DIGGING IN THE PET SEMATARY: AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTORS ​DENNIS WIDMYER & KEVIN KOLSCH

Pet Sematary is available to download and keep from Paramount Home Entertainment today, and to mark its release we have an interview with the directors Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch.  

A huge thank you to Premier Comms for making this possible.  

Pet Sematary is available to Download & Keep on 29 July and on Blu-ray™ and DVD 12 August, from Paramount Home Entertainment

Do you remember the first time you read Pet Sematary?


DW: Oh yeah. Stephen King was one of those guys like [J.R.R.] Tolkien, who I started reading at 11 or 12 [years old]. I’d already read a bunch of his books by then. I’d held off on Pet Sematary because I remember the back of the paperback said, ‘The most terrifying novel he’s ever written!’ And, I had a cat, so something about it always just [kind of] spooked me a little bit. I remember reading it in two or three day and there was something different about Pet Sematary compared to his other ones. When you look at a lot of Stephen King’s work, he is actually very sentimental. He has a heart, you know? Even The Shining [the novel] ends up with Scatman Crothers marrying Wendy. People forget that, because it’s not in the movie but, Pet Sematary isn’t like that. Pet Sematary is the one where the guy never figures it out. His arc is, he spirals. The family is slowly going crazy and that, at a young age, meant I had a very indelible reaction to it. It just felt more dangerous and different than his other books. And it was very autobiographical. It definitely stood out.

Q: So, you’re going full throttle on this, then? No holding back?


DW: Oh yeah! Be warned: we’re not holding back and they’re letting us do it! Our whole thing is to make people think. To make a movie that is going to scare teenagers because it’s supernatural and there’s [characters like] Pascow and Zelda, but one that will also scare parents, because of what happens. It works on both those levels. It’s very mature and psychological.
 
Q: Before this movie, you guys were most famous for Starry Eyes, in which you basically eviscerate Hollywood for its ruthless ambition and deadly greed and, ironically, it was that movie that led to Hollywood calling you for this. Were you ever worried after Starry Eyes that you’d never work in this town again?


KK: Well, we’re not spring chickens [laughs], like some of our friends who are making films in their 20s. We’ve been at this for 20 years, making our own small indie films and we were at a point where we weren’t working in the town to begin with! We were working in a very indie place and we were getting older and thinking we weren’t going to be working in the town, so [Starry Eyes] was our movie that we took out our frustrations on...The funny thing was that it was actually the reverse...It was [Starry Eyes] that got us in meetings for Hollywood movies! So, it was just kind of odd, that it had the actual opposite effect.

DW: Even if you’re poking fun at the industry, if someone sees something in there that’s true and honest, they can’t deny it, no matter what side of the fence they’re on so, the people who knew we were satirising them responded to it. They realised it was coming from a gut place. There was no pretence to it, you know? Really, [Starry Eyes] is about any kind of struggling artist who is scratching to get their way into an industry and is very frustrated by that. So, in that way it’s a very subversive film and I think that stuff just works on people.

Q: You’ve assembled a terrific cast for this movie. What made these guys so perfect for your Pet Sematary?


DW: We have always been big fans of Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty). He’s that guy that people see his face and go: ‘Oh, I like that guy!’

KK: I worked at a post-house in New York, so I saw dailies on so many projects and [with Jason], I was always like: ‘Who is this guy?’ Because he was always popping up in so many projects. I remember always thinking he was someone to keep my eye on. He had a great presence. I remember thinking I really wanted to work with him some day and here we are, on our first studio film, and we got him in there! Same with John [Lithgow] (Netflix’s The Crown). He was our first choice for Jud.”

DW: Amy [Seimetz] (Upstream Color), too. She’s such a great indie horror mainstay. We have friends who have worked with her, a lot of mutual friends and when you look at her stuff, she’s great in everything and we wanted people that weren’t going to distract, that didn’t feel like ‘movie stars.’ We didn’t want a guy who would have been at home on the cover of Men’s Fitness. We wanted people that felt like real people. A real family. The funny thing with Amy was that even though we had lots of mutual friends, we first met her through Skype. We had a great and very long conversation because it felt like we already knew her when we met her.

