Even only one quarter into 2019, it’s clear that the rest of the year and into the next are promising to be an exciting time for horror fans. The slate of upcoming releases is absolutely stacked, especially if you’re a fan of Stephen King or his son, equally prolific author Joe Hill. But there’s another name on the rise: screenwriter Jeff Buhler (The Midnight Meat Train), one of the top genre writers working today. Kicking off the year as the writer behind February’s creepy kid chiller The Prodigy, Buhler also wrote the screenplay for the new adaptation of Pet Sematary, arguably King’s most terrifying novel of all. It doesn’t stop there, either, as upcoming reboots of Jacob’s Ladder and Grudge were also penned by Buhler.
Ahead of Pet Sematary’s release, we spoke with Buhler on his approach to crafting horror, and learned surprising insight into the long journey in getting this adaptation to the big screen.
In an unusual move for screenwriters, Buhler has been with this new iteration of Pet Sematary from its earliest conception right until its completion just weeks prior to its premiere at SXSW in Austin, Texas. He reflects on the lengthy journey, “Matt Greenberg had written a version of this script and that’s what I was submitted by the studio, gosh 5 years ago? I think it was around 2014 that it came across my desk. Matt’s a great writer, a great guy, and had worked with Lorenzo [di Bonaventura, producer] on 1408, which was also Stephen King territory. When it came across my desk, they had Juan Carlos Fresnadillo attached to direct. I stayed with the script from when Juan Carlos left the project and then Dennis [Widmyer] and Kevin [Kölsch] came on board, all the way through post-production. Which literally finished a couple weeks ago. We shot some additional photography in January so, yeah, I was on the whole time.”
If you’ve read our review, then you have an idea that this new take plays on fans’ working knowledge of both Stephen King’s novel and Mary Lambert’s 1989 film adaptation. Buhler explains, “I think that was one of our ways into cracking [the story]. Everyone who is involved with this incarnation were huge fans of the original book and the movie, and we very much had both of those projects in mind when we wrote this. There are places where we decided to diverge, and places where we decided to stick close.”
Widmyer and Kölsch had revealed during our set visit that they were adamant the nightmarish Zelda be included in this new adaptation. “Well, there have been many different versions [of the script], but I would say that originally Victor Pascow and Zelda, and some of the other elements that we would consider classic from the Mary Lambert film, were not as prominent. They were still in the world, but they weren’t written into the story in the way it is now. But we were able to go back and make Victor and Zelda really key characters,” Buhler shares of earlier drafts that didn’t just diminish the presence of Zelda, but ghostly Victor Pascow as well.
For those who have avoided trailers that revealed a key change from the source novel, skip this paragraph! Spoilers ahead for any still hoping to go in completely blind.
When asked about the major character swap, making Ellie the character that’s buried in the sour grounds beyond the Pet Sematary, Buhler reasons, “For me, I love the Mary Lambert film for the time and place it was made. And I think to some extent, in retrospect, it’s been a little bit of a victim of its own success. In the sense that we had never seen a little kid running around with a knife at that point. Since then there’s been Child’s Play and other movies with little kids, and so I think because it set up the paradigm for that it really made us think about trying to not do something that was the same dynamic. The idea of having a 3-year-old boy running around, he’s tiny, but there’s the production side of it – you’re limited to what you can do with a child actor. And then there’s the emotional side of it, which is your characters are limited. Of course, every parent loves their child no matter what age they are, but it’s easier and more accessible to portray a relationship with a 9 or 10-year old than it is with a 3-year old on film.”
This change, and other departures, still stem from a place of pure respect and adoration for the source material. Buhler, massive King fan himself, also shared that every single person involved was as well. “When Dennis and Kevin came on, they were very adamant about looking at the book. They, Jason Clarke, and John Lithgow, all approached the project having read the book multiple times and came to the screenplay that I’d written with the idea of, ‘How can we lay in the book in this as much as possible?’ We leapfrogged the movie, so to speak. We went back to the novel.”
While Buhler has a number of projects he’s currently working on, including Best New Horror based on a Joe Hill short story and supernatural thriller Black River, we were very curious about the trio of reboots he’d written, all scheduled for release over the next year. He told us, “At one point I was working on Jacob’s Ladder, Pet Sematary, and Grudge all around the same time. I was thinking, ‘Whoa, this reboot thing has really become a niche.’ But they’re all widely different in their approach. If there’s one through line that I would draw between them, and this is true of all the projects that I work on, it’s that I start with the characters. And start with the horror that they’re experiencing emotionally and psychologically. With Jacob’s Ladder, it could be returning from war. In Pet Sematary it’s the loss of a child. In the Grudge, it’s when someone dies in the grip of rage. All of those things are intense psychological states. Once you have that anchored in, then it’s easy to do the adaptation because you’re not thinking about what so-and-so did before, you’re then in the characters. That’s what I did.”
Buhler’s approach to horror stems from characters first and foremost, and the scares just come naturally for him. He explains, “Well, I call it a curse. My imagination tends to be very dark. Probably because I’ve written so many horror movies and I tend to think along those lines. I have random crazy thoughts that jump into my head at any given time, so I think coming up with that stuff is the easy part of it. It’s almost like if you can find the skeleton of the story and figure out the emotional journey for your characters, then finding the places to put in scares is- I wouldn’t call it secondary- but it lands easier. With the case of Louis Creed and his wife Rachel, they’re both destroyed by losing a child. That’s just an emotionally devastating thing. Every scare that occurs is in some way a reflection of that fear.”
Pet Sematary arrives in theaters April 5, 2019, but be prepared to see a whole lot more horror headed our way from Buhler in the very near future.
