Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kölsch know a thing or two about horror. Starry Eyes earned profound success while touring multiple film festivals as a prolific midnight sensation before hitting theaters. The duo is responsible for the Holidays segment “Valentine’s Day.” They even found their way into the directing rotation for MTV’s Scream series. If you’ve seen any of their work to date, you’d know they’re one of the hottest horror genre tandems climbing Hollywood’s ladder at the moment – and if you haven’t heard of them yet? Don’t worry, their adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary will change that. 

I had a chance to speak with both directors after Brooklyn Horror Festival hosted Pet Sematary’s NYC premiere (as well as the film’s fuzziest and most important cast member). Read on to find out how Widmyer and Kölsch drove their adaptation to be something different, the stigmas of remakes and nostalgic adaptations, how to handle internet backtalk, plus a little Friday The 13th chatter? Sure, why not. 

Dennis, I just wanted to start by reminding you how many times I’ve virtually murdered your counselor avatar while playing Friday The 13th on PS4. 

Dennis Widmyer: I do, I remember that! That was a great time. Isn’t the game done now? [Referencing the ongoing legal battle over Friday The 13th rights that halted IllFonic’s development.] 

 

Well once the whole court case is ruled on and the rights are hammered out, there’s talk about generating content once again for the game – like a Jason X level. 

DW: I’ve got to say, playing that game was so fun it revitalized my interest [in Friday the 13th]. I went back and watched the entire franchise with my wife. I know they’re trying to remake [Friday the 13th], and if you want a well-done remake of it, play the game. There are in-game moments that are so good, scenarios you find yourself in without a story that would make great scenes in a [Friday the 13th] movie. Do that version! 

  

It’s free content. Just play hide and seek with Jason Voorhees. 

Kevin Kölsch: Pet Sematary directors talk Friday The 13th: The Game! 

  

I feel like directors often get pegged as these egomaniacs who don’t play well with others, but filmmaking duos like yourself dispel that notion. Can you tell me one thing your partner brings to this collaborative team that continually impresses you? 

DW: [To Kevin.] You go first, shower me with affection!  

KK: Dennis is a – you know, it’s funny. No one ever wants us to say nice things. They only want to hear about controversy or if we ever fight!  But Dennis has crazy stamina and organizational skills. When we’re writing scripts, Dennis has all the drafts saved and all the different versions. Then I go on, and he’s like, “You’re saving these as all different drafts, right? Multiple?” I’m like, “Aw, nah. I’m just saving over the old ones!”  Film days are long, dealing with a lot of people. Dennis is good with still going strong after 12-hour workdays when I might want to be done. 

DW: Yeah but I find you’re the one I go to when I hit the wall, though: “Take over for me, Kevin.” 

KK: That’s what it feels like – how I’m feeling the reverse for me, too. Not just on set, in everyday life. I get up in the morning and lament over having to send one email to an accountant. Then it’s 3PM, and I’m like, “I’ll do that email today, for sure.” Then by 5PM I’m like, “She’s probably leaving the office soon, I better send that email out!” I feel rewarded if I’ve completed that single task.  Then you’ve got Dennis, who in an hour completes the number of tasks I might have on my week’s checklist. 

DW: I’ll say what Kevin sees as a pro in me, I see as a pro in him in that I’m like the “Go! Go! Go!” idea guy. Kevin’s the more introspective, take his time with the idea guy. The two of us complement each other. Sometimes I’ll try to bulldoze something through force of will while Kevin – who runs at a different pace than myself – keeps us in check in the right way. Prevents us from making bad decisions or mistakes. He’s mulling it over and thinking more than I do sometimes. It’s a balance that moves at the same flow, then. 

KK: You can probably get all that in the way that we answer our questions, right? 

Absolutely. But remakes and adaptations sometimes bare this stigma for not being original content – it scares some filmmakers away. Was there ever a hesitation to direct Pet Sematary

DW: A readaptation of Pet Sematary. 

KK: It’s funny because those are two separate things, remake and adaptation. Was there a worry? Of course – a little different for each. With the original Pet Sematary movie, audiences see it as a classic. They say, “Why another one? Why a remake? It’s perfect as is.” The thing we always tell people is, it’d be different if you were just remaking a movie. That’s all you’re basing it on. What we remind people is Pet Sematary is based on a source novel, one we’re passionate about. We want to tell our Pet Sematary. We want to bring our vision to life. For that, now we’re getting back to Stephen King’s book – it’s not a remake, entirely. 

