Paramount's expansion of their Pet Sematary story has gained new blood in actors Samantha Mathis and Henry Thomas. The Paramount Players' sequel to the rebooted Stephen King property is expected to arrive sometime late in 2022, and already has a cast list of Jackson White, Forrest Goodluck, Jack Mulhern, Natalie Alyn Lind, Isabella Star LeBlanc and Pam Grier who got to work on the production last week. The movie is being direct by Lindsay Beer, who also wrote the script based on Jeff Buhler's original draft.

Stephen King has long been cited as one of his scariest stories, telling the story of the Creed family and the horrors that befall them when they mess with an ancient burial ground and the evil it releases, and has already been made into movies by Paramount in 1989, with a follow-up a few years later, and a remake in 2019. The new movie will act as a prequel to the original story, and has Beer on board to continue the tradition of the franchise, which made history in 1989 for having Mary Lambert helm both that feature and its sequel.

The plot of the Pet Seminary Prequel is currently unknown, but Jackson White signing on play a younger version of Jud Crandall, a neighbor to the Creeds who has had his own experience with the cursed ground of the Pet Sematary, it is likely that the prequel is going to tell his story, which was explained in a little more depth in King's novel than in any of the movie iterations, having been virtually cut entirely from the latest incarnation - probably for the very reason that they hoped to tell that story on its own merit. In a time when sequels, prequels and remakes are all the rage, it is probably one of the few spin-off stories that genuinely deserves its own movie.

In the novel, Judd Crandall welcomes the Creed family to their new home and when the family cat is killed by a truck he explains the secrets of a burial ground beyond the creepy but benevolent Pet Sematary of the title, which turns out to be a decision he will live to regret. Having seen the dark powers of the burial ground first hand in the past, his willingness to share the secret is probably still one of the many dubious decisions in horror fiction. White will be the third actor to play the character, following the late Fred Gwynne in the 1989 original and John Lithgow who took on the role for the 2019 remake.

There is no word yet as to who Samantha Mathis, most recently seen in Guillermo del Toro's The Strain and Billions, and Henry Thomas, still most famous for his breakthrough as the star of ET but who has recently developed his horror chops in Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor, will be playing in the new movie but we will likely find out some time soon as the production of the movie continues into the fall. The untitled Pet Sematary movie will premiere in 2022 exclusively on Paramount+. This news originated at Deadline.