With the remake of Pet Sematary hitting theaters this Friday, few probably need any more encouragement to check it out. It's either your kind of movie or its not. However, one final trailer has been released ahead of the film, and if you were at all worried that the new version of the classic Stephen King story wasn't creepy enough, the final trailer should have you covered. Check it out.
While the final trailer for Pet Sematary might be fairly brief, it's incredibly effective. The creepiness scale is off the charts. Watching Jason Clarke brush his daughter's hair in the bath shouldn't be the most awful thing ever, and yet it is, as we hear the child speaking in a voice that's barely more than a whisper, and the fact that we never see her face makes it clear that we may not want to see her face.
A lot of people are looking forward to the new Pet Sematary, some with excitement, some perhaps with trepidation. It's one of Stephen King's more popular novels and it was previously made into a film that many have fond memories of, even if the movie's ultimate value might be questionable at best.
I don't have a dog in this fight. While I've read my share of Stephen King, Pet Sematary is not one of the books that I have any particular connection to. The trailers for the new movie, up to this point, while they've made the movie look reasonably good, haven't particularly made this one a "must see" for me.
That's changed quite a bit with this new trailer. The reanimated daughter being both a constant presence in the new trailer, while also being kept mostly hidden, works remarkably well and makes everything feel extra sinister. The trailer makes you want to see the movie in order to see what it's not showing, while also making you (or at least me) a little afraid to actually see what's being hidden.
Jason Clarke looks great as the heartbroken father who is willing to do something drastic because he's not willing to let his daughter go. It gives the story an emotional resonance that makes him sympathetic, even though what he's decided to do is clearly wrong.
By virtue of the one major change that this version of the story has made, even those well versed in Stephen King's story will certainly want to check out the new movie in order to see just how much else has been changed around and how it impacts the story as a whole. We could be getting a very different movie than people are expecting, which isn't a bad thing if it turns out to be good. Based on the early reactions, it seems that it very much is.
Pet Sematary hits theaters Friday.
