Some of us are fortunate enough to experience a novel, poem,
painting…or movie, that strikes us as perfectly planned, all the
way from the outline in the artist’s soul.
Maybe you felt it right away. Or maybe you read about it, or learned about it from someone who loved it too. A friend, a review, a teacher. Someone who could interpret the artist’s vision. What they dreamed of creating… how they went about doing it—going from a simple idea to a finished piece of work.
Don’t expect this from Pet Sematary.
You won’t feel the filmmakers, especially Stephen King (who wrote the novel and the screenplay) knew exactly where they were going. Not everything fits together… not by a long shot.
Yet not only is this a pretty scary movie, it may leave you with unanswered questions you think about a long while. Disturbing questions.
The DVD commentary mentions that it took King a long while to publish the novel Pet Sematary. Not much explanation, but
strong hints that the book’s themes hit close to home. Like the novel’s family the Creed’s, King and his wife had young
children then, and lived in a house close to a highway with trucks
speeding by. Like the young Ellie Creed, King’s daughter had
a cat killed on that road. Writing it had to take a toll on King.
The movie starts out bland. The Creed family moves from Chicago to small-town Maine. Louis, the father starts a job in a small-college infirmary. Rachel, a home-maker, daughter Ellie, full of life; perceptive, endlessly curious, and subject to strange dreams. Their son Gage just starting to walk, and as full of life as Ellie—a sweet, sweet child.
Their new house a dream-come-true, in every way but
one. It’s located just off a busy highway, filled with huge
trucks travelling from a local manufacturing facility. Day
and night these monsters speed by.
The Creed’s bond right away with their new neighbor, Jud Crandall. A huge, gruff looking guy, Jud is actually full of kindness and warmth. The Creed’s are neighbors he has longed for.
Right away the Creed’s ask Jud about a path near their house. Jud shows them where it leads, a cemetery (misspelled by a child) for dead pets, many of them killed on the road. Most of the markers are hand-written, in phrases a young child would write. Only Rachel finds it frightening. Jud’s take? Not a scary place, but a place of rest.
His first day on the job, Louis encounters death. A student, out jogging, hit by a truck, killed instantly.
Ironically the dead student, Victor, becomes a sort of angel for Louis, doing his best to steer him away from danger. The first night Louis sees him in the bedroom, he is sure he is dreaming.
“Who said you were dreaming?” Victor says. He leads Louis down the path to the pet sematary, then warns him. “The barrier is not meant to be crossed.”
Thanksgiving. You learn about bad blood between Louis and Rachel’s family. No explanation, but bad enough that Louis refuses to visit. While his family is away, Louis takes a phone call from Jud.
Ellie’s cat, Church, on the road, run over.
Louis and Jud know how much Church meant to
Ellie. It’s Jud who gives Louis the idea to bury the cat in the other pet sematary—actually a Micmac tribal burial ground.
Church is back the next day. Not physically changed much, but…different. Real mean. 
Church–brought back to life
Finally Louis gets the story from Jud. As a boy, Jud had a dog he loved. When the dog died, Jud was heartbroken. A ragman, half Micmac, told Jud about the burial ground. Jud buried the dog there. The dog returned—as savage as Church is now.
Louis and Jud hoped to spare Ellie from the pain of
death. The plan works better than expected. Church is
vicious with most people, yet treats Ellie pretty much the same.
Ironically, the Creed family experiences death nevertheless. Missy, their housekeeper, diagnosed with terminal cancer. Unable to deal with the unending pain, she chooses suicide.
Ellie finds some peace in talking to her dad about life after death. Louis does not follow any organized religion, but has faith just the same in an afterlife. “I believe we go on,” he says to Ellie.
But Missy’s death reminds Rachel of her sister Zelda; her slow painful death from spinal meningitis. Her family never explained why, but her sister got no outside medical care.
“…like a dirty secret,” is how Rachel describes her situation.The burden fell on Rachel, still a child. Many felt that the scenes of Rachel caring for Zelda were the scariest in the movie, and I can’t argue with that. Could her family have experienced some kind of inappropriate shame about Zelda? No one will say. Clearly they had money to spare. Rachel has never asked them about it.
