The Intrinsic Terror of ‘Pet Sematary’ (1989)
The Stephen King story that almost never saw the light of day
Of all of Stephen King’s stories, perhaps none is more innately chilling than Pet Sematary. Where Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining terrifies the viewer with its slow-rolling and measured portrayal of isolation in the sprawling Overlook Hotel, what director Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary provides is utterly visceral in its simplicity. Where The Shining opens to a car slowly winding its way up a desolate mountainside, Pet Sematary’s introduction to the characters is marked by the abrasive passing of a speeding tanker. Pet Sematary is devoid of the subtletly that defined the Kubrick horror classic.
Though in many regards it takes an adult to fully appreciate what exactly makes The Shining so disconcerting, even a child can understand the awful siren song of a cemetery that resurrects whatever is buried inside of it. The concept is summed up succinctly in a sentence. But it’s that brutal absence of complication that exalts Pet Sematary as an alltime favorite King movie for many. We all fear the loss of our loved ones, and the appeal of a cemetery that brings “them” back from the dead doesn’t require mental gymnastics. In that way, it’s probably one of King’s least inspired stories.
In fact, when King wrote Pet Sematary, he let it sit in a drawer for entire years before allowing it to see the light of day. He still claims to this day that — if he’d had his way and not been mired by his business contracts — he would never have published the story at all. To look at the runaway direction the franchise took after its first movie, perhaps it’s no wonder why King almost kept this one a secret. It’s a subject that offers a macabre launching pad for the imagination. And when profit is at stake, Hollywood is rarely unwilling to rehash an idea — the will of the horror literary legend be damned.
Though Pet Sematary is a film that scared me to my core when I rented it from Blockbuster on one fateful evening in the mid-2000s, as an adult I can sympathize a bit with some of King’s reservations about putting this one out into the world. Although I think it deserves better than to sit at the bottom of a dusty drawer, it’s certainly no The Green Mile, Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption or Stand by Me. It’s not the deep and metaphorical, nuanced masterpiece that so many have learned to expect of the prolific author.
The fear of death is both primal and easily comprehensible. The room for metaphor is limited; it’s a story that can be pretty fairly taken at face value. The cemetery, not-so-endearingly mispelled “Pet Sematary,” reanimates its residents. But when they return, they’re different. Although there’s something to be said for the themes of guilt, grief, denial and trauma, they’re relatively surface level.
Before the opening credits have even concluded, it’s plainly clear that the burial ground is home to something malevolant. After the death of the family cat, The Creed family’s new neighbor, Judd Crandall, commandingly played by Fred Gwynne, guides Louis Creed over a giant wood partition, through the woods, and toward an eerie outcropping of rocks arranged by “The Indians.” The sense of foreboding in the air is palpable.
Gwynne provides what’s likely the movie’s most captivating performance. But while charismatic, the blatant foreshadowing that colors his face and his exaggerated colloquialisms have still made him into a fit subject for satire. The South Park 2005 episode, entitled Marjorine, musters an impressively 1:1 recreation of the towering and foreboding farmer figure. For those looking for a satire of this 80s horror classic, it’s an episode that makes for a worthy watch.
Dale Midkiff offers a more than satisfactory performance as Louis Creed, and Denise Crosby, too, effectively animates the Rachel Creed character of the source material. Beau Dakota Berdahl plays a serviceable Ellie Creed, but struggles to fully sell some of her theatrics as she grives the loss of her younger brother, Gage. For a child actress her performance is forgivable, but when inevitably compared with The Shining’s Danny Lloyd, still leaves a certain mystique to be desired.
Many movies live on in the minds of viewers as singular, isolated still frames. For Titanic, it’s Jack and Rose “on top of the world” as the ship sets out on its maiden voyage. The Shining is the twisted and malevolant face of Jack Torrance as he yells “Here’s Johnny!” through the door he’s just axed open. In Psycho, it’s the shower stabbing scene (and, of course, the discordant background violins that accompany it). Pet Sematary is best encapsulated in one single line: “Sometimes, dead is better.” It’s an unnerving sentence, and it’s one that’s made an understandable reappearance in the movie’s sequel, remake, and remake sequel.
A surprising standout from the movie is a sideplot involving Rachel Creed’s past. Her immobile sister, Zelda, died under her care when she was only a child, but still continues to haunt her. It’s ironic that her appearances uniformly stand out for me as the film’s creepiest moments. She’s a walking (lying) spin-off in the making. The 2019 Pet Sematary remake fortunately takes that cue with the increased and exaggerated screentime that it affords her. Although the exploration of Rachel’s traumatic past sometimes comes across feeling like a narrative afterthought, it’s those scenes that stand among the most nerve-racking in both films.
The dark territory that Pet Sematary explores is one that leans heavily on cinematics. The reanimation of the Creed family cat, Church, and Gage are respectable for the late 1980s, but when compared with the effects that Stanley Kubrick achieved in The Shining nine years earlier, Pet Sematary’s scare factor lacks an undeniable novelty and conviction. Though there’s a certain wistful magic to the more spacious and diegetic approach to sound that prevails in so many older movies, the practical effects of prior generations still do little to capitalize on the inherent terror of the King story at hand.
Pet Sematary is an undoubtedly fearsome concept, but its campy horror effects, and the hokey reappearance of a ghostly Victor Pascow, played by Brad Greenquist, is nearly enough to remove me from the narrative every time I watch the movie. The sound of Gage’s ghostly laughter is inarguably the material of nightmares, but even his reanimated corpse still falls a little flat when compared with the imagery that surrounds the Zelda sideplot.
The instrumental score, composed by Elliot Goldenthal, is both atmospheric and unsettling. Though it never made a name for itself as one of the decade’s more noteworthy soundtracks, it’s very much a product of its times and complements the movie more than sufficiently.
Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary is an unflinching exploration of our intrinsic fears, but it remains largely restricted by the limitations of its era. While the narrative taps into something universally human — the fear of death and the alluring temptation of undoing it — the film’s few pitfalls detract noticeably from the gravity of the most climactic moments. It’s not King’s most nuanced tale, nor is it the zenith of 80s horror cinema, but Pet Sematary’s resonant simplicity has still managed to carve out a worthy spot in the psyches of cinephiles everywhere.