Guillermo del Toro Explains Why He Wants to Adapt Stephen King’s ‘Pet Sematary’
Max Weinstein
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Last week, Guillermo del Toro let everyone know that he’s still determined to bring At the Mountains of Madness to the big screen. But that isn’t the only horror adaptation he still has hopes of getting off the ground. The director is enamored with Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and has a few reasons why he’d love to put his stylistic stamp on the material.
“You know the novel that I would have killed to adapt—and I know there’s two versions of it, and I still think maybe in a deranged universe I get to do it again one day—is Pet Sematary,” del Toro recently revealed in a conversation on The Kingcast.
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For del Toro, the last lines of King’s novel are among “the very best,” and the story really frightened him in his younger, formative years. But he also adds that “as a father, I now understand it better than I ever would have, and it scares me. A hundred times more.”
One scene from King’s book in particular stands out to del Toro as ripe for adaptation.
“For me, the best scene in that book is when [Louis] opens Gage’s coffin, and for a second he thinks the head is gone, because this black fungi from the grave has grown like a fuzz over the kid’s face,” he says. “I think you cannot spare those details and think that you’re honoring that book. One of the things I thought about Pet Sematary that we would do in post is when the dead return, when Gage returns, I’d spend an inordinate amount of money taking out the sheen from his eyes. So that the eyes are dull.”
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Since the book was published in 1983, Pet Sematary was made into a feature in 1989 by Mary Lambert, who also directed its sequel, Pet Sematary Two, in 1992. A reboot from directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer was released in 2019. The story follows a family who discovers an ancient burial ground near their new home, and discovers that anyone buried there can be resurrected.
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