First Pet Sematary Trailer Reveals Chilling Reboot to Stephen King Classic

Sometimes dead is better.

Pet Sematary’s new logline is a perfect encapsulation of this Stephen King adaptation from one of his most surprising and chilling books ever. And now Paramount has released the first trailer for the film from Starry Eyes directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer and Nightflyers scribe Jeff Buhler. The film stars Jason Clarke and Amy Seimetz as Louis and Rachel Creed, two parents who move with their children from Boston to a new home in rural Maine. Their house’s backyard abuts the woods, and in those woods lies a “pet sematary” that turns out to be a lot more than just a creepy old relic from the town’s distant past. When their cat Church is run over by a truck and buried in the old cemetery, the Creed’s life is upended when they realize the wisdom of that logline; dead is better.

John Lithgow plays old timer Jud Crandall, the man who explains that the woods behind their home “belong to something else.” As if that wasn’t creepy enough, he puts their predicament in more concise terms; “The ground is bad.” After Church returns from the dead, the Creeds realize just how right Jud was, and are plunged into a nightmare that gets much, much worse. When King’s creepy masterpiece was first adapted in 1989 by Mary Lambert it became iconic, with Fred Gwynne’s turn as Jud Crandall one of that decade’s most disturbing roles.

The new trailer shows off the lush setting and the great cast, and while it gives you a hint of the horror to come, it doesn’t reveal any of the film’s darker, more iconic moments (for example, there’s very little of Gage Creed). For a first look, however, this is very promising.

Buhler told Dread Central that his goal when penning the script was to return to King’s source material: “When we first started our conversations, Dennis and Kevin and I really connected around the idea of bringing the story back to the source material, to find a modern telling of the book that really spoke to some of the big scenes and big moments that Stephen King had originally written, and as much as all of us are huge fans of the original film, there are moments that are larger than life and feel borderline campy. Our desire was to tell a really grounded, character-driven and psychologically horrific version of Pet Sematary, which in my belief, is the scariest book that King ever wrote.”

Pet Sematary rises in theaters on April 5, 2019.

Check out the trailer here:

Featured image: Theatrical poster for ‘Pet Sematary.’ Courtesy Paramount Pictures.