When Zelda finally died, Rachel was relieved…to the point of joyfulness. The guilt about her gladness still haunts her.
Zelda–memories Rachel wants to forget
But worse tragedy will strike the Creed’s; the worst misfortune a family can suffer. No big surprise; death seems to follow them. Jud’s words: The road, the road, the road. A beautiful breezy fall day, a kite soaring in the sky. Jud and the Creed family in harmony
with the season, with their world.
A few miles away, another monster truck. Thedriver blasts loud, primal music, Ramones music. A bringer of sure death. The Creed’s lose sight of Gage for just a few seconds. But enough time. Gage never has a chance.
You know what happens next. Louis, unable to face his grief, will wait until after Gage’s funeral, dig up his body, and bury him where he buried Church. Already knowing the odds; Gage will come back a monster. Louis ignores Victor’s warning about crossing the barrier.
You expect this movie to deliver on its promises of terror, and it does. I won’t throw in many spoilers.
Leave it at this: The excellent directing, screenwriting and acting succeed at a difficult job– making the horror in this story believable.
Why is the story so unlikely to be believable? Think about it. A sweet young kid, returning from the grave, now a demon… These scenes should have been unconvincing, could easily have been embarrassing, if handled badly. Give everyone credit.
I remember renting Pet Sematary when it first came to video stores. My own kids were young. My feelings then; the story
played dirty. Any time you use a child’s death this way, you are playing dirty.
Two brief insights 25 years later:
First, none of us gets to say what someone can or
cannot write about. Neither can we cannot limit where
writers get their inspiration. On the DVD extras, you see
King watching the movie being shot. King is all smiles.
But what he went through in creating the book is another
story.
Second, if you hold up older movies as measuring
sticks for comparison, saying Pet Sematary crosses the lines of decency. You may be forgetting the savage beating movies like
Horror of Dracula, Peeping Tom, and Freaks got when they were released. People then, convinced these movies played dirty.
Speaking as a fan of all those movies, I don’t ever want to get old and talk about the good old days. I want people free to experience barriers smashed, the way I did, watching Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist.
Still, by mainstream standards, this is a grim, pessimistic, ugly story. Louis’ decision comes from love, not evil motives. He only wants a chance to get back the life his family had, for Gage to experience growing up.
To a fundamentalist Christian, for example, Louis probably sinned deeply; interfering with God’s plan.
But I doubt that’s where King was coming from. The story of a sinner getting his just desserts would not be as scary as this.
Scarier still, King possibly had no point to make at
all. Maybe the real-life death of his own cat simply created
a story inside him, and he followed where it went. The cat’s
death made him imagine something worse.
We can be amateur psychologists and ask if Louis “loved too much.” Not likely. Not enough evidence. I think King wanted all of us to be dragged into Louis’ agony—to make it a universal experience. You would lose that by making Louis over-possessive, a bad father, a workaholic.
One way I think the story does play dirty. It forces every parent of a child who died accidentally to re-live that agony. Part of the American Dream is the universal human dream—the joy of watching your kids grow up. In a different way, movies like Ordinary People make you feel the impact of having that
dream grabbed away.
Ordinary People shows you a family’s struggle to get over a boy’s death; his older brother, his father and mother. Father and son finally deal with the pain and survive the grieving process.
The mother had never learned to deal with pain; she retreats. First by pulling back into herself, second by literally leaving the family she loves. She has to turn away, to stay alive, to keep her sanity. Many saw her character as empty…or worse. Always smiling, always capable of saying the right thing, yet giving no nurturing to her son Conrad. One fairly negative review described her as a monster.
But watch the movie again; she is not a monster. She is someone with no other way to deal with death.
I don’t want this to sound like a paper for a literature course. To say: The resurrected Gage symbolizes this or that. But I will for a moment.
Gage the monster may be the quiet horror the mom, Beth, feels in Ordinary People. The horror of what can happen to your life at random, with no one to blame. No one responsible. No one to say, “It’s not your fault,” in a way you believe it.
In fact, no one can say anything that can ease your
pain…those words don’t exist. You feel that you have failed,
that your life will never be the same. By giving you a taste
of these feelings; that probably is the way Pet Sematary plays dirtiest.
Gage