Sometimes horror remakes are seriously bad (like that Psycho revamp with Vince Vaughn). Other times they’re a marked improvement on the original and serve to terrify new generations of fans (like last year’s hugely successful IT). This year’s remake offering, Pet Sematary — another Stephen King classic — looks like it’s gonna follow in the tradition of the latter. That is, if the terrifying new trailer is anything to go by.
Starring Stranger Things’s Amy Seimetz alongside John Lithgow and Jason Clarke, today’s trailer revealed a huge twist set to be explored in 2019’s Pet Sematary. In the original novel and film adaptation — which follows the doomed Creed family as they relocate to rural Maine and uncover a creepy pet cemetery near their house — the plot centres on the tragic death of the family’s toddler, Gabe. In the remake however, it’s older daughter Ellie, not Gabe, who is killed by a truck and buried nearby, before being resurrected as a creepy zombie who chops off her dad’s achilles tendon.
“By having the elder child in the Creed family as a central character of our film we were able to explore the dual themes of family and death in a deeper way,” explained filmmakers Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kölsch. “And Ellie being older than her brother allowed other characters to interact with her in a way that a toddler simply couldn’t.”
The rest of the trailer is full of ominous thumping drums, zombie cats and anthropomorphic children carrying out ritualistic resurrections in the woods. Pet Sematary is set to be released 5 April, and should be more than enough to keep horror fans going until the second instalment of IT drops in September.