Pet Sematary Reboot
Posted: July 23, 2015, 00:05
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A remake of the original 1989 horror classic, which was directed by Mary Lambert and based on the novel of the same name by horror legend Stephen King, Buhler said of the status of his scripted re-imagining of Pet Sematary, “Since last we spoke [see our previous coverage here], director Juan Carlos and I literally spent another three months going over the script and fine-tuning the horror to the place where it needed to be.”
Buhler expounded of the reboot, which is being produced for Paramount by Lorenzo DiBonaventura and Mark Varhadian, “The characters in this script make some tragic decisions, and the horror is about the ramifications of those decisions. There are still the supernatural aspects of the book, with the pet cemetery and the burial ground from which things come back from the dead, but the real horror is, ‘What do these things do to the family? What does it do to a person to see their child killed, but then to know that they can bring them back? How do you tussle with that idea? And if and when you make that choice, what does that do to you? Will that child be the same? How can life ever return to normal?’”
He continued of their take, “This is pretty far from the 1980’s film, which I adore for certain things that are very intrinsic to that time period in terms of the genre, like a truck driver smoking a joint to a Ramones song. But when a little kid comes back with a scalpel and is like, ‘I want to play with you,’ it kind of becomes Chucky. With this one, we really wanted to get into the emotional aspects of it. There’s still plenty of visceral horror that’s explored, but I’ve always felt that if you lean more into the characters and into their emotional lives, when the visceral shit hits the fan, it’s ten times more scary.”
As for an intended start date of principal photography, Buhler said, “Right now the film’s budget is up for approval at the studio. We have the new script [completed] and will be ready to go when Juan Carlos returns from New York in August. He’s currently there shooting a pilot called ‘Falling Water’ for Gale Anne Hurd’s company, so hopefully things will be up and running in terms of production by the end of the year.”
