Hitting theaters next month is an all-new adaptation of Stephen King‘s It, with a second part aiming to film next year with a 2019 release. Once those projects have wrapped up, director Andy Muschietti has already set his sights on another King adaptation, revealing he wishes to make his own version of Pet Sematary.
“We’re huge fans of Pet Sematary,” Muschietti explained recently to the Toronto Sun. “If we can get our hands on that and do the Pet Sematary we want to do, that will be something. One day, maybe.”
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The original novel was published in 1983 and turned into a feature film in 1989, earning itself a sequel in 1992.
Muschietti wouldn’t be the first filmmaker who attempted to revive the story, with 28 Weeks Later directorJuan Carlos Fresnadillo and Guillermo del Toro both having previously attempted to adapt the property.
In the story, a family moves into a new house in rural Maine when the family’s toddler Gage accidentally stumbles into traffic. When Gage’s father realizes that a cat he buried in a local pet cemetery returns to the family days later, he gets the idea that he should bury their young son in the cemetery. The family learns the hard way that some things should stay dead, no matter how tragic their passing might have been, as once the living has seen the other side, they will be forever changed.
The inspiration for the story came from an incident in which King stayed at a house that was across the street from an actual pet cemetery. Stephen King’s website describes what it was about the house that inspired him to write the novel:
“Stephen was serving as a writer-in-residence at the University of Maine at Orono and living in a rented house in nearby Orrington that bordered a major truck route which frequently claimed the lives of dogs and cats. In the woods behind his house, local children had created an informal pet cemetery. One day, his daughter’s cat was killed by a passing truck. Stephen was faced with the task of burying the cat in the pet cemetery and then explaining to his daughter what had happened.” The site adds, “It was on the third day after the burial that the idea for a novel came to him.”
Muschietti might have to wait and see how well his first adaptation of a King story does in theaters before getting the go-ahead to make another adaptation.
It lands in theaters on September 8.
