Like a roadkilled cat gruesomely returned from the dead, Pet Sematary is back. The 2019 remake of the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1983 novel lumbers onto the screen like a resurrected pet (or child): It looks normal at first glance, but the more you watch it, the more you understand something is seriously wrong. “Sometimes dead is better,” intones the folksy local Jud Crandall (John Lithgow), a fine summation for this remake as there ever was. Which is truly a shame, since its source novel remains one of the more thought-provoking exercises by King on death and loss, and what happens when we refuse to face what’s right in front of us.

King himself has said he never wanted to see the novel in film. He wrote it in 1978, after his daughter’s cat Smucky was hit on the highway outside their front door, and after saving his young son Owen from running out on to that same road. The book so horrified his wife and his friend Peter Straub that they advised him against publishing it. Only when King needed a novel to get out of a contract with his publisher did he resurrect it. “That book came out of a real hole in my psyche,” King has said about the novel. “If I had my way about it, I still would not have published Pet Sematary. I don’t like it. It’s a terrible book—not in terms of the writing, but it just spirals down into darkness.”

Like so many of King’s novels, Pet Sematary is about the darkness at the edge of town: the sour evil that lurks thinly veiled behind a picturesque rural Americana. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) and his family move from Boston (where Louis was an E.R. doctor) to the sylvan Ludlow, Maine, where he’s to assume an unassuming gig as the campus health services director of a local university. What seems like a sleepy, monotonous job of diagnosing strep and mono takes a bad turn when a student, Victor Pascow (Obssa Ahmed), is hit by a car and brought in oozing blood and brain; Louis, despite a valiant attempt, cannot save him. But worse things are in store for Louis: His new home abuts a dangerous highway where trucks race by, killing local pets by the score. His property, meanwhile, stretches back fifty acres into the forest—“further than you’d ever care to go,” his neighbor Jud explains—where there are worse things than trucks.

What made the original novel so evocative was its fundamental meditation on grief. In both the book and the movie, Louis and his wife are struggling to avoid the agony of loss. For Louis, it’s the student Victor Pascow who he couldn’t save. His wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz), meanwhile, is still haunted by her sister Zelda’s death from meningitis when Rachel was a child (she blames herself for the fall that finally kills Zelda, and, as this version makes clear, she’s probably right to). When their 8-year-old daughter Ellie (Jeté Laurence) starts asking questions about mortality, they’re unable to offer her anything except platitudes and clichés—Louis the atheist via bloodless descriptions of decomposition, and Rachel countering with insultingly vague promises of Heaven.

When Ellie’s cat Church gets hit by a truck, Louis can’t bear to tell her, and his neighbor Jud offers to help him bury the cat in the pet cemetery behind the Creed’s house. Once there, in the dark of night, Jud seems possessed, and offers to take Louis and Church’s body past the deadfall of piled logs at the edge of the pet cemetery, through a swamp to a burial ground where dead things that are buried return.