Pet Sematary | Tracingtrails

The language of our culture is varied and in many corners hotly contested. But whether you call it a remake or a reboot or a new adaptation, when I got wind of the fact that a new film version of Pet Sematary was in the works, I got very excited. The book is easily one of my favorite of King’s and one that I have often listed in my top five overall. I also had a close connection with the original film adaptation, as I’m old enough that I actually got to see that on the big screen as well. With the recent explosion of the horror genre in popular culture and the proliferation of Stephen King adaptations, I was intrigued to see how the book would be handled.

The fates seemed aligned to deliver a near perfect film. Besides loving the book, it had a great cast as well. John Lithgow is one of my favorite character actors and seeing him cast as the iconic Jud Ludlow was a fantastic move in my opinion.

There was no way this movie wasn’t going to be great.

Unfortunately, as reviews started to come out and I began to hear from early viewers, it was starting to look like that was exactly what had happened. Somehow they had taken the rich, beautiful material from this novel and crafted it into a movie that seemed to be falling flat in pretty much every way.

So with the price of a movie being what it is and being such an investment, I made the disappointing choice to give the film a pass and wait for DVD or streaming to see what it was really like.

Pet Sematary remained relegated to the poorly maintained storage area of my subconscious until the other day when I was scrolling through Amazon Prime and came across it as now being available. What better time to watch and find out that everyone was indeed wrong and it really was the movie I was sure was going to be fantastic?

Well, as much as I would like to be able to do so and for as open as I tried to be to the experience, I think that in the end, it would have been better if the writers and the director had gone all the way, removed this from any association with Stephen King’s book and just made this its own thing. Taken fully away, I think it could have been a pretty cool, cult-ish kind of horror flick. As it is, the best I can say is that what we ended up with was a movie that took the novel, watered down much of the key elements and replaced them with bland plot points that don’t really add anything of value to the equation.

Just to show I’m of fair mind, I’ll throw in some things that I liked about the movie. Obviously a major plot point for the book is the Creeds’s house being so close to a dangerous stretch of highway. The near accident involving one of their kids was a big part of what inspired the story in the first place. And the movie really creates a phenomenal sense of dread around the road, and the foreshadowing of the impending tragedy is really done well. Also, one big part of the book was seeing Louis’s gradual and spiraling decline into madness. As such, the movie employs a number of straight down camera shots, angling through the woods from above in a clear homage to Kubrick and The Shining, another great mental collapse for a King character. Some might see it as a cheap knock-off moment and maybe it was that as well but I thought it lent a nice vibe to the film. And I’ll round this off by stating that the acting in the film is pretty spot-on. The breakdowns I see in the process, in my opinion happened largely outside the actual filming. If the turkey has spoiled at the store, there’s not much you can do with it in the oven, regardless of how brilliant of a chef you are and how much you dress it up.

So what are my problems? Why didn’t this film work for me?

In many ways, the movie seems to place aspects of the novel in a way that feels merely obligatory, like they needed it as window dressing to give themselves permission to take things in a completely different direction.

Victor Pascow is a hugely important influence on the book, despite his minor appearances as a character. His death early on is a drawbridge into the subject of our mortality and the precipice we all walk on every day of our lives. He serves as a cautionary figure, initially to Louis and then with Ellie, the Creeds’s daughter.

In the movie, while they did a good job capturing the intensity of Victor’s death, from that point he is barely present and as a result, you don’t really get what the point is of his being there. It comes off like the writers knew fans of the book would be tuning in so they tossed him into the script just so they could point to it and say, “There you go, losers. There’s you’re Victor Pascow.” It was one of the scarier aspects of the book for me the first time I read it and in the movie, he seems little more than a barely notable footnote.

Then there’s the character of Jud, himself. Louis’s relationship with Jud is one of my favorites in the King universe. The two become close friends and Louis’s care for Jud’s wife is a large part of what drives Jud to show Louis the Pet Sematary in the first place, because of his feeling indebted to his neighbor. Jud is an incredible character and it’s his stray lines of dialogue that often come bubbling up when I reflect back on King’s older work.

In the film, while Lithgow puts in a solid performance, Jud as a character has very little punch to it. His wife isn’t even in the film, which creates a huge imbalance because now he has no impitus to show the real Pet Sematary to Louis after their family cat is killed. We see Jud hearing voices talking to him from the woods but that device is pretty much abandoned after the first act of the film, which makes me wonder why it was even there in the first place. What reason does Jud have to take Louis to the sematary? He says later on that it was because he cared so much for Ellie and didn’t want her to be hurt by the loss of her pet but it isn’t clear at all at the time that he feels that strongly for her. We have to be told about it after the fact which is never a good sign for a film.

