There were a few things that The Monkey’s ending didn’t reveal: where did the toy come from? What did the supernatural clockwork monkey want? And why did it kill random people every time it was wound up? Apparently, there’s no answer to these questions, neither in the movie nor in the Stephen King short story on which the film is based. However, if you ask me what the monkey represented, then yes, I might have an answer to that one. [Spoiler Alert] In both Hal and his twin brother Bill’s cases, the toy can be seen as a manifestation of evil. You might have heard the famous saying, evil begets evil, that’s exactly what happened with the brothers. The supernatural entity only grew stronger the more the brothers resented each other. This could better be explained using a line from Stephen King’s story where Hal, the protagonist, trying to explain the origin of the toy to his son, Petey, said that most evil in life is very much like the clockwork monkey that one winds up… the trauma we fail to acknowledge and the past we fail to make peace with fuel negative impulses within us. We keep suppressing those painful memories until our subconscious can’t take it anymore and eventually bursts.
The Monkey Was Just A Weapon
The toy could also be seen as a weapon of unfathomable destruction, like a ticking bomb or a grenade. The object in itself wasn’t completely evil, but its nature relied on the person using it as a weapon. A sane person would never pull the trigger because they know the cost of human lives, but Bill, who was just a mindless kid, ended up winding up the monkey’s key and killing their babysitter, Annie. A similar thing happened in Hal’s case, who, being bullied at school, cursed his mother, Lois, for not understanding the harassment he was going through and therefore wound up the monkey, asking the toy to kill his brother, but the monkey doesn’t work like that. It targeted his mother instead and killed her in a matter of seconds. The only thing we know about the monkey was that it would never kill the person who wound its key.
Hal Pulled The Trigger
But even though we are considering the monkey as some sort of weapon designed by unknown evil entity, we have to bring up the case of Hal and Bill, who were most affected by the toy. The brothers didn’t have an ideal childhood, per se. Their father abandoned the family at a very early age, and we don’t really know if he’s dead or alive. In the film’s beginning, we saw their father, Captain Petey Shelborn, trying to sell the monkey at an antique shop, where the toy killed the shop owner before they could make a deal. Later, Captain Petey tried to burn the toy with a flamethrower, but after that, we don’t know what exactly happened to him.
Lois, the mother, told them that he went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never came back, which to me sounded like a made-up story you tell the kids to shield them from trauma. Though the tragedy was that, no matter how hard Lois tried to protect the kids from pain and suffering, their father’s absence eventually caught up with them. It was their dad’s closet where the kids found the evil toy. Now, it’s a nice metaphor if you look at it. Instead of telling the truth to the kids, the mother locked their father’s memories in a closet, which one could see as an act of trying to suppress her emotions and not confront the past. In Hal’s case, all that bullying and harassment at school had a lasting psychological effect on the young boy, who, in a fit of anger, asked the monkey to kill his own brother, whom he believed was the root of all evil in his life. But when it killed their mother, Hal’s guilt and remorse weighed heavy on him. After their mother’s death, the boys went their separate ways, likely because of which the monkey too disappeared from the scene. Hal didn’t want to use the monkey ever again; meanwhile, Bill, who blamed his brother for their mother’s death, spent the rest of his youth in isolation trying to find the monkey so he could take revenge on his younger brother.
I truly believe that the monkey was mostly attracted to Hal, as he was the one who opened the box and freed the monkey from its imprisonment. And this could be one of the reasons why the monkey disappeared from the scene after the kids threw it down the well because Hal wasn’t left with any negative feelings for his brother, as he was still struggling with the guilt of killing his own mother. From time to time, the monkey had teleported back, but not this time. The next day, Bill went down the well to find the toy, but he could only find its clockwork key, which he got obsessed with and embraced as a relic, waiting for the monkey’s return.
Bill had a crooked sense of justice and wanted to seek revenge for his mother’s death by winding the monkey so that it would eventually kill his brother, but it didn’t. It killed everyone in the town, instead. This was the moment when Bill theorized that the evil toy likely targeted a person’s loved one or the one closest to them and therefore wanted Hal’s son, Petey, to turn the monkey’s key, believing it would kill Hal. But once again, it killed everyone in town except for Hal. This is to say , no one really knows how the monkey toy worked.
In The Monkey’s ending, Bill’s resentment against his brother made the toy’s evil spirit wreak havoc on the entire town, yet Bill wasn’t satisfied, because it didn’t kill the only person he wanted to eliminate. The thing is, Hal never really apologized for accidentally killing their mother. He never acknowledged his remorse, and instead of sticking with his brother and supporting him in the time of loss, the brothers parted ways, which eventually made things worse. Bill, fortunately, came to understand that it wasn’t Hal’s fault, but the brothers’ happiness was short-lived as the monkey beat the cymbals on his lap once again and killed Hal. A bowling ball engraved with their mother’s name smashed his head in, further implying that it was desire for vengeance that got him killed. And I know most of you might be wondering who was the old man on the horse that Hal and Petey encountered while driving away from town. Well, the smoke and flames suggested that it could be none other than a grim reaper who had come to the surface to collect the souls of numerous people dying in the town. He exchanged a look with Hal too, but quickly rode away, implying that Hal’s time hadn’t come yet. He’s gonna live for a little longer and maybe will decide to spend some time with his kids to fill the void in his life. Hal cannot change the past, but he can be there for Petey and be a better dad than his own father.
Hal Turned Out Like His Father
Hal always believed that he and his brother had been cursed by the monkey, which was one of the reasons why Hal didn’t want to start a family, yet an accident happened, and Petey was born. After his son’s birth, Hal broke things off with Petey’s mother, and tried to stay away from the family, just like his own father had abandoned his mother, Lois. Hal stayed away from his kid because he didn’t want Petey to become a victim of generational trauma (represented by the monkey itself). And even though he tried his best to protect his son from the toy, he couldn’t. The thing is, Hal was trying to protect his kid by hiding things from him, similar to what their mother had done when their father disappeared from their life. Hal never told Petey the truth, and when the young boy asked about his father’s family, Hal only lied to his face. It was obvious that Hal was ashamed of the things he had done. He tried to escape his guilt, refusing to confront his past, which only made things worse as soon as Hal’s past life caught up to him. Things started to unravel in front of Petey making him believe that his father was nothing but a liar and a coward. In a way, Hal unknowingly dumped his emotional baggage on the next generation. This is to say that the monkey may return again if Petey repeats the same mistakes as his father.
The monkey often targeted the head
One of the things that I noticed in the film was that most of the toy’s victims died from head trauma or, in some cases, by losing their head completely. For example, Babysitter Annie’s head was sliced clean off her body during an accident while the kids’ mother, Lois, died from a boomerang aneurysm. Their aunt, uncle, and all those people who died in the present timeline lost their heads in one way or another. Their deaths suggested that the monkey often targeted the head of its victims because it’s in the mind that evil resides. It operates on an unconscious level, making us slaves of our negative thoughts, just like Hal and Bill. This might also suggest that the toy was attracted to the evil in people’s minds, which was why it came back from hell and targeted random people in the vicinity who had the most evil inside them. And evil not always amounts to negative thoughts or desires but also sometimes refers to our inability to confront the truth and make peace with the past.
