Sneak peek: Sarah Wayne Callies deals with dead in 'Other Side of the Door'

Sarah Wayne Callies had the craziest nightmare during her stint on AMC’s zombie-filled TV series The Walking Dead.

“I was on this beautiful river, and then it started to get gray," says Callies. "I put my eyes underwater, and all of a sudden these dead bodies started floating up toward me. And then they started reaching for me. It was so horrifying.”

Sorry, Sarah: It looks like her night visions are going to continue with the ghost story The Other Side of the Door (in theaters March 11). Only this time, it’s not the undead to be feared, but her dead screen son and other angry spirits.

Director and co-screenwriter Johannes Roberts says he was inspired to make The Other Side of the Door by classic horror stories such as W.W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw and Stephen King's Pet Sematary. The tale focuses on a family living overseas in Mumbai, India, who are struck by tragedy when their 8-year-old son Oliver (Logan Creran) is killed in a car accident, for which his mother, Maria (Callies), feels directly responsible.

Maria falls into a deep depression, unable to function around her husband (Jeremy Sisto) or 6-year-old daughter (Sofia Rosinsky), who survived the crash. But her housekeeper tells her about a Hindu ritual that will allow her to speak to her son one last time. She's instructed to head to an abandoned temple, sprinkle her son's ashes and, when he appears at night, to speak to him from the other side of the temple portal.

The one caveat is that no matter what he says, she cannot open the door between the two worlds.

"But she opens it because she desperately wants to see her son again," says Roberts. "And everything goes to hell in a handbasket."

It soon becomes clear that Maria is haunted by her son and other spirits angered by the sacrilege of the open door. Callies says the story has New Age spirituality at its roots.

“People are cherry-picking things out of spiritual traditions embedded in a deep cultural context,” says Callies. “Calling upon gods who don’t know you might not be the best way to get help.”

The filmmakers shot for three months in Mumbai during 2014's sweltering summer heat, including exteriors at author Rudyard Kipling's birthplace. Callies says Creran was unfazed by playing dead.

"He’s actually the sweetest little boy," says Callies. "But if you give them the direction to scare the (heck) out of someone, boys just love it. It becomes a three-month-long Halloween."

She's not sure if she’ll see the film. She doesn’t watch horror movies and has never seen an episode of The Walking Dead. “They just scare me too much.”

“It all depends if I can work up the courage,” says Callies. "I have to make sure my husband (Josh Winterhalt) will be home for the following two weeks. I’ll need to have someone keep the demons away at night.”