[Spoilers for Pet Sematary]
If you watched the new Pet Sematary trailer that was released yesterday and have seen the original movie and/or read Stephen King’s novel, you probably noticed something was different: it’s not young Gage who’s hit and killed by a speeding truck (and later returns from the dead), it’s his older sister Ellie.
The film’s directors, Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, made the change because they wanted to try something new. “Much of how they shot the first [movie] was a doll,” Widmyer told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s creepy and it’s effective. But we’ve now seen Child’s Play and we’ve seen the little kid trying to kill, and it’s effective when done right, but…” Kölsch added, “If you read the book, these are things that are taken right out of it that just didn’t make it into the original movie because they probably couldn’t have a three-year-old do it.”
It’s also, simply put, easier to work with a gradeschooler than a toddler:
“Gage is so young, you can’t really do that much with him,” [producer Lorenzo] di Bonaventura says. “So this way, we’re able to really get underneath our affected child. We’re able to get into the psychological horror of a child [coming back] because of her age.”
This is actually the second age-based tweak in a movie based on one of Stephen King’s works since 2017. “While it’s an important scene, it doesn’t define the book in any way I don’t think and it shouldn’t,” It co-writer Gary Dauberman said about the book’s infamous orgy that was, thankfully, removed from the film. “We know what the intent was of that scene and why he put it in there, and we tried to accomplish what the intent was in a different way.”
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
