Pet Sematary may not be King’s most popular work, but it is the scariest. Just ask King himself – Pet Sematary is the one novel in the author’s bibliography that actually scared him when he finished writing it.

So much so that he tucked it away in a drawer, believing he’d gone too far and that it should never be published. Eventually it was published, of course, and became yet another best seller in a long line of best sellers.

It also became a movie, in 1989, directed by Mary Lambert with a script by King himself. Rumblings of a possible remake/new adaptation of King’s tome of terror attempted to crawl their way out of the grave for years. Even Guillermo del Toro showed interest. But nothing materialized. Cut to 2017: the new adaptation of King’s It broke box office records, and Hollywood finally wised up to the fact that Stephen King adaptations were big business again.

Now, Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, the duo behind the indie horror flick Starry Eyes, are hard at work bringing a new take on King’s story to the screen. With producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Mark Vahradian, they’ve assembled a killer cast.

Jason Clarke (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) is Dr. Louis Creed, who uproots his family – wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz, Upstream Color), daughter Ellie (Jeté Laurence), toddler Gage (twins Hugo Lavoie and Lucas Lavoie), and family cat Church (played by several talented felines) – to Ludlow, Maine. It should be a fresh start in an idyllic rural setting. Instead, Louis’ new neighbor, Jud Crandall (John Lithgow), introduces him to a pet cemetery – crudely spelled as pet sematary by local children – nestled deep in the woods behind Louis’ house. But that’s not the only burial ground hidden in that forest. There’s another patch of ground – the Micmac burial ground – located even further in…and it has its own dark secrets.

While the crew bustles about setting up a complicated scene involving Jason Clarke and John Lithgow, directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer emerge from that peeling, run-down house and meet us in the yard. Both men look a bit exhausted, and yet come alive when speaking about the film. Widmyer is the more talkative of the two by far, rattling off info about the production while a cigarette burns in his hand. Kölsch sits by his side with a thoughtful look on his face, waiting to interject.

“We’re lucky that It did as well as it did, because now we’re in another Stephen King renaissance and we shouldn’t blow it,” Widmyer says. “We should be making great movies out of this material, because the material warrants it. [Pet Sematary] is a very seminal book, it’s very different from [King’s] other books. [And] our approach to the material is very mature, very grounded, and we really understood the material.”

And what of that material? How true is this Pet Sematary hewing to King’s novel, as opposed to the 1989 film adaptation?

“There were a lot of things in the book that we were always big fans of or things that didn’t even make it into the original movie that we wanted to do,” Kölsch says. “And we worked hard to get those into the script. That has been our approach, to be faithful to the book. But the best remakes are the things that stay faithful to the essence, not necessarily every single thing that happens. We’re making some changes, or doing some decisions based on the kind of things that we think would be really cool, but it’s all within the essence and the spirit of the original source material.”

This is incredibly promising to hear. Based on the footage we see being shot today, it’s clear that this Pet Sematary has nailed down the ever-present dread of King’s novel. It’s also found clever ways to remain faithful to King’s prose while also interjecting new, exciting bits, resulting in something that seems fresh and alive. Earlier in the day, on a conference call with with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the Pet Sematary producer elaborates a bit on some of the material changes in this new adaptation.

One of the most terrifying elements of the 1989 film – the thing that still has the power to give audiences the creeps – is Zelda, the dead sister of Rachel Creed, who haunts her to this day. Andrew Hubatsek played Zelda in the ‘89 film, and the ghoulish makeup used on the actor was suitably horrifying.

But it wasn’t exactly true to King’s work. For one thing, Hubatsek was clearly an adult, and the Zelda in King’s novel is a child when she dies. And that’s the approach the 2019 film is taking, going so far as to cast 13-year-old actress Alyssa Brooke Levine in the part. At first this might seem too much of a departure from the 1989 film to work, but the way the filmmakers explain things make it sound even more unsettling.

“[Zelda is] an 11- or 10-year-old girl with a debilitating disease in bed,” Widmyer says. “So if you look at the psychology of the Zelda situation – it’s a family that was dealing with a horrible situation that had a daughter that they couldn’t fix, that was wasting away up in their bedroom, and they had a younger daughter [Rachel] who was in charge of basically like going in and taking care of her and being there as she disintegrated. That in itself is pretty horrific.”

Widmyer also points out that Zelda wasn’t in the new film’s script until they joined the project, and that they both wanted the character, and felt an urge to make her even scarier. “We came along and said you have to have Zelda. And then we just sort of accepted the challenge and said we gotta try to do something on our own and do something that honors the book but is our own thing, which is just as scary if not scarier than they did in the first one.”

A Pet Sematary movie without Zelda would be utterly strange, so we can all be thankful the character has made it into the film. And what else has made it into the film along with her? With the Stephen King renaissance in full bloom, can we expect to catch King-inspired Easter eggs peppered throughout the film, the way they were in the Hulu series Castle Rock?

(Excerpt) Read More at: SlashFilm.com

‘Pet Sematary’: Bringing Stephen King’s Most Terrifying Novel to Life