Spoilers forthcoming. Turn away now.
The second trailer for Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch‘s adaptation of Pet Sematary dropped this morning, and it spoiled a pretty major deviation from both Stephen King’s novel and Mary Lambert’s 1989 film. This time around, rather than Gage Creed dying and being reborn thanks to the Sematary’s powers, it’ll be his older sister, Ellie Creed.
In a press kit sent out this morning, Widmyer and Kolsch detailed the change.
“That twist was in the script when we came on board, and straight away you could see that it was one of the smartest things in the script. It was new and fresh but also absolutely kept the essence of the novel,” Widmyer explains. “One of the things we liked about the novel is that it’s always the character of Ellie who is asking about these things. She’s asking about her cat dying one day and asking all these big questions. So, it felt right for it to be her, to echo these questions to her Dad, to resolve these earlier conversations that we’ve had. It felt like a nice way to connect that theme.”
Kolsch adds, “You’ve got to be sure that you’re making changes for the right reasons, not just a shock factor. And changing it to Ellie makes absolute sense to the story.”
Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura also chimes in, “I’ve been lucky enough to have worked on something like 80 different book or graphic novel [adaptations]. And I think the truth of any success is that if you treat it literally you get in trouble because it feels very static and stale. But if you make too many changes then you’ve lost the essence of what it is. This treads the perfect line. It is about embracing what the book is trying to say, and not trying to change its tone, its rhythm and its perspective, while also evolving things forward.”
Return to the Pet Sematary on April 5, 2019.