KK: I agree. This isn’t a Stephen King story about killer chattery-teeth. It’s a very dark one, a very human one, a very personal one. It’s a story that’s about people. The characters are a
big part of it, so we wanted to get the best people who will make this about the characters and the performance, not just about the scares or the horror.

Q: How would you describe your style of working together, as directors?


DW: We’ve been working together for so many years that we’ve learned to do this together. Even though we went to separate film schools, we were always working on side projects together. We learned together, watched films together, studied the classics together. We formed our taste and our vision together. It became like we were one voice, in a way. It just works.

Q: What kind of classics did you think of when you started work on Pet Sematary?


DW: The Exorcist (1973), definitely. Any good horror is a drama – a drama dealing with horrific elements. Most great horror films, the director never says they’re making a horror film. [Stanley] Kubrick never saw The Shining (1980) as a horror film, [William] Friedkin never saw The Exorcist as a horror film, you know? And that’s because, really, they’re domestic dramas, about family. Families that are falling apart. So, we took a lot of influence from that...and they all take their time, just like we are trying to. You’ve got to really build the characters up and earn that psychology before you get to the more horrific stuff and that’s what we’ve tried to do here

.
KK: That’s what we always look for in movies. We’re not just horror people. I mean, Kubrick worked in every single genre, and always brought the Kubrick stamp to it. For us, we always look for great characters and relatable themes. We do love the horror genre but when we make a horror movie, we want those elements in there. Relatable characters going through themes that are universal, that people can relate to and the horror should stem from that, it should be an extension of what these people are going through.

Q: What is it that makes this movie so scary?


DW: I’ll give you an example: Zelda [Alyssa Brooke Levine]. Even we were a little worried about putting Zelda in because everyone remembers how scary Zelda was, from [the movie in] 1989. That made me not want to see that film as a kid. If I ever caught [her shrieking], ‘Never get out of bed again!’ I was like, ‘I can’t watch that!’ So, we weren’t sure if we wanted to tackle that. Our approach to horror is that something that is grounded is always more terrifying than something that is supernatural. So, for us, anything that is supernatural should have a grounded element...A perfect example with Zelda is, she’s not some ghoul who’s up in a room, it’s a 12-year-old girl who is suffering from an ailment and the family doesn’t know what to do. They’re overwhelmed by it and have sort of given up. This poor girl is wasting away up in her bedroom and there’s this younger sister who has to look after her and check in on her and there’s a certain resentment from Zelda because [the sister] is healthy and she’s not. That in itself is pretty scary, without all the bells and whistles – just the idea of a young girl wasting away, with dusty medical equipment, in a bedroom of a
semi-wealthy family who can’t save her. Knowing she’s going to die at some point...She’s become this dark secret that the family has.


KK: That’s what makes the character so scary. It’s not the make-up or the jump-scares, it’s the horrible truth.

DW: You can heighten that as the film goes on, bringing in more heightened layers to it but if you look at the core of what that story is, it’s already horrific because it’s grounded in nature and it’s sad. It’s this underlying idea of not talking about grief. I think a lot of times when we show people [in movies] sobbing and talking about grief, and having these big, melodramatic conversations about it, sometimes it’s not like that. Sometimes you talk it away, sometimes you don’t talk about it and that’s what this movie’s about, about trying to not deal with death, trying not to communicate and talk about death, and the ramifications that come out of that.”

Q: A couple of years ago, the new adaptation of It (2016) was a huge success. What would you say you have you learned from the success of that movie?


​DW: I would say we learned a lot. You know, Stephen King has gone through previous renaissances. He went through one in the ‘70s, one in the mid-‘80s, the ‘90s not so much. But I think that movie reminded people that the guy writes great fiction, great literary horror. And it treated it like prestige horror, not like schlock. It really respected the material. And I think that’s what woke people up – that it could be scary, critically successful and make a lot of money. I think that definitely re-opened doors, the way the Muschietti [Andy Muschietti, the director of 2017’s It] treated it. So, we owe Muschietti a great deal of gratitude for that.”
 

Pet Sematary is available to Download & Keep on 29 July and on Blu-ray™ and DVD 12 August, from Paramount Home Entertainment