Stephen King’s ‘Pet Sematary’ Gets Its First Trailer — ‘Sometimes Dead Is Better’

Stephen King is definitely on a roll — some would, of course, say he’s been on one since he first arrived on the scene in the 1970s with the novel Carrie — with It being one of last year’s biggest box office hits, and two streaming series in the form of Castle Rock and Mr. Mercedes currently airing. Well now we’re revisiting some old territory via a trailer for the remake of Pet Sematary (the first version was released back in 1989).

Paramount Pictures describes the film as follows: “Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) who, after relocating with his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and their two young children from Boston to rural Maine, discovers a mysterious burial ground hidden deep in the woods near the family’s new home. When tragedy strikes, Louis turns to his unusual neighbor, Jud Crandall (John Lithgow), setting off a perilous chain reaction that unleashes an unfathomable evil with horrific consequences.”

Watch the newly-released Pet Sematary trailer below! 

In an interview with Tor.com, the author said of this particular novel, “If I had my way about it, I still would not have published Pet Sematary. I don’t like it. It’s a terrible book — not in terms of the writing, but it just spirals down into darkness. It seems to be saying that nothing works and nothing is worth it, and I don’t really believe that.”

Over at StephenKing.com, information on the inspiration for the novel is provided: “In early 1979, Stephen was serving as a writer-in-residence at the University of Maine at Orono and living in a rented house in nearby Orrington that bordered a major truck route which frequently claimed the lives of dogs and cats. In the woods behind his house, local children had created an informal pet cemetery. One day, his daughter’s cat was killed by a passing truck. Stephen was faced with the task of burying the cat in the pet cemetery and then explaining to his daughter what had happened. It was on the third day after the burial that the idea for a novel came to him. He wondered what would happen if a young family were to lose their daughter’s cat to a passing truck, and the father, rather than tell his daughter, were to bury the cat in a pet cemetery. And what would happen if the cat were to return the next day, alive but fundamentally different?” 

“I can remember crossing the road, and thinking that the cat had been killed in the road — and (I thought) what if a kid died in that road?” he says. “And we had had this experience with [his son] Owen running toward the road, where I had just grabbed him and pulled him back. And the two things just came together — on one side of this two-lane highway was the idea of what if the cat came back, and on the other side of the highway was what if the kid came back — so that when I reached the other side, I had been galvanized by the idea, but not in any melodramatic way. I knew immediately that it was a novel.” 

Pet Sematary (which is based on a child’s spelling of the word) will be released next year.