SXSWORLD

2 4 SXS W O R L D | M A R C H 1 4 , 2 0 1 9 | SXSW.COM For horror fans, a warning from Stephen King also serves as an endorsement. In February, he tweeted the just-released trailer for the new adaptation of his Pet Sematary with a warning — "You might consider skipping this movie if you have heart trouble." Directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer were gleeful. "It's pretty surreal," Widmyer says. Obviously, he admits, they were hoping for King's approval, "but it's so intan- gible in your brain that if you think about it too much, you drive yourself crazy — thinking about something you worked on — and your hero is actually sitting in a theater and watching and having thoughts and commenting on it." And their hero is not the only one. Since Kölsch and Widmyer made waves in indie horror circles with their sophomore feature film Starry Eyes, they've been embraced as an exciting choice to adapt what many people call King's most fright- ening book. After Mary Lambert's beloved 1989 film adaptation of Pet Sematary, how do the filmmakers intend to distinguish their own take on the novel? "The first film was a big influence on us," Kölsch says. "It was a film I remember seeing at a friend's house during a sleepover, watching it in his basement and getting really scared, terrified." Widmyer adds, "You can't ignore the first film, but we really tried to put it out of our heads there for a while and just went back and read the book a number of times, and that was really what we were informed by." Fortunately, their cast pitched in. Pet Sematary lead Jason Clarke, who plays patriarch Louis Creed, garnered the nickname "The Archivist" as a go-to source of insight into King's words. "He continually read the book on set," Widmyer marvels. "He'd call us up on a Sunday before we were going to shoot on Monday and say, 'Hey, guys, in the scene we're shooting tomorrow, I just reread the chapter, and we have to have [Louis] say this line, because it's the best line of that chapter.'" Burying the Past in the New Pet Sematary By Meredith Borders Winston Churchill in Pet Semetary. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

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