off at some point, but the fun comes from the unbearable wait. Finally, in a burst of violence, Ricky’s gun goes off inside the car and ends up punching a perfect hole through the windshield and — you guessed it — directly hitting that nest. Nothing happens at first. For a few brief seconds, it seems like Hal and Ricky might’ve avoided the worst-case scenario. And then the entire swarm storms out of the nest and directly into the car and, ugh, right into Ricky’s screaming mouth.

Neither some wonky-looking visual effects nor the weirdly mean-spirited tone of this scene could manage to knock this off the top of this ranking. As Ricky slowly dies and the insects from hell burrow their way out again, I couldn’t believe the sheer audacity of what I was seeing (or, more accurately, peeking through my fingers). Expect my therapy bills in the mail, Osgood Perkins.

“The Monkey” is currently playing in theaters.