The only certain thing in life is that everybody’s going to die. Me, you and everyone we know all have an appointment with the Grim Reaper, one that’s probably coming sooner and more suddenly than you’d expected or imagined. We don’t like to think about this. I don’t think we’re wired for it, which is why mankind created gods and philosophy to apply some sort of ordering principle, so we can have faith in a larger design that keeps our minds off the inevitable. Horror stories can help with this, too, giving us safe spaces to exorcise these feelings of fundamental dread, applying arbitrary rules and resolutions to an abstract chaos that’s far more frightening.

Stephen King’s short story “The Monkey” was originally published in a 1980 issue of Gallery magazine, and later anthologized in King’s wildly popular 1985 collection “Skeleton Crew.” Folks around my age will no doubt recall the creepy, cymbal-banging title character staring out at us from library and bookstore shelves throughout our childhoods. The story is a svelte little anxiety attack in which the titular toy handed down from a deadbeat dad to his two sons serves as a harbinger of death — its crashing cymbals heralding (maybe causing) the freak accidents and medical calamities felling members of a small community in rural Maine. Despite the boy’s best efforts, the toy follows him into adulthood. Unable to be destroyed or contained, it’s as indomitable as death itself.

A metaphorically supercharged precis of the author’s usual hang-ups about toxic traits passed down through generations, King’s story is a cold and clammy mini-masterpiece of psychological terror. Writer-director Osgood Perkins’ wild new adaptation of “The Monkey” is the funniest movie I’ve seen in months — a marathon of sicko gallows humor that expands and expounds upon the short story in ways both irreverent and playfully profound. It’s a cathartically comic burlesque of gag-inducing set-pieces, rivaling the “Final Destination” films for Rube Goldberg-inspired, contraption-like death scenes. God help me, I laughed like a hyena. (Apologies to everyone who had to hear me howling through the hibachi restaurant scene.)

The film keeps the bones of King’s story, following twin brothers who spend 25 years feuding over how to handle the haunted, grinning windup toy that always seems to reappear right before someone in their lives suffers a terrible demise. Played as children in dual performances by the exceptional Christian Convery and somewhat less successfully as adults by Theo James, these bickering brothers genuinely despise one another, especially after a possibly monkey-initiated mishap sends their saintly single mother (Tatiana Maslany) toppling to the floor with blood gushing out of her ears and eyeballs.

What’s refreshing about “The Monkey” is that there’s no lore explaining arcane rules by which the monster can be vanquished. Like death itself, it’s an inevitability one must learn to live with and enjoy life in spite of. This is an admirably adult approach for a film so full of juvenile humor, even if it sometimes leaves Perkins scrambling for plot-type stuff that the characters can do to move the story forward. (The third act in particular is full of mechanics that feel more like wheel-spinning on the way to the acceptance stage of grief.) So many horror movies today try to be deathly serious explorations of trauma, here’s one that’s more philosophically sophisticated and also extremely silly. It is, first and foremost, a hoot.

“The Monkey” works as both a tribute to Stephen King and also something of a sendup, leaning into the eerie absurdity of the story’s premise while knowingly lampooning some of the prolific writer’s pet obsessions. You can’t work as prolifically for as many years as King has without developing some easily recognizable tics, and Perkins has some good-natured fun with them while also throwing in a ton of inside jokes and references for the fans. (He’s got a knack for the author’s tin-eared profanities that can make even adult characters sound like 10-year-old boys. I love a lot of his books dearly, but nobody swears worse than Stephen King.)

The son of “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins, Osgood is horror film royalty and also beloved by a lot of rom-com fans for playing Dorky David in “Legally Blonde.” There’s nothing in the restrained, haunting atmospherics of previous directorial efforts like 2015’s “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” or last year’s surprise box office smash “Longlegs” that suggest the kind of madcap, macabre humor that runs through “The Monkey.” During some of these gleefully grisly sequences, you feel like you’re watching a filmmaker find a new gear. Though I would argue that given the ridiculousness of some of these scenes, Perkins’ penchant for putting characters in silly wigs feels like a hat on a hat. Or a wig on a hat.

The monkey itself is a marvel of design, all grinning, glass-eyed malevolence. Notably, the iconic, cymbal-banging toy seen on the cover of King’s short story collection could not appear in the film. This monkey plays a drum because the crashing cymbals were trademarked by The Walt Disney Company in 2010 for a character in “Toy Story 3,” and anything that looked too close would be vulnerable to claims of copyright infringement, even though variations on this toy have been around since the 1930s. It seems the only thing more insurmountable than death itself is Disney’s greed.

“The Monkey” is now in theaters.