Now with a new adaptation, there’s also a worry. You want to stay true to the book. Before we said “readaptation,” but we know the first movie exists. We can’t deny it, and we love Mary Lambert’s version. That said, we wanted to make some changes that’d bring a new experience. Make the movie fresh and different for those familiar with Lambert’s – but at the same time, you have to stay faithful to source material. You have to capture the essence of Pet Sematary. We’re making changes, but the worry is are we making changes so far removed fans will disown our movie. That was the balancing act. 

Those fears hit their high water mark when we were about to screen Pet Sematary for Stephen King for the first time. He’s very vocal on Twitter. If he rejects this, he might not be quiet about it, and that might affect the movie if all his fans take what he thinks about our film as approval or not. Thankfully he really liked Pet Sematary and tweeted about it – but it was still terrifying.  

 

Now the flip side – is there anything explicitly freeing in a creative sense or exciting about tackling any remake or adaptation versus original filmmaking? 

DW: You’re able to look at the original Mary Lambert film and see what she did well. You have that testing board already out there, proven. At the same time, you can look at things she didn’t do in her version, that you want to. You’re able to look and subvert them. I don’t know if that was creatively freeing, but we definitely had fun with it. Taking something like the infamous ankle scene, play with the audience’s expectations, and use their knowledge against them.  

It’s also cool because Pet Sematary is, ironically, one of King’s shorter novels at 500-something pages. Probably medium, if not short? There’s a lot of content in that book the first film wasn’t able to cover – such a rich literary world. King creates so many iconic elements in the woods, the deadfall, the ancient burial ground, the Micmac Indian tribe, Zelda, and Victor Pascow. That was part of our pitch. We’re like, “Look, Christine has the car. It has Pennywise. We have Zelda, Pascow, Gage, the road, the truck, the burial ground…” They were like, “Enough, we get it!”  

We wanted to use as much of that, but streamlined. All these iconic elements. It was fun going back into the novel and selecting what hasn’t been mined enough like the Wendigo, or the cat burial, or Little God Swamp – actually putting that in the movie. It might sound like a trifle, but that was important to us. We built the swamp [laughs]. 

Little God Swamp stands out, too. It’s one of the more memorable set pieces your film visits. 

DW: Yeah! That whole sequence. We convinced the studio and said, “This is one of the best chapters, period.” Even outside of the book. Fans agree this is one of King’s scariest written chapters. It’s this aural experience with tense sound design – the lack of what you hear because there are no animals there. “Was that a Loon, or something else? Are those trees breaking in the distance?” All that stuff. The Northern Lights? All that material was so appealing to say, “treat this scene as an actual set piece.” Put a little more money in and build out the experience.  

That’s Pet Sematary, right there. The whole division of pre-deadfall is the real world and post-deadfall is the ancient world. We wanted to feel the difference between both aesthetically. We purposefully shot everything pre-deadfall in the woods, and everything post-deadfall we built on a soundstage to give it that hyper-real feel because the book feels hyper-real.  

KK: I want to go back to the creative freedom part. What I found is that not working in an original we wrote ourselves, having it based on this book and movie that exists, we know the narrative works. It frees you up to have fun. Of course, there are obvious questions people will still have – “Why did this character do [x],” all that. At its core? We’re doing a beloved story. Now we could focus all our creative energies on how to do it best, how to do it justice.   

A lot of time with your own originals, nobody’s seen this story yet. You also have to question all these aspects. Does this story make sense? Is that a loophole? Blah blah blah. With Pet Sematary, we know the story works. We read the book, saw the original movie, are fans, and understand how timeless the themes are. It freed us up to make the best version we could tell. 

 

I want to ask about the “twist” of making the Creed’s older daughter Ellie the film’s undead villain instead of Gage. You revealed this in an early trailer. Are you the kind of filmmakers who go online and read the backlash or comments?  

DW: Every single one of them. [Laughs] 

KK: [Dennis] reads them – and it’s funny because we already mentioned the difference in personalities. I don’t read them, but since we’re two directors and I can’t just sit there and say “I don’t want to read what people are saying,” Dennis will start reading reactions out loud. Like I was having a good morning but then… 

DW: I’ll send him screenshots, like, “Sometimes remakes aren’t better.” I’ll send that headline, but you know what it is? We learned from Starry Eyes, a well-regarded film, there’s always going to be bad reviews of everything you do. We thickened our skin early. We’re in our 40s now; we’ve been doing this for a while. You realize the internet is just a very volatile, opinionated place. For me, it’s almost an OCD thing. It’s not masochism where I read words and let them dictate my day. It’s about being curious, seeing what people think, and also learning from it.  

