Before I begin this post, I want to say that I express my thoughts and condolensces to the people of Maine for what has happened this past week. Also, this post will contain some spoilers so if please don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the movie or read the book.
Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is considered one of his better books. As I have posted about earlier, the story came about during two incidents that occured as King was a writer-in-residence at the University of Maine. His family had been living along a busy road in 1979 and his daughter, Naomi, had a cat which had gotten hit on the road by a vehicle. Also, there was an incident in which his younger son, Owen, as a toddler, went walking toward the road as a vehicle was coming. King said he was able to get his son before he could make it to the road, but the thought of what could’ve happened stayed with him.
So, he wrote the first draft and showed it to his wife, Tabitha. She felt it hit a little too close to home and King agreed it was a darker story than what he had written. So, King threw it in a desk drawer and forgot about it for a few years. However, he was going through a problem at Doubleday with the way he was treated and wanted to move to another publinghouse, which was Viking. However, he was still contractually obligated to turn in another book. So, he dusted off the manuscript, worked on it and submitted it for publication.
The book would become one of his most popular novels and revered as one of his most frightening. King himself said the novel scared him the most. I think it looks at the biggest fear any parent has – the death of their child due to an accident that could’ve been avoided. I’ve sat during many murder trials and seen the horror on the faces of parents. It’s something you don’t forget no matter the age of the deceased. I responded to a traffic accident on a country road where the toddler had been thrown from the vehicle because they weren’t wearing a seat belt. When the mother showed up frantic, she was rushing toward the scene. The entire Georgia State Patrol wouldn’t have been able to hold her back because she was determined to get to that ambulance. The child was fine, thankfully, but I’m sure the father was signing divorce papers by the time the doctor’s were signing the child’s release forms.
Traffic accidents are the worst because we never know when we leave our house if we’re going to return. Someone runs a red light or turns the wrong way on the road (which was often the case in Americus, Ga. I remember one day sitting in my office, I got a fatality notice from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. This person’s name was a young man who had recently graduated the year before. I remember he rode a motorcycle and had played football and soccer. It was a motorcycle accident if I remember. I even had a photo I had taken of him in the system to use for the story when it went to publication. It was a horrible thing for his friends and family who were still around. It had happened when he was at college.
Pet Sematary revolves around the Creed family moving to a country home in Ludlow, Maine. Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff) is a young physician who has just accepted a job there. They all seem like the ideal nuclear family. Rachel (Denise Crosby) is his wife. They have a young daughter, Ellen (Blaze Berdahl) or “Ellie” who is about primary school age. And their toddler son, Gage (Miko Hughes), is at that young age where he’s walking and wanting to go everywhere.
And when he first goes toward the busy road, the Creed’s neighbor, Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne) is able to scoop him up and introduce himself to the Creeds. Gwynne, most famously known as Herman Munster, fills the role of an aging New England country man to a T. He wears overalls and smokes like a chimney. He spends more time out on his front porch than he does in his own house. Gwynne also knows how to lay on the accent enough that it sounds authentic. Born and raised in New York City and a Harvard graduate, he knows how to sound like he was born and raised in Maine.
As the Creeds settle in, Jud leads them down the path next to their house to the pet cemetery, incorrectly spelled “sematary” which Rachel immediately dislikes because Ellie is curious about it. There never really is a good time to approach your young children about death of animals or people. Jud explains the traffic on the road with semi-trucks has led to death of many animals, which might explain why he tells Louis the house has been vacant for some time.
But what we don’t know at first is Rachel is struggling with her own past. In probably one of the most memorable scenes, Rachel, who grew up in Chicago, had an older sister, Zelda (Andrew Hubatsek because director Mary Lambert thought it’d be better to have a man in the role.) Zelda had spinal meningitis and her parents kept her in a back bedroom shut off. They also made Rachel, only a child not much older than Ellie, take care of her. Zelda is mostly bedridden and in extreme pain and suffering due to her illness. The night Zelda died, Rachel was alone taking care of her as her parents were out. Rachel tells Louis she was actually glad Zelda was gone but it affected her.
This is why Rachel seems put off when she realizes that an animal cemetery is located nearby. And while Ellie is amused that someone buried a goldfish, she knows that eventually Ellie will worry about their own family cat, a British Blue cat named Winston Churchill or “Church” for short. They get Church neutered in hopes he won’t wonder as much and toward the road.
On Louis’ first day at work, a jogger, Victor Pascow (Brad Greenquist), is brought in after he was hit by a vehicle. He dies on the table but warns Louis about the cemetery. After that, Louis has dreams he thinks of Pascow leading him to the cemetery and warning him not to cross the barrier. Louis and Rachel’s father, Irwin Goldman (Michael Lombard), don’t get along, so he stays in Maine while Rachel and the kids go to Chicago for Thanksgiving. While he’s gone, Jud calls to tell him he found Church dead in his front yard.
Realizing that Ellie is too young to deal with the death, Jud offers and alternative to Church being buried in the regular cemetery. He takes Louis to another location which looks like a cemetery farther away up on a hill where he tells Louis he “has to bury his own.” The next day, Church appears in the garage. Jud explains the location was Mi’kmaq burial ground and when he was a child, he lost his dog in an accident. But he was taken by a local to bury his dog there and it came back but was more aggressive.
