Pet Sematary Trailer Brings Stephen King's Horror Story Back to Life

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The trailer for next spring's Pet Sematary brings one of Stephen King's more infamous horror stories back to the big screen. Published in 1983, King's original novel was previously adapted as a film in 1989 and has been slated to receive a fresh screen adaptation since as far back as 2010. Even so, Paramount Pictures' Pet Sematary remake didn't really start to come together until after last year's IT movie became a massive critical and box office success.

Jason Clarke (Mudbound) stars in the new Pet Sematary as Louis Creed, a Boston-based doctor who (upon landing a high-end position at the University of Maine) moves his family to the outskirts of the small town of Ludlow. The Creeds' new home is located next to a seemingly ordinary pet cemetery (marked by a sign that's incorrectly spelled "Pet Sematary") that itself is watched over by a kindly old man named Jud Crandall (John Lithgow). However, it turns out the "Sematary" has a secret - namely, it's the cover for an ancient burial ground that can bring the dead back to life, but at a terrible price.

While the film doesn't hit theaters until April 2019, Paramount has decided to take advantage of the Halloween season's increased demand for horror entertainment and get Pet Sematary's marketing campaign up and running now. The studio only just released the Pet Sematary poster online yesterday (at the time of writing) and has since dropped the first trailer online to go with it. You can check out the latter in the space below.

The 2019 Pet Sematary was helmed by up and coming filmmakers Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer (Starry Eyes) and written for the screen by Jeff Buhler. Much like the film's directors, the latter comes from an indie horror background and wrote the cult horror-thriller The Midnight Meat Train, as well as the "J" segment in ABCs of Death 2. Buhler also wrote the forthcoming Grudge movie reboot and served as the showrunner on this December's George R.R. Martin sci-fi horror TV adaptation, Nightflyers.

As indicated earlier, Pet Sematary is both one of King's best-known works and generally considered one of his most disturbing stories ever. King himself has long been among the original novel's most outspoken critics and decried it for being far more nihilistic than he intended. The trailer for the movie remake suggests the film won't be shying away from the more horrifying aspects of the story either, including the flashbacks to Louis' wife Rachel's (Amy Seimetz) childhood and her terminally ill sister Zelda. However scary or not scary the movie winds up being, it's probably safe to assume that the latest iteration of Pet Sematary will be just as unnerving as the ones before it, for related reasons.

Pet Sematary (2019) release date: Apr 05, 2019