Paramount announced back in February that they were looking to exhume Stephen King's Pet Sematary, and the project may now have a director in Alexandre Aja. The French director of Switchblade Romance is in talks with the studio to bring the Creed family back to life.
Aja's career since Switchblade Romance (or Haute Tension, as we ought to call it) has been perplexing. That awesome debut turned a lot of heads, but his Hollywood CV to date has been a hundred percent remakes (The Hills Have Eyes*, Mirrors, Piranha), which surely ought to make him wary of yet another.
Previously filmed by Mary Lambert from King's own screenplay in 1989 (with a sequel by the same director in 1992), Pet Sematary sees the hapless Creeds moving into a new home near an ancient Native American burial ground which can reanimate the dead. "Sometimes dead is better" though, as kindly neighbour Fred Gwynne explains. By which he means "always", since whatever comes comes out of the ground (Church the cat; little boy Gage; Lt. Tasha Yar) becomes a homicidal shadow of what went in. The film is clunky, but we reckon the Zelda flashbacks are untouchably horrific.
Aja was at Comic-Con talking up Cobra: The Space Pirate, but it seems that he's still struggling to get the sci-fi manga adaptation up and running. Perhaps there's a deal to be done with Paramount here? One more remake, and then...
Whether or not Aja signs on the line, the new Pet Sematary has a screenplay by Matthew Greenberg (who also wrote 1408) and is being produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Steven Schneider. We'll have more news as soon as it's exhumed.
*Admittedly really quite good.