HBO Max: Adaptation of Stephen King’s Self-Proclaimed Scariest Book Now Streaming
Chad Collins
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Stephen King has had a storied career. Decades after he got his start, his stories continue to delight (and terrify) audiences everywhere. Adaptations of his short stories are heating up on Netflix, and (hopefully) sometime soon, audiences will have the chance to check out the long-anticipated remake of Salem’s Lot. Now, fans can check out my pick for one of the scariest Stephen King movies ever made. Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary, adapted from Stephen King’s novel of the same name, is currently streaming on Max. Check out the trailer and synopsis below:
Per Max: After tragedy strikes, a grieving father discovers an ancient burial ground behind his home with the power to raise the dead.
Pet Sematary, the novel, is my favorite work of Stephen King’s. It’s the scariest thing he’s done, grounding the supernatural shenanigans with realism and one of the genre’s most profound (and troubling) meditations on grief. While I maintain no adaptation, neither the original, the remake, or one of several sequels or prequels, has gotten the novel quite right, Lambert’s original adaptation is the closest they come to capturing the suffocating sense of dread present throughout his writing. Plus, it’s got a terrifying Zelda, now an iconographic image within horror history.
Stephen King himself seems to agree. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in anticipation of the 2019 remake, King remarked, “That’s the other thing about Pet Sematary. When I read it over, I thought, ‘There’s such grief in this book.’ Just awful.” While I’m not a parent, the death of a young child, every parent’s worst nightmare, has to be the most horrifying thing, and King captures that cesspool of grief and uncertainty remarkably well.
King himself has even stated the novel is the scariest one he’s written, a book so hopelessly bleak, marketing at the time fixated on King’s contention it was too disturbing to put out into the world. There’s some puffing there, no doubt, but Pet Sematary fans know the lingering impact that work has.
What do you think? Are you planning to check out Pet Sematary on Max? What do you think Stephen King’s scariest novel is? Let me know over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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