The Monkey Ending Explained (2025): Okay, So Why Does the Monkey Kill Bill Instead of Hal?

The Monkey Ending Explained: So you just watched a wind-up toy monkey decapitate a man with his own mother’s bowling ball, and now you’re sitting there wondering what on earth Osgood Perkins was trying to tell you. Fair. That’s kind of the point of this movie, honestly, it wants you to be a little rattled and a little confused at the same time, which is a weird combination for a film to pull off, but here we are.

If you came out of The Monkey with more questions than answers, you’re in good company. This is a movie that spends ninety-some minutes being gleefully, almost cartoonishly violent, and then in its last ten minutes quietly asks you to sit with grief, fatherhood, and the idea that death doesn’t owe anyone an explanation. That tonal whiplash is intentional, but it also means a lot of viewers walk out fuzzy on exactly what happened, why it happened, and what that pale figure on the horse was even doing there.

That’s what this is for. We’re going to walk through the ending step by step what happens with Hal and Bill in that final confrontation, why the monkey turns on Bill specifically, who or what that rider actually represents, and why Hal makes the choice he makes with the monkey and with his son. We’ll also get into how this ending compares to Stephen King’s original short story, since Perkins changed a lot more than people realize, and what it might mean for where this story goes next.

There’s also the question of tone to untangle, because this isn’t a movie that plays its ending completely straight. Right up until the final scene, Perkins keeps cutting between genuine horror and stuff that’s almost slapstick. A bowling ball flying across a room is objectively a ridiculous way to kill someone, and the film knows it. But underneath that absurdity, the last few minutes are doing something surprisingly sincere with Hal and his son. Figuring out where the joke ends and the actual emotional point begins is a big part of why this ending trips people up.

One quick housekeeping note before we dive in: this is a full spoiler discussion of the ending, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, this is your exit ramp. Is everyone still here? Good. Let’s get into it.

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TL;DR, Quickie if you’re short on time!

Hal and Bill’s mother Lois dies from an aneurysm early in the film after young Hal winds the monkey’s key out of anger at his brother, an act that quietly poisons both of their lives for the next twenty-five years.
As adults, Bill has been secretly winding the monkey’s key over and over to punish Hal, believing his brother caused their mother’s death.
In the climax, Bill and Hal finally reconcile and apologize to each other right before the monkey drums one final time and a bowling ball engraved with their mother’s name shoots out and kills Bill instantly.
Hal decides to keep the monkey rather than destroy or hide it again, choosing instead to protect it and everyone else by never letting the key be wound again.
On the drive out of town, Hal and Petey pass a pale, black-eyed man on a horse, a visual reference to the biblical Pale Horseman of death not a new villain, just death itself, quietly acknowledging what it’s just witnessed.
The film closes with Hal asking Petey to go dancing with him, echoing something their grandmother Lois used to do, which is the movie’s way of saying Hal has finally chosen connection over isolation.

So What’s Actually Going On With This Cursed Toy By The Time The Movie Ends?

To make sense of the ending, it helps to remember how we got here, because the movie buries a lot of its emotional groundwork in the first act and then expects you to remember it an hour later while people are getting exploded in swimming pools.

The monkey first shows up in the twins’ lives as kids, tucked away among their absent father’s old belongings. They wind it up out of curiosity, not knowing what it does, and that night their babysitter dies in a freak accident at a hibachi restaurant. From there, the pattern becomes clear, even if the boys don’t fully understand it yet: someone winds the key, and shortly after, someone dies. It’s never predictable who. It’s never the person you’d expect, and it’s rarely who the person doing the winding actually wants gone.

That randomness is the whole engine of the story, and it’s why the ending lands the way it does. Young Hal, sick of getting bullied by his brother, winds the key hoping something bad happens to Bill. Instead, their mother Lois collapses from a brain aneurysm right in front of Bill, and dies. Hal never tells his brother the truth about what he did, and that unspoken secret becomes the thing that quietly poisons both of their lives for the next two and a half decades.

The boys throw the monkey down a well after another death in the family, thinking that’s the end of it. It isn’t. Twenty-five years later, the monkey resurfaces, and the same cycle of unexplained, gruesome deaths starts all over again except this time, the brothers are adults, estranged, and about to be pulled right back into the same nightmare they thought they’d buried.

Wait, Who’s Who Again? Quick Refresher On The Family At The Center Of This Mess

Since the back half of the movie throws a lot of names at you fast, here’s a quick who’s-who before we get into the ending itself.

