THE FIRST STEPHEN KING BOOK that Lindsey Anderson Beer read – at the age of nine – was Pet Sematary. Now she has directed her debut movie based on the novel which, despite reading much of his work since, remains her favourite King book.
“It’s such a surprising combination of things,” she says of the 1983 horror. “You hear the title Pet Sematary, it sounds somewhere between silly and absurdist, right? But it’s really just a backdoor entry into what is actually a very poignant meditation on grief and loss and parenthood and what we would do, really, to save or protect or spend one more day with the people that we love.
“There’s such a deeply human aspect of it. The horror really is secondary. But there’s this incredible dread and tension that runs throughout the entire book.
“There’s also this almost absurdist inner monologue of [protagonist] Lewis’s that runs throughout the book that I thought was so funny when I read it. Even as a kid and then revisiting it as
