'Pet Sematary' uses your very adult fears for its chilling, childish horror

Warning: Mild spoilers for the remake of Pet Sematary (all of which have already been included in the film's trailer) lie ahead.

Stephen King's savagely scary Pet Sematary has returned to the big screen -- and to say this resurrection feels like a haunting we just can't shake would be a hellish understatement.

The premise of this remake, directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, is well known to readers and moviegoers with an affinity for its previous iterations. The story of the Creed family and their rapid unraveling first appeared in King's original 1983 novel and was later adapted for King's 1989 film of the same name. Both remain key staples in most horror rotations worth their salt.

And yet, even for non-King fans, the Pet Sematary of 2019 seems eerily familiar. It's easy to imagine an older sibling, flashlight in hand, regaling you with the morbid details of a neighborhood graveyard cursed with the power to bring back the dead. On the surface, Pet Sematary is a zombie-centric scare that seems if not totally juvenile, at least a bit basic -- and possibly not worth revisiting.

But, don't be fooled. Pet Sematary's bread and butter terror isn't in its round-the-campfire premise. Rather, what makes this retold tale so spectacularly upsetting is its ability to once again capture adult fears and heighten them to the unbridled level of hell found only in a child's nightmare.

Throughout the film's hour and forty-minute runtime, the adults in the room, Louis and Rachel Creed (Jason Clarke and Amy Seimetz) as well as neighbor Jud Crandall (John Lithgow), traipse through life's most dauntingly big questions with reckless abandon.

Within the film's first twenty minutes, Louis and Rachel debate the existence of God, Heaven, and Hell, as well as how (and if) they should explain the concepts of mortality and death to their two young children. Jud similarly laments the passing of his late wife, questioning when and if the two might ever be reunited. Consistent and stark, these philosophical discussions are enough to make even the most at-peace viewer feel their expiration date approaching.

As these existential explorations fester, the film simultaneously and relentlessly picks away at a number of more practical adult fears. Pet Sematary is largely devoid of monsters under the bed, instead replacing boogeymen with the kind of stuff that can actually kill you.

From a little girl finding a loaded handgun in a stranger's house to multiple speeding eighteen-wheelers threatening to flatten anyone within frame, these real-life threats will occasionally make you jump, but more often make you want to parent and protect the characters you are watching dangle from a thread.

Ultimately, Louis and Rachel's daughter Ellie meets an untimely and strikingly tragic end as a result of these realistic dangers. That's when all hell breaks loose.

The undead frights you bought that ticket to see arrive full force, just as you might have imagined them as a child.

Ellie (Jeté Laurence) becomes a fountain of vile dialogue, delivering biting lines with the reinvigorated venom of The Exorcist's Regan MacNeil. A bloody ghost appears just out of frame repeatedly, giving you serious Toni Collette in Hereditary vibes. Church the Zombie Cat pops up to hiss directly to camera like an angry fog machine on a startlingly glitchy timer.

It's all stuff you've seen or at least mulled over before, but it feels alarmingly impactful within Pet Sematary's adult thematic context.

In many ways, Pet Sematary is the perfect companion piece to Andy Muschietti's It: Chapter 1. Although the projects share little connection outside of drawing from King source material, they approach the same dreadful theme from two opposite, but complimentary generational angles.

While It builds up its horror by imagining childish fears at their most extreme and inventively visualized, Pet Sematary gently pumps the brakes to deliver a more mature, but equally unnerving experience from the adult vantage point.

By building familiar scary imagery atop unceasing adult fears, Pet Sematary captures pragmatic, unshakable panic like a firm gut check. It's no Pennywise, but for adult viewers that might be even more horrifying.

Pet Sematary hits theaters April 5.