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After most authors sell their books’ movie rights, they have no rights at all when they’re adapted to the screen. That wasn’t, however, the case with Stephen King’s 1983 novel PET SEMATARY.

The best-selling horror novelist’s contract specified that he’d write the  PET screenplay and that it would be followed faithfully in production, which would be done near King’s Bangor, Maine home.

After King had written the PET novel, he decided at first to just put it away. Then his wife, actress Tabitha King, read it and pushed him to have it published, which was definitely good advice.

King’s idea for PET came after Smuckey, his daughter’s cat, was tragically hit and killed by a speeding truck on a road near their home. King later memorialized Smuckey on gravestones in both the town’s and the movie’s pet cemeteries.

PET’s movie rights were originally bought in 1984 by George Romero for just $10,000. Romero, however, wound up leaving the project to direct the sci-fi horror film MONKEY SHINES for Orion Pictures. Lindsay Doran, an Embassy Pictures production executive, loved the PET screenplay, but couldn’t get it made there. After she joined Paramount in 1985 as VP, Production, Doran kept trying, but the studio felt audiences had tired of King movies since so many of his books had been turned into early ’80s films.

Doran and King got lucky during the 1988 Writers Guild strike because with the flow of new scripts suddenly halted, Paramount needed to find more projects to release in ’89. With King’s PET script ready to go before the cameras, Doran got a green light from Paramount to acquire the rights and start filming.

King’s contract also gave him director approval. Paramount’s first choice was Mary Lambert, who’d only made one feature — the 1987 romantic mystery SIESTA with Ellen Barkin. But Lambert was well known for directing music videos for Madonna, including MATERIAL GIRL & LIKE A PRAYER. King met with and approved Lambert, who’d made it clear she’d follow his screenplay very closely. Since King was on set during production, he was able to keep a close eye on what Lambert was shooting.

When Lambert screened her first cut for Paramount, she was told it ran too long and cut scenes to fix that problem. Worse yet, the studio didn’t like her ending, which it felt was too tame and ambiguous (no spoilers here). Lambert thought it was a “more spooky, sad, tragic” ending. But Paramount, of course, had the last word. The ending was re-shot to be a stronger and more gruesome conclusion for a horror thriller.

In the end, a “gruesome” ending was just what moviegoers wanted to see. PET, which Paramount produced for $11.5M, opened April 21, 1989 and went on to do a lively $57.5M in domestic theatres.