i’m not going to call myself “the friend who’s too woke” or hedge around my opinion because this is my deeply considered belief: horror literature is the theater of disgust, and the disgust that drives the vast, vast majority of classic horror media from the 1890s-1940s—dracula, jekyll and hyde, king kong, nosferatu, the mummy, universal frankenstein, the wolf man, cthulhu, and more—is the exact disgust that drove the worldwide tide of violence in the 1930s and 40s, a tide that has never fully receded, and you have NO business adapting a piece of classic horror media if you aren’t willing to put in the work to identify what is portrayed as disgusting in that property and enter into some form of dialogue with it. if you don’t want your movie to be “about” race or class or gender or sexuality or ability, you’re free to choose a source material that isn’t already about that, but unluckily for you giant hypersexual apes do not exist in a vacuum