New Pet Sematary Movie Casts Young Jud Crandall

The new Pet Sematary movie, which is in development to be released exclusively on Paramount+, has found its first cast member and with it seemingly revealed what the film will be about. According to a report from Deadline, actor Jackson White (Mrs. Fletcher) is in final negotiations to take on the role of Jud Crandall in the film. Fans of the original Stephen King story and the feature films it inspired will remember Crandall as the elder neighbor character to the Creed, played by Fred Gwynne in the 1989 adaptation of the book with John Lithgow taking on the role in the 2019 reboot.

With White being a 25-year-old actor, his casting seems to clearly indicate that this film will be a prequel to the classic Pet Sematary story and that he’ll take on a younger Jud for the movie. Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura previously teased that a prequel movie was a possibility but the film and book both clearly outline what a prequel movie would be about. In the original story, and feature adaptations, Jud tells his distraught neighbor Louis Creed about what went wrong the last time that a person was buried in the “Pet Sematary” and returned from the dead.

Crandall tells the story of Timmy Baterman, a person killed during World War II and whose father buried him in the “sour ground.” After returning to life, Baterman began to terrorize people just like the pets that returned, but would terrorize the town with their own secrets. In the end his father would kill him once again. The whole story from Crandall leads to the iconic line “sometimes, dead is better.”

It’s not confirmed that this will be the content of the new movie but if we were the betting type we would put the house on it.

Lindsey Beer (Sierra Burgess Is a Loser) is set to write and direct the film based on a previous script by Jeff Buhler.

“I think if there’s anything here, there’s a prequel,” di Bonaventura previously told Consequence of Sound about a Pet Sematary prequel idea he had. “I think if you look at the book, we didn’t cover all that stuff that happens before the Creed family moves in. So, I think there’s a movie there, and I think I’d be particularly interested in doing that, because, again, it’s the source material and you are going toward something that also has a lot of crazy, creepy feelings about it.”

Check back here for more details on the new Pet Sematary as we learn them.