Monkey’s Paw

If only anybody were ever smart enough to call a lawyer and an English major before they made their three wishes, right? You’ve got to the get the wording just, just right, with all these exclusionary clauses, with all this over-specific verbiage to indicate exactly what you’re asking for. And bring an artist in as well, to go ahead and illustrate what you’re saying, to storyboard out the smallest most insignificant minutia of these wishes. Don’t worry about being too redundant or pedantic, either. You have to go that far. Because the wishgivers of the world, at least according to the stories, they will willfully misinterpret whatever you say. They’ll gleefully misinterpret it. It’s like—it’s like, sure, they’re bound by ‘laws’ to follow your instructions. But if you leave any wiggle room at all, then look out, you’re about to become a chalkboard on which they can carve a cute rhyming poem about how much it chafes being bound by these rules. Case in point: Another case in point: The Monkey’s Paw, a bloody retelling of that 1905 short story by WW Jacobs. Except, you probably remember it as happening over the course of a single day, yes?   Not feature-length. Here it is in short: a couple acquires a magic talisman that grants three wishes, one of which kills their son, one of which brings him back, one of which sends him away. So, it’s built for three acts, but, in the story at least, those acts are bam bam bam fast, and then  . . . → → →