Like a big kid in a candy store where the jars are stocked with ghosts and giant robots, Guillermo Del Toro’s cinematic eyes are often bigger than his movie-making stomach. For every movie the Pan’s Labyrinth auteur manages to actually make—like the recently released Crimson Peak—there’ll be three or four At The Mountains Of Madness or Hellboy 3’s, awesome-sounding projects that will never see the light of day.
Case in point: the director’s recently expressed interest in Stephen King’s exercise in spell-check frustration, Pet Sematary. Del Toro hopped on Twitter the other day to declare it his “book of the day,” adding that he “would kill to make it on film.”
Look, let’s be honest here for a second: Guillermo Del Toro is never going to make Pet Sematary. You know it, we know it, Del Toro probably knows it. (We’re pretty sure he’s already been distracted by the prospect of remaking Hellraiser or something.) But it’s still fun to play let’s pretend, especially when you add in all the ripe potential of the novel’s Wendigo subplot, which was overlooked by Mary Lambert’s perfectly fine 1989 adaptation. There’s still a lot of meat left on the book—easily one of King’s darkest—and Del Toro’s take on reanimated cats and the soulless, razor-wielding Gage—who’d make a fine addition to the director’s canon of creepy kids—would be worth the price of admission alone.
So sure, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pet Sematary is a fantasy, but isn’t it a director’s job to foster fantasy onto the world? It’s actually kind of brilliant that Del Toro has figured out a reliable way to pull it off without even taking the lens cap off of his camera.