Theo James plays both adult Hal and adult Bill, the twin brothers at the center of the story, while Christian Convery plays them as kids. Tatiana Maslany plays Lois, their mother, whose death as kids sets everything in motion. Colin O’Brien plays Petey, Hal’s own son, who ends up dragged into the same cycle his father was as a child. Adam Scott has a brief but important role as Captain Petey Shelburn, Hal and Bill’s father, who vanishes early in the film after his own terrifying encounter with the monkey.

Elijah Wood plays Ted, the man dating Hal’s ex-wife and hoping to adopt Petey, and Rohan Campbell plays Ricky, a local kid who becomes obsessed with getting the monkey for himself once it resurfaces in town. Sarah Levy plays Ida, the twins’ aunt, whose death is what pulls Hal back into contact with Bill in the first place.

Keeping that lineup straight matters for the ending, because the final act hinges almost entirely on the relationship between Hal, Bill, and Petey; everyone else has basically served their purpose.

What Actually Happens Between Hal And Bill At The End?

Here’s where it gets genuinely tense. Once Hal and Petey track Bill down, we learn Bill has had the monkey the whole time, retrieved for him by Ricky. And Bill isn’t just a passive owner of a cursed toy he’s been actively winding the key, again and again, as a slow-motion act of revenge against Hal.

Why? Because Bill has apparently pieced together, or at least strongly suspects, that Hal wound the key all those years ago hoping it would kill him, and that their mother died in his place. That’s the wound Bill’s been carrying his entire adult life, and it’s warped him into someone who genuinely doesn’t care how many strangers die as long as it eventually catches up to his brother.

Bill lays out a theory to Hal that becomes the emotional trap of the climax: whoever winds the key is spared. So Bill tells Hal he’ll let it go and he’ll stop winding it if Petey takes over the job permanently. If Hal refuses, Bill says he’ll just keep winding it himself until Hal is the one who ends up dead, regardless of who else has to go first. It’s a genuinely awful ultimatum, and it’s the thing that finally forces Hal to stop running from his brother and confront him directly.

What follows is chaotic. Ricky, obsessed with owning the monkey, forces Petey at gunpoint to help retrieve it, and ends up killed by a swarm of wasps for his trouble. Hal rushes in to find his son, and comes face to face with Bill for the first time in years. Furious that the monkey won’t kill Hal even when he tries to force it to drum without winding the key, Bill essentially loses control and the monkey responds by drumming wildly on its own, unleashing chaos across the entire town.

And then, almost in the middle of all that carnage, something shifts. Hal and Bill finally say the thing neither of them has said in twenty-five years. They apologize to each other. Bill admits how much he’s carried, Hal admits what he did as a kid, and for one genuinely quiet moment, two very broken brothers actually reconnect.

Why Does Bill Get Killed By His Mom’s Bowling Ball, Of All Things?

This is the moment that tends to stick with people the most, and it’s worth sitting with, because it’s not random for the sake of being random even though that’s exactly the point the film is making.

Right after the brothers reconcile, the monkey beats its drum one last time, and a bowling ball with their mother Lois’s name engraved on it comes flying out and takes Bill’s head off. It’s brutal, it’s darkly funny in that specific Perkins way, and it’s also the film’s cruelest piece of irony: the man who spent decades trying to avenge his mother’s death dies because of an object that belonged to her.

Think about what Bill actually wanted this whole time. He wasn’t trying to live, he was trying to settle a score. Every year he spent plotting revenge against Hal was a year he didn’t spend doing anything his mother would have actually wanted for him, which the film makes clear was simply for her sons to be happy and close to each other. The bowling ball isn’t punishing Bill for a specific sin. It’s underlining the film’s whole argument: death doesn’t negotiate with grudges, and it definitely doesn’t care how justified you think your anger is.

There’s also something almost mocking about the timing. Bill dies in the exact second he finally lets go of his anger right after healing the relationship he spent his whole adult life poisoning. If he’d died mid-rage, it would almost make narrative sense as a punishment. Instead, he dies right after doing the one healthy thing he’s done in the entire film, which is exactly the kind of cruelty the movie has been building toward from its very first scene.

Okay, But Who Is That Pale Figure On The Horse?

This is probably the single most-Googled image from the ending, and for good reason it’s genuinely eerie, it’s never explained out loud, and it shows up right as the credits are about to roll, so you don’t get much time to process it.

As Hal and Petey drive away from the wrecked town, they pass a pale, ash-colored man with dark, sunken eyes, riding a horse along the road. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t threaten them. He just looks at them, gives a small acknowledgment, and rides on.

This is a direct visual reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation, specifically the pale horse and its rider, who is traditionally understood to represent Death itself. Osgood Perkins has talked about wanting to lean into biblical imagery for the film’s chaos, and this is the clearest example of it landing on screen.

