Ranking ‘The Monkey’ Kills Among Other Kills in James Wan Movies

James Wan is one of the most influential horror filmmakers of our era. He created an iconic horror franchise with Saw, merely his second feature film, complete with a new horror legend in the antagonist Jigsaw. Six years later he launched one supernatural horror franchise in Insidious, whose films have gone on to make $731 million worldwide; then three years later he launched another with The Conjuring, the highest-grossing horror franchise to date at $2.2 billion. And those are just a few of his early directorial outings. If there’s one thing we know about Wan’s horror films, they boast a lot of memorable baddies, scenes, and kills.

Oz Perkins’ upcoming Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, produced by Wan, is a wild adaptation destined to be a horror-comedy classic. It’s hilarious and extraordinarily violent, boasting some of the best kills in Wan’s extensive career as a filmmaker (counting both director and producer roles).

So, we’ve ranked the 10 best kills across Wan’s entire filmography to see where your favorites stack up, and if The Monkey’s diverse kills come out on top. Some are great for their symbolic value or importance to the film, some for their bloody creativity, and some for all those factors, but they’re all some of the best kills Wan ever put to film.

10. The Razor Wire Maze, Saw

Jigsaw’s many traps become more memorable, and often more gruesome, as the prolific franchise has come along. While the first film may not be the most blood-drenched, it still sets the tone for a series full of violent death traps, with at least one kill solidified in the annals of horror history. The victim? Paul Leahy, a man who unsuccessfully tried to end his own life. Paul was kidnapped and placed nude in a maze of razor wire, with a timer on a deadly trap in a basement. It’s a vicious way to go, and there’s a terrible irony to it as Paul’s forced to cut himself if he intends to survive. Finally, it’s a strong exemplar of Jigsaw’s ethos using extreme methods to show victims the value of their life. Future kills may have gotten more elaborate, but few encapsulated the franchise better.

9. Henry Loses A Tongue, Dead Silence

Dead Silence sometimes gets lost in discussions of Wan’s work, most likely because it’s an early film that falls between some of his wildly popular franchise-launching properties. It still rocks. A couple receive a creepy ventriloquist doll named “Billy.” Husband Jamie (Ryan Kwanten) leaves, coming back to find his wife dead, her tongue cut out. As Jamie investigates, he comes to discover that the town had a ventriloquist, Mary Shaw, who killed a boy for heckling her performance. She was lynched by the town, and since became a haunting presence who (we discover) has an eerie connection to dolls and dummies and who kills anyone who screams at her true appearance.

There’s a lot to love about this movie, and it packs an all-timer of an ending, but one of its best kills involves the town’s mortician Henry (Michael Fairman). He’d witnessed the supernatural aftermath of Mary Shaw’s demise but stayed quiet and was spared, but she comes back to collect. As he brings in Billy, Henry realizes he isn’t alone. He suspects his senile wife Marion (Joan Heney) and goes looking for her, but he doesn’t find Marion: he finds Mary. She rips his tongue out, and we see Mary consume it behind him (with an eerily-long tongue). What’s arguably worse is when she turns to speak. “Your voice is mine now, Henry,” we hear, right before he dies. It’s a terrible way to go, but the fact she steals voices and the way she does so are pure nightmare fuel.

8. The Opening Kill, Lights Out

David F. Sandberg’s initial short film, Lights Out, went viral for its simple and effective premise: a woman is alone at home, and sees an eerie silhouette of a woman every time she turns off the light, as the silhouette gets closer each time the light’s out. The feature film follows a family plagued by a spirit from their past who similarly kills victims in the dark.

In its opening, Paul (Billy Burke) is the boss closing up shop at a textile factory who finds himself pursued by an unnatural woman’s silhouette that gets closer when the lights are off. He barricades himself, but she pulls him into the shadowy corner before he’s tossed out into the factory, dead, ripped up, and broken. It’s quick and we don’t see the kill, but it replicates the effective tension of the short on a larger scale while showing the spirit’s gruesome aftermath. Chilling.

7.  The Jail Cell Kill(s), Malignant

2021 saw the release of the original James Wan-directed horror film Malignant, following Madison (Annabelle Wallis), a young woman in an abusive relationship until she emerges from a nightmare, with said husband violently murdered. She eventually discovers that she’s connected to the killer in a bizarre way (seriously, go see it if you haven’t… I won’t spoil it) along with having a strange medical history, but she can’t quite shake police suspicion.

While Madison is placed in a jail cell, she’s attacked by other inmates before the real killer, Gabriel, shows up and violently massacres literally every one of them. The scene is absurd and extremely violent, with bones breaking and heads being stomped. There’s entertaining and acrobatic choreography, and it’s a clear love letter to exploitation cinema: buckets of blood all over the wall, intercut with absurd explanations about the killer’s origins, and the entire setup is straight out of the women in prison genre of grindhouse films. It’s a gem.

6. The Cheerleader Bus, The Monkey

Osgood Perkins has made excellent, ethereal, unsettling horror films like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Longlegs, but he broke new ground in taking a horror-comedy route for The Monkey. In a key moment, Hal (Theo James) and his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) are traveling with the murderous monkey toy in tow, feeling quite safe in the moment. Just when they’re about to breathe a sigh of relief, a bus full of smiling and waving cheerleaders is suddenly mass-decapitated by a passing truck.

It’s grotesque, sudden, ironic, and nonchalantly destructive, made more entertaining by the reminder that it’s a willful choice by the toy in question. Better still, that same trip is accompanied by the passing presence of Death, looking morose, on a pale horse… is the Monkey Death? Nothing really suggests it, but Death sure looks like it pities the poor father-son duo, whose trip was as ruined as the next cheerleader camp.

