ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Pet Sematary: Bloodlines director Lindsey Beer about the horror prequel. The director spoke about her feature directorial debut and the enduring appeal of Stephen King stories. The film is now available to stream through Paramount+ and to buy on Digital and available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment.
“In 1969, a young Jud Crandall is set to leave his hometown of Ludlow, Maine, in search of his life’s purpose,” the movie‘s official synopsis reads. “Before he makes it out, however, Jud and his childhood friends encounter an ancient evil that has gripped Ludlow since its founding.”
Tyler Treese: Pet Sematary: Bloodlines is a prequel, and it really flushes out the backstory of the town of Ludlow. I know some of it is mentioned in the original book, but how was the process of broadening what we know about the mythology and the town while also making it your own and balancing staying true to the original vision? I’m sure that’s quite a balancing act.
Lindsey Beer: Yeah. There was a lot of balancing going on, and, for me, I just kept rereading the book and using that as the North Star. There were a few pillars that I felt I had to stay between or work around. One is the central thesis of Pet Sematary in terms of, “What would you do if you could bring your loved one back to life? If you could spend one more day with somebody you love?” And making sure that that was still our moral argument in the film. But then there were parts of the book like Timmy Baterman coming back from war and the evil manifested in him and what that looked like.
The fact that he could read townspeople’s minds and knew their darkest secrets and played with his food the way that the cat liked to play with dead birds … I just thought that was such an interesting villain to start with because the townspeople, at first, didn’t know that there was something wrong with Timmy other than he was a boy back from war who came back very broken and damaged and exploring that, I just thought, was really interesting. But beyond that, there are so many characters in here that are from the book, but they’re characters that are mentioned on a page or in a sentence. The challenge of then trying to flesh out those backstories … I was just constantly reading and rereading and trying to pull different things together so that I could tie it in a bow.
I was really surprised to find out that this was your directorial feature debut. Did anything about the process of making a movie surprise you, or did it go pretty much how you expected it to?
Well, I’ve been on sets for so long that there was nothing really surprising other than I was maybe under the misunderstanding that after my director’s cut, the hours in the day would maybe go down to something normal, like a 10 to 12-hour workday. [Laughs]. But no, it was like 20 hours a day for three and a half years. So, the length of time and that it was as intense as it was surprised me. But other than that, no, not much surprised me about making it.
It’s interesting to have the young Jud Crandall as the protagonist here, and it’s a sort of a double-edged sword because people know he survives, but they’re already invested in the character. How was playing with the character that has that plot armor but also has a fanbase?
Yeah, I think there’s a challenge and an opportunity in that, obviously, people immediately have a connection to Jud. He is such a fan favorite from the book and from every movie installment. For me, the fun was taking him from a naïve boy who just wants to go out in the world and help people to that more disillusioned man that we see sitting on the porch in the later installments and in our movie as his father did before him.
But because we do know what becomes of him, for me, the important thing was just that we build the relationships around him. What we don’t know is how many people he loses in this movie and who survives in terms of the people he cares about. So the relationships were really key.
I thought Jackson White did so great in that role. Can you speak to what you saw in him as a young, talented actor and what you thought he really brought to the role?
He has this old soul quality to him, and I just thought that a character that we only know as an old man … it was so important that there was some kind of string of connection there, that you could see how this much younger version of somebody could kind of become that older person that we know in the later installments.
I really enjoyed David Duchovny’s performance. Those are some heavy scenes and themes to be dealing with — to be so desperate to bring your son back and then ultimately know that you can’t have your son anymore. What stood out about just his performance?
He was the first person I thought of because of his role on Californication and just what an amazing father he played in that. It was so important to me that Bill come across as somebody who’s a sympathetic antagonist and not a villain. I really thought that he showed that range. There are times when you fear him, there are times when you feel your heart break for him, and seeing that entire range of performance was gratifying as a David Duchovny fan, but was also gratifying as a director of the film. I thought he knocked it out of the park.
Three out of the four Pet Sematary movies have been directed by women. What did it mean to really add to that legacy of both the series and having women behind the camera for this series?
Yeah, that meant a ton to me. There have been so many Stephen King adaptations, and unfortunately not very many of them have been adapted by women. Pet Sematary is definitely more than pulling its weight in that regard. [Laughs]. But I mean, for my directorial debut, I loved the fact that Pet Sematary — the original in 1989 — was directed by Mary Lambert. It’s obviously a classic and a lot of people don’t even know that a woman directed that film.
Stephen King’s work has been able to really stand the test of time. The framework works so well, whether you take it back to the ’60s like this or stay in the modern day. What do you think makes his work so ripe for adaptation?
In my opinion, it’s because his stories … they really start with character, and they’re so human and relatable, so the scary stuff is just all the more scary because of the human drama. That’s always going to be relatable. Shakespeare’s always relatable because of the human drama, even though it was centuries ago. So I think whenever you start with character and a character that somebody loves in a world that feels really rich … and all of his worlds feel so lived-in, but you also want to know more about them. I think that’s why they can really justify endless revisits.
I spoke with Henry Thomas recently, and he’s great as the father of Judd. He said he got a recommendation to work with you from Mike Flanagan. What did that mean to get that type of co-sign and to get an actor like Henry involved?
I actually did not know that! [Laughs]. I mean, that’s great. I loved working with Henry. I think he’s such a phenomenal actor and he brought this kind of warmth, but also this … even though there was so much he couldn’t say in the role, you can tell that he’s a caring father and those layers were really there. He’s obviously such a genre legend. There’s just a shorthand when you see him on the screen. He’s got some secrets and he’s been through some shit.