However, when Louis asks Jud if someone ever buried someone up there, he gets agitated telling him no. Later, after Gage is run over by a semi-truck, Jud tells him of how Bill Baterman, a local, buried his son, Timmy, in the burial ground after Timmy had been killed in action in World War II. However, Timmy was malevolent and Jud and others in the town banded together to stop Timmy. They ended up having to burn both Bill and Timmy alive in their house.
Jud knows Louis is thinking of it. However, the ground turned sour, Jud says, and what is buried there doesn’t come back the same. Jud tells Louis that “Sometimes, dead is better.” Jud knows Louis is overcome with grief and guilt as Gage was flying a kite with his father when the string got away from him. Louis was briefly distracted but couldn’t catch up with Gage as he ran toward the road as a truck going too fast was coming down the roadway. (Not to be too gruesome, but if a semi-truck hit a toddler child, I don’t think there would have been much to bury. It’s possible Gage was clipped by the driver who attempted to swerve to miss him.)
Irwin also blames Louis for Gage’s death and they get into a physical fight at his funeral. Later, Rachel and Ellie go spend time with him in Chicago. But Louis goes and digs up Gage’s body to bury in the Mi’kmaq ground. But he falls asleep from the effort when he returns. Gage ends up killing Jud and later Rachel when she returns home after Ellie has a nightmare where she was visited by Pascow.
Some people have said the movie devolves into a slasher, which I don’t think is accurate. It’s really about an evil presence overcoming whatever is buried in the ground. On the surface, Gage looks innocent, but he’s not. Hughes was only 2 when he made the movie and has the face of a cherub angel. Seeing him in Kindergarten Cop in 1990 as the young boy who said, “Boys have a penis; girls have a vagina” works because he looks adorable. But even things that look wholesome can be malevolent.
As a doctor, Louis believes in medical sciene but watching him believe more of the supernatural as the movie goes on makes it more eerie. How desparate would a parent be, even one that is a medical doctor. And as a phyisician, Louis’ job is to save lives. So he sees this as an attempt to right a wrong. It’s irrational, immoral and illogical. Even if Gage wasn’t malevolent, how would he explain it.
In the end, he’s gone so far he thinks he’s made a mistake with Gage and Rachel will come back because she hasn’t been dead too long. The horror is that Louis didn’t see the error of his ways. His actions kill Jud and Rachel and he had to kill his own son to put a stop to Gage before he can harm someone else. He’s not thinking as a doctor but a man in grief. And when you’re in grief, you do the wrong things sometimes. He’s still in denial.
Despite some negative reviews, the movie became a hit at the box office grossing almost $90 million against a $11 million budget. The scenes with Zelda are still unsettling and Lambert proved that horror isn’t for the “Boy’s Club.” King adapted the screenplay and briefly appears as a pastor during a burial scene. While Jud has a wife in the book, he’s a widower in the movie. There’s a subplot featuring Missy Dandridge (Susan Bloommaert) who is a housekeeper for the Creeds. She commits suicide by hanging after complaining of stomach pains. This also helps introduce Ellie to concept of death.
I feel the movie has gotten better over the last 34 years mainly with how King and Lambert present us with a cold-hard fact we all must face – we’re all going to die. Life is fragile and a lot of times, it’s not fair. We all deal with loss and grief whether it’s a parent, child, friend, spouse/partner or family member. And even though we tell us their pain and suffering is over if an illness took their lives, we’re still bitter and angry. That’s why Heaven was created as a concept to look forward to them in another life. But we don’t know if it’s real or not as no one ever really comes back.
Of all King’s works and adaptations, this is one of the few that sticks with you long after it’s over. We’ve all dealt with that pain of loss once or another. Seeing how Louis goes from a man of science to someone no different than Bill Baterman shows how we’re not as smart or sophisticated as we’d like to think we are. Midkiff, who had previously played Elvis Presley, in the TV movie Elvis and Me and later did the TV show Time Trax, gives a great performance. While he wasn’t a big name before and has mainly been a character actor, you don’t need to be distracted by a big name in a role like this. Midkiff looks like he could be a young doctor and family man but we can also see his gradual descent into madness.
Crosby, who is the daughter of Bing Crosby, was already popular for her role on Star Trek: The Next Generation. She gives a good performance to a woman who is trying to forget her past and live the nuclear family she never had. It’s a very sad performance of a person who can’t escape the darkness of death and struggling between the love of her husband and the obligatory love she feels she must feel for her horrible parents.
Unfortunately, the filmmakers should have taken Jud’s words to heart. In 1992, a horrible sequel was made by Lambert featuring new characters. And it seemed the franchise was dead for good. That was until the 2019 version changed some things up with having Ellie be killed, not Gage. I don’t remember much of it but Church was creepier which was the best thing. Recently, a prequel Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, which focused on Jud and the Batermans, was released on Paramount-Plus. It’s not that good, but better than everything else that came out in the years since the 1989 original.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 