“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier.”
Of all the Stephen King books I’ve read – which is almost all of them, although I’ve never gotten around to The Tommyknockers, Lisey’s Story, or Gerald’s Game – few have terrified me like Pet Sematary. It’s one of King’s scariest, maybe even a close second to It. (Don’t worry, this won’t be an overlong, self-involved digression about my Stephen King bona fides.) The novel is peak King. It combines some of his most terrifying imagery, coupled with existential dread and some deeply unsettling philosophical underpinnings. Pet Sematary, at its core, is about our inability and unwillingness to cope with grief, to accept loss. It shows the nightmarish extremes to which we will go to reverse course when it’s far too late. The movie does this justice.
What baffles me is that Pet Sematary seems to fly under the radar. It doesn’t usually get mentioned alongside standout King adaptations like The Shining or Cujo. The film isn’t perfect, but it’s terrifying, and at times it’s genuinely upsetting. Isn’t that what we want out of a horror movie?
The plot is classic, straightforward King: the Creed family moves to a rural part of Maine, where Louis is set to be the new doctor at the college. The Creed family isn’t incredibly interesting, to be fair (Dale Midkiff, as Louis, is fairly bland in a role that Tom Cruise would absolutely murder), but the supporting cast, and the environment, picks up a lot of the slack. Their neighbor is Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne), who embodies one of King’s favorite archetypes, that of the fundamentally decent person. The idyllic silence of the countryside is broken periodically by semi trucks speeding down the road, and soon after moving in Jud takes the Creeds on a hike to the pet cemetery (the sign was made by children, giving the film’s title its eerie misspelling).
Gwynne’s performance is marvelous, in its small way. Speaking with a thick Maine accent, he uses folksy colloquialisms like “Here’s to your bones,” and Jud Crandall stuck in the cultural subconscious strongly enough to become parodied; South Park, for instance, has gotten a lot of comedic mileage out of this character. But there’s no joke here; Gwynne plays Jud totally straight, and the friendly yet paternal bond that he establishes with Louis is one of the film’s strong suits. Gwynne more than makes up for Midkiff’s comparatively lackluster performance.
Director Mary Lambert, a music video veteran, wisely lets her visuals do the talking. On Louis’s first day at the college, a badly wounded student named Victor Pascal dies during his shift. There’s some great makeup effects in this sequence, as we see a flap of Victor’s skin pulled away to reveal his brain. Brad Greenquist, as Victor, is one of the film’s most disquieting presences, and he’s largely responsible for one of Pet Sematary‘s scariest sequences. Pascal, still wearing the jogging outfit he dies in, wakes up Louis and takes him to the pet cemetery. He shows Louis a thicket of brambles and warns him not to go past it. He intones: “The ground…beyond…is sour.” When Louis wakes from his dream, his feet are covered in dirt.
Pet Sematary works as a mosaic of nightmarish images. First the family cat Winston Churchill dies, hit by a truck, and Lambert treats us to the visceral sound of a dead cat being peeled off of a lawn. Jud, wanting to help, takes Louis beyond the pet cemetery to the Micmac burial ground beyond (this makes for one of Lambert’s most effective visuals, as Louis and Jud are dwarfed by the size of the burial ground; in no other scene does Pet Sematary operate on this scale). When the cat is resurrected, it’s aggressive and foul-smelling. It’s not the cat that Louis buried. Here Jud’s makes horrible sense: What comes out of the ground isn’t what you put in it. “What did we do?” Louis asks him, and Jud can’t explain. “Has anyone ever buried a human up there?” he presses, and Jud is aghast: “Jesus, no!”
What happens from here is obvious, but no less horrifying for that. The youngest Creed, Gage, is killed by a passing semi. At the funeral, Louis gets into a fistfight with his father-in-law, showing an ugly, uncomfortable side of grief. Jud shows up at Louis’s door to deliver the film’s best line: “Sometimes, dead is better.” But it’s too late. It was too late the second that Jud took Louis to the Micmac burial ground. We know that Louis is going to take Gage up there – where the ground is sour – but the most upsetting part about Pet Sematary is that it forces us to empathize with Louis. Who, given the choice that Louis is given, wouldn’t do the same thing? Wouldn’t you do anything to bring back the ones you love? There’s an amount of selfishness inherent in grief, because we can’t stop thinking about how tragedy affects us personally – but there’s an amount of love there, too. Louis digs up Gage’s coffin and cradles the dead child to his chest; it’s a horrifying image, but also, in a strange way, very sweet.
But what you put in isn’t what comes back. Gage is deranged and murderous. In a scene that’s still hard to watch, he slices Jud’s Achilles tendon before biting his throat out. Louis’s wife Rachel (Denise Crosby, matching Midkiff for blandness) comes home and is in turn killed by Gage. Louis is forced to watch his son die a second time, but at his own hand. (This is a good sequence, but Miko Hughes, as Gage, is not very scary; that’s not his fault, he was a little kid when this was shot.) This is where most movies would end, with Louis having learned a horrifying lesson that cost the lives of his wife and best friend. But that’s where Pet Sematary takes its great, bleak turn. Louis learns nothing by this. His rationale is that he waited too long to bury Gage, and if he buries Rachel right now, she’ll come back to him. She does, as a rotting, shambling wretch, and in the film’s final chilling shot, the two kiss as she raises a knife.
Pet Sematary does more than end on an upsetting visual. It takes an ordinary man and presents him with extraordinary grief and tragedy. In retrospect, Midkiff’s unremarkable performance helps here; Louis Creed is all but a cipher, allowing us to project ourselves onto him. Bargaining is one of the five steps of the grieving process, and that’s what Pet Sematary is about. What you put in the ground isn’t what comes out – but what if you do it quickly enough? What if there was even a sliver of a chance? Would you take that risk?
I think I would.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: House of the Devil
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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