Stephen King is so monumentally productive, even now, five decades into his career, that it’s hard to nail down the peaks of his bibliography. But critics and fans agree that his 1983 novel “Pet Sematary” was something special, and especially horrific. The story of an attractive American family finding terror in a new home credibly wedded Edgar Allan Poe’s twitchy, stiff-necked dread with the fetid, swampy atmospherics of a 1950s EC horror comic.

The Creeds, Louis and Rachel and their young children, Ellie and Gage, move to rustic Maine and find out their property includes a creepy burial ground for pets, and behind that, an even creepier burial ground where the loved ones interred “come back,” as the Creeds’s avuncular neighbor, Jud, puts it. Louis and Jud try it out on the family’s killed-by-a-truck cat. That doesn’t work out well. Then other things don’t work out well.