There was stuff online before we even made the movie, or while we were shooting the movie, that we took from. Seeing how much people cared about a particular element, and making sure that’s in the film. For example, the [Ramones] song “Pet Sematary.” 

The end Pet Sematary song, the Ramones cover, was something Kevin and I were adamant not to include. We figured fans wouldn’t want to hear the same song they heard in the first movie. We thought we were just and correct in that assumption. It’s not from the book, and we’re making a readaptation of the book – not the movie. Then we started to realize “Pet Sematary” transcends the film at this point. It’s a song you hear on the radio. I heard it at my friend’s wedding recently – you listen to it everywhere. So many fans started asking for it. Even people we wouldn’t expect demanded we put it in the movie or they weren’t going to like our Pet Sematary. There was so much of that going around; we started to be swayed. We said, “Maybe we’re kinda wrong about this song? Maybe we’re being highfalutin and snobby?” People wanted the nod.  

We had this band Starcrawler who came around, a young up-and-coming band with a great following, and they were both ecstatic about the first movie and the idea of creating a song for ours. They said, “Look – we’ll spend the weekend and record a demo of it. If you like it? Cool. If not? Don’t worry about it.” We heard it and were like, “Goddamit.” [Laughs] They did a good job, now we had to include it.  

That was a response to actually reading comments. Good does come of it!  

Were there any liberties or alterations you wanted to take with your Pet Sematary that maybe didn’t make the final cut? Alternate scenes that maybe fell on the editing floor? 

KK: We have deleted scenes. Things that didn’t necessarily fit in. There’s another Zelda scare different from any of the existing products. Not in the book or original movie. It’s a good scene, but as filmmakers, you have to find the balance – we wanted Zelda to be more than just a flashback story. She has to be present for the story; there has to be a reason. We wanted her to be there in Rachel’s world when the woods start pulling the grieves out of characters and preying on them. Rachel’s past unresolved issues with Zelda start bubbling up. It has to be part of the story, but you don’t want it having more screen time than an “A” storyline about the ancient burial ground. 

Oh wait, there is a “liberty,” so to say! But I don’t know if we want to tell now or not… 

DW: It’s a deep dark secret one of the characters harbors that’s hinted at in the movie and solidified in an extended version of one of our scenes. We think it’s one of the cooler things in our Pet Sematary. It’ll make you look at that specific character a lot differently.  

 

Is that going to be included in the special features on the home release of Pet Sematary?

KK: Oh it’s on there, we’ve already finished the additional features. 

DW: You’ll want to get this movie when it hits home release. 

 

You’ve mentioned the themes of the film, which are disturbing and dark. Death, grief, finality – was there ever a moment that pushed the actors, as these characters, further than you anticipated? 

DW: We’ve all experienced grief or death in one way, shape, or form. All the actors knew we treated the material very seriously, so they utilized that in their performances. Amy Seimetz was able to channel that. Jason Clarke has kids now – he has an 8-year-old son – so that was his experience on the film. What would I do, God forbid. Then Jeté Laurence! Who was 10-going-on-11 during shooting, didn’t have those experiences but was such a professional she was able to channel this darkness that I don’t know where the hell a 10-year-old gets.  

For her, there was never anything scary or taboo about directing her. She brought it, and we had to wonder, did her parent prepare her for this? She’s like, “No, I thought you guys did?” No one knew where she was getting her menace from – but she did. All the actors understood their material and channeled it in creative ways. 

If you were given your dream remake from start-to-finish, writing and directing, do you have any titles in mind your hungry to bite into? 

DW: I would love to remake Rebecca, but I know Ben Wheatley is doing it, and our Director of Photography Laurie Rose is shooting it. Sounds like a weird one from me, but I’m drawn to the idea of this well-made Gothic, classical, disturbing, mystery horror film. It’d be fascinating. 

KK: The Red House 

DW: The Candy Snatchers I think you mentioned once [to Kevin]. The Sentinel would be a good one because I think it’s a cool idea for a movie. We chatted about that. 

KK: Pet Sematary? I’d take another crack at it. [Laughter] 

DW: Kevin and I are writers/directors, so we have a lot of original ideas we’d love to film – but we’ll never say no to a remake. Especially if it’s something that, like Pet Sematary, there’s more to mine within the subject matter. That’ll always be a reason to go back and remake. 

 

Pet Sematary is currently in theaters. Get your tickets now.

 

 

 

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