The rider isn’t a new threat, and he’s not connected to the monkey mechanically in any way we’re shown. He’s more like a visual punctuation mark a reminder, right at the moment Hal and Petey are trying to drive away from all of this, that death has been the real subject of the movie the entire time, monkey or no monkey.

It’s worth noting the rider doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t chase them, doesn’t threaten them, doesn’t even really react beyond that single acknowledging glance. That restraint is deliberate. If the movie wanted him to be a literal danger, it would have made him one. Instead, he functions almost like a nod between old acquaintances Hal has spent his entire life surrounded by death in the most absurd, over-the-top ways imaginable, and this is death, essentially, saying it sees him too.

Why Doesn’t Hal Just Destroy The Monkey For Good?

Given how many times this exact monkey has ruined Hal’s life, it’s a fair question why keep it around at all? Why not burn it, bury it somewhere no one will ever find it, or just leave it in the wreckage of the town and drive away?

The answer the film gives us is pretty grounded once you sit with it: Hal has already tried getting rid of the monkey. Multiple times. As a kid, he took it apart. He and Bill sealed it in a box and dropped it down a well specifically so no one would ever find it again. And it came back anyway, twice, each time landing in the hands of someone who had no idea what they were dealing with, which is exactly how so many innocent people ended up dead in the first place.

So instead of repeating a strategy that’s already failed him twice, Hal makes a different choice. He decides to keep the monkey, under his own control, where he can make absolutely sure the key never gets wound again. It’s less about defeating the curse and more about taking responsibility for containing it, permanently, rather than passing the danger along to some future stranger who stumbles across it in an attic or a garage sale.

There’s a quiet parenting parallel buried in this decision too. For most of the film, Hal’s whole strategy for protecting Petey has been distance, seeing him once a year, keeping him at arm’s length, believing that closeness is what gets people killed. Choosing to keep the monkey close, instead of pretending he can outrun it by staying away from everyone, mirrors the choice he makes with his son in that same final stretch of the movie. He stops running. He starts holding on to the things that scare him instead of pushing them away.

What’s The Ending Actually Trying To Say?

Strip away the wasps and the bowling ball and the exploding pool water, and The Monkey is a movie about the fact that death is completely indifferent to fairness. That’s the thesis, and the film tells you outright at one point the box the monkey is stored in has a label on it that says it’s “like life.” Cruel. Meaningless. Something that happens to you regardless of what you deserve.

Every death in this movie happens to someone who, in a normal horror movie, wouldn’t necessarily be a target. The babysitter didn’t do anything wrong. Neither did the realtor, or Ricky, or most of the people caught in the chaos at the end. Bill spends the whole film trying to use the monkey as a tool of justice, trying to make it kill the person he believes deserves it, and it never once cooperates with that plan. Death in this movie can’t be aimed. It can’t be reasoned with, bargained with, or pointed at your enemies. It just happens, to whoever happens to be standing there.

What makes the ending land emotionally, though, isn’t the theme itself, it’s what Hal chooses to do with that knowledge. He could have spent the rest of his life the way he spent the last twenty-five years of it: isolated, terrified, keeping everyone at a safe distance so death couldn’t reach the people he loves. Instead, watching his brother die right after finally reconciling with him seems to push Hal toward the opposite conclusion. If death is coming regardless, then isolating yourself doesn’t actually protect anyone, it just guarantees you spend whatever time you have left alone.

That’s why the final image isn’t Hal locking the monkey away in fear. It’s Hal asking his son to go dancing with him, the same thing his mother used to do with him and Bill even during the worst years of their childhood. He’s choosing connection over self-protection, fully aware that it might not save him.

It’s a little like the logic behind why people keep driving after a bad car accident happens nearby, or keep flying after hearing about a plane crash on the news. Statistically, staying home doesn’t actually make you safer in any meaningful long-term sense. Life is full of risk no matter how carefully you try to manage it, and at some point continuing to live normally becomes its own kind of quiet courage. Hal spent two and a half decades essentially refusing to get back in the car, so to speak. The ending is him finally getting back in.

How Different Is This Ending From Stephen King’s Original Story?

If you’ve read Stephen King’s original short story, you’ll notice Perkins changed a lot more than the ending; he essentially rebuilt the whole back half of the plot. In King’s version, Hal doesn’t have a twin brother at all. He has two sons, not one, and the whole revenge angle between siblings simply doesn’t exist in the source material.

The short story’s ending is quieter and much less bloody. Hal and his son weigh the monkey down with rocks in a bag and throw it into the deep end of a lake, which kills a large number of fish and very nearly capsizes the boat they’re in when the monkey claps its cymbals together one final time. That’s right, the original toy monkey has cymbals, not drumsticks. The film swapped that detail out for reasons that have nothing to do with the story itself; the production reportedly worried the cymbal-banging version was too closely associated with a certain iconic toy from a certain animated franchise, so drums it was.

