A remake of Pet Sematary has been on Hollywood’s radar for many years now, with various directors attached at various points in time. But it’s finally on the fast track, with 28 Weeks Later director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo at the helm. He wrote the script with Jeff Buhler, who promises a dark and terrifying film.

In an interview with Dread Central, Buhler (The Midnight Meat Train) spoke briefly about the impending remake – or re-adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, if you prefer – revealing that he and Fresnadillo have spent the last three months fine-tuning the script for optimum horror.

“The characters in this script make some tragic decisions, and the horror is about the ramifications of those decisions,” Buhler told the site. “There are still the supernatural aspects of the book, with the pet cemetery and the burial ground from which things come back from the dead, but the real horror is, ‘What do these things do to the family? What does it do to a person to see their child killed, but then to know that they can bring them back? How do you tussle with that idea? And if and when you make that choice, what does that do to you? Will that child be the same? How can life ever return to normal?’”

“This is pretty far from the 1980’s film, which I adore for certain things that are very intrinsic to that time period in terms of the genre, like a truck driver smoking a joint to a Ramones song,” the writer continued. “But when a little kid comes back with a scalpel and is like, ‘I want to play with you,’ it kind of becomes Chucky. With this one, we really wanted to get into the emotional aspects of it. There’s still plenty of visceral horror that’s explored, but I’ve always felt that if you lean more into the characters and into their emotional lives, when the visceral shit hits the fan, it’s ten times more scary.”

Buhler hopes that this brand new take on Pet Sematary will finds its way in front of cameras by the end of the year, and he says that the film’s budget is currently up for approval at the studio.