Stephen King's 'Pet Sematary' Remake Lands Star Indie Horror Directors

Whether it’s an interdimensional demon taking the form of a clown with red balloons or a zombie child with a knife and a deadly scheme, horror master Stephen King is here to haunt your nightmares. One of King’s most famous novels, 1983’s Pet Sematary, is getting a well-documented remake, and the project has officially landed its directors.

As reported by Deadline on Monday, Paramount Pictures has made a deal with directors Dennis Widmeyer and Kevin Kolsch, the duo that directed one of 2014’s most disturbing, underrated horror movies, Starry Eyes.

King first started writing the novel Pet Sematary in 1979 after his daughter’s cat was run over by a car. Animals in the neighborhood were prone to falling prey to a nearby road and the local kids had been burying their pets in a pet cemetery behind the King household for years. One day, King’s then-2-year-old son Owen King narrowly escaped a run-in with a car on that same road. Owen walked away unscathed, but the thought of losing his son in that manner sent King down a dark path.

And that’s how the world got Pet Sematary in 1983.

In Pet Sematary, Louis and Rachel Creed move their young family to a relatively remote house where their new neighbor, Jud Crandall, warns them about a nearby road. Like in King’s own neighborhood, cars on the street tend to kill a lot of animals, so the local kids had started up a cemetery and labeled it with a poorly spelled sign: “Pet Sematary.”

Jud, who becomes a sort of father figure to Louis, eventually shows Louis an ancient burial ground once used by the local Micmac Native American tribe after the Creed family cat is killed. The cat comes back to life, but kind of ends up being demonic and horrible. When something bigger than a cat dies, they bury it too.

It comes back; the results are not good.

Mary Lambert directed the first Pet Sematary film in 1989, which grossed about $57 million worldwide and got a little-loved sequel in 1992, Pet Sematary II.

While the world has seen a bit of a King resurgence as of late, especially in 2017, some King fans have admitted trepidation in the face of a Pet Sematary remake. But, if the wild success of 2017’s It remake is anything to go off of, King fans can rest easy.

Pet Sematary does not yet have a release date.

If you liked this article, check out this video on why an important book monster was left out of the movie It.