5. Kung Lao’s Buzzsaw Hat, Mortal Kombat

It would be a shame if Mortal Kombat didn’t earn a spot on the list, given how much controversy the games had courted thanks to famously gory, over-the-top fatalities. Directed by Simon McQuoid but co-produced by Wan, the film has a number of gory fatalities as its kombatants fight amongst themselves. There are a number of appropriately good kills in Mortal Kombat, but one in particular is an all-timer.

Kung Lao (Max Huang) is a fashion icon in the film thanks to his stunning mind-controlled razer blade-rimmed hat, but it’s put to great use in one particular fight. A promising showdown with Shang Tsung (Chin Han) is interrupted when the latter signals winged baddie Nitara (Mel Jarnson) for backup. Nitara’s hard to pin, so Kung Lao centers himself right before she swoops down. At the last second, he dodges her attack and mentally commands the hat to stick in the arena sand. Kung Lao steers her straight into the now-spinning hat, pushing her into it like a log through an industrial buzz saw. It’s bloody, well executed, and a perfect example of a cinematic fatality done right.

4. The Monkey Bowls A Strike, The Monkey

Hal’s discovery of the aforementioned murderous Monkey toy was complicated by its gradual discovery by his narcissistic and abusive twin brother Bill (also played by Theo James as an adult). After some terrible childhood experiences with the thing, they get rid of it (or at least think they do) and it buys them a little peace over the years. Bill, however, becomes obsessed with its power, and with the fact that it seems to have the strongest connection to Hal.

When we meet adult Bill again, he’s a skeezy mess who hasn’t stopped obsessing about the Monkey, which is nowhere more evident than his literal paranoid death-trap of a house. It’s full of dangers for anyone unfortunate enough to visit. To be vague and avoid spoilers about a truly exciting kill, someone runs afoul of one of Bill’s traps. It sets off an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of destruction that uses a bowling ball among other objects for a wildly satisfying kill. A good Rube Goldberg-style machine is always fun on-screen, but this one’s used to great effect with precise timing and killer execution producing a great end for one particular character.

3. The Paper Cutter Dance, M3GAN

In M3GAN, the prototype model of an advanced AI-android (intended to be a child’s perfect friend) is put too soon into the field by its creator Gemma (Allison Williams) as a friend for her traumatized niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). M3GAN (played by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) becomes attached to Cady, but eventually is recognized as a danger who will attack anyone deemed ‘a threat’ to the girl and their bond. Gemma brings M3GAN in to the lab for deactivation, but the android turns itself back on for a truly memorable rampage.

In the film’s best kill, M3GAN corners Gemma’s boss David (Ronny Chieng) in a hallway and hunts him down, but it’s the way she does it that makes the scene an all-timer. Set to the Skatt Brothers’ “Walk the Night” (a perfect cue, here), she dances down the hallway in an inhuman fashion before grabbing a paper cutter blade and hunting him down the hallway. After a good and bloody kill in front of one of Gemma’s coworker, she goes the extra mile by explaining how she’s framing him for David’s death. From the creepy dance to the misuse of office supplies, to the messed up plan to frame a victim (she really learns fast), it’s a fantastic kill full of top-notch- flawlessly executed ideas.

2. The Police Station Rampage, Malignant

It’s hard to top the jail scene in Malignant but it’s James Wan, so he managed the task. One of the film’s best sequences involves Gabriel rampaging through a wild number of Seattle police. First stopping by the evidence room to collect his characteristic weapon and jacket, Gabriel boldly enters the Seattle PD station, using electrical powers to turn off the lights, and acrobatically slices and dices his way through the police.

Like the aforementioned M3GAN entry, what stands out about the scene is the style of it all. Gabriel is acrobatic, leaping over desks, using the cops’ weapons against each other (and even weaponizing severed body parts) with incredibly fluid combat choreography. The camera follows closely behind the action, putting the viewers deep into the batshit scene, so we don’t miss a beat. It’s not easy to describe why Malignant‘s best scenes are so memorably fun and bonkers without spoiling important elements of the film, so suffice to say it is an amazing, bloody, high-octane scene that you can’t miss.

1. Revenge of the Wasps, The Monkey

One of the many characters we meet in The Monkey is ‘Thrasher’, played by Rohan Campbell. For a limited time, he finds himself in possession of the Monkey thanks to an estate sale, becoming obsessed with it before losing the thing. As the film builds towards its exceptional conclusion, he appears at Hal’s door in the guise of a police officer (seriously folks, always ask for a warrant before you let them in). He forces Hal and Petey to drive the pair to where he suspects the Monkey is, and shoots through a car window in an ensuing altercation. Here comes the fun. The bullet also found its way through a shockingly massive wasp nest on the other side of said window. In a supernatural display of coordination, the walls emerge in full force, funnel through the bullet hole, and produce the film’s best kill (indeed, my favorite kill of Wan’s career).

I won’t explain exactly what happens to save for exact spoilers, but it’s a wildly satisfying, flawlessly executed, multi-stage kill. There’s perfect comedic timing as well, but what sets it apart from the film’s other excellent kills is its masterful exhibition of The Monkey’s supernatural control. In The Monkey, the toy (or whatever it really is) can and will use anything, no matter how elaborate, to secure a victim’s demise, but most of the kills are in the highly improbably but logically possible realm. Not so with the wasps: the way they move to secure the kill simply wouldn’t happen without the malevolent power of the Monkey in question, making for a flawless kill you’ll never forget.

Find out for yourself if The Monkey tops your own list of James Wan kills. It releases in theaters February 21.

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