Beyond the mechanics, the tone is completely different too. King’s story is a quieter meditation on childhood trauma resurfacing in adulthood. There’s no sibling rivalry, no decades-long secret about accidentally causing a parent’s death, and nothing resembling the town-wide massacre that closes out the film.

The film version reshapes all of that into something much more overtly about grief, revenge, and family fracture, and that shift is really what gives the ending its weight. It’s not just a horror movie killing off a side character for shock value, it’s a story working through how randomly, unfairly death actually operates, dressed up in the silliest possible container: a toy monkey that plays the drums.

If you’re interested, you can check out our Keeper ending explained here!

Does The Ending Set Up A Sequel?

The Monkey doesn’t have anything as direct as a post-credits scene attached to itself, but the ending absolutely leaves the door open. Hal keeping the monkey instead of destroying it is the most obvious hook all it would take is one accident, one theft, one moment of the monkey ending up in the wrong hands again, and the entire cycle could restart with a new cast of victims.

There’s also the mystery of where the monkey actually came from in the first place, which the film never really answers. That’s the kind of loose thread a sequel could pull on, whether that means digging into the monkey’s origins directly or introducing an entirely different cursed object from the same unexplained source.

Another angle worth considering is a prequel rather than a sequel Captain Petey Shelburn, Hal and Bill’s father, disappears after a single unsettling scene early in the film and is never fully accounted for. There’s clearly a story there about how he first came into contact with the monkey and what happened to him afterward, and it’s the kind of gap this franchise seems built to eventually fill in.

Worth mentioning too: audiences who stuck around through the credits got a teaser for Perkins’ next film, Keeper, which isn’t a direct sequel to The Monkey but does confirm Perkins and Neon are treating this as an ongoing partnership rather than a one-off. Nothing has been formally announced connecting the two properties, but given how The Monkey performed and how clearly its ending is built to accommodate more story, it wouldn’t be surprising if we’re not done with the Shelburn family just yet.

None of that guarantees a follow-up gets greenlit, of course plenty of horror movies end on a similarly open note and never get a continuation. But between the unresolved mystery of where the monkey actually came from, the still-missing Captain Petey Shelburn, and Hal now permanently in possession of a cursed object he’s clearly not equipped to keep secret forever, the raw material for more story is sitting right there if Neon and Perkins ever want to use it.

Wrapping It Up

At its core, The Monkey uses one very silly, very bloody premise to say something pretty unflinching about grief: you don’t get to control when it happens, who it happens to, or whether it’s fair. Bill spent his whole life trying to weaponize that randomness against his brother, and it cost him everything, right at the exact moment he finally let go of it. Hal spent his life trying to hide from that same randomness, and the ending suggests he’s finally figured out that hiding was never actually protecting anyone, least of all his son.

That’s why the final beat isn’t really about the monkey at all. It’s about a father choosing to dance with his kid instead of keeping him at arm’s length, fully aware that the world is still exactly as unpredictable and unfair as it was in the film’s opening scene.

The pale rider on the horse doesn’t need to say a word for that message to land, he’s just there to remind you, one last time, that he’s always going to be somewhere nearby, whether you’re watching for him or not.

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FAQ: Most Googled Ones!

Does The Monkey ever get destroyed at the end of the movie?

No. Hal decides to keep it under his control rather than try to destroy or hide it again, since both of those approaches failed in the past.

Who is the pale man on the horse in the final scene?

He’s a visual reference to the biblical Pale Horseman associated with death, not a new character connected to the monkey’s mechanics.

Does whoever winds the monkey’s key actually stay safe from it?

That’s Bill’s theory in the film, and the story never fully confirms or disproves it one way or another.

Is The Monkey’s Ending the same as Stephen King’s short story?

No, the film changes the ending significantly, including removing the twin-brother dynamic and the lake disposal scene entirely.

Does The Monkey have a Post-credits scene?

There’s no post-credits scene tied to The Monkey itself, though a teaser for Osgood Perkins’ next film, Keeper, plays after the credits.

Is Hal’s son Petey in danger going forward?

The film leaves that open-ended, though Hal’s choice to keep the monkey locked down is presented as an active effort to keep Petey safe.

About the Author.

Hi, I’m Vansh, the founder of Vibe On Cue. I track the absolute best ways to experience cinema, from the biggest Hollywood Blockbusters and upcoming release dates to the finest details of PVOD & Streaming and pristine Blu-ray & 4K physical media. And when the credits roll, I break down the narrative with deep-dive Ending explained guides. If you live for the full life cycle of film, stick around and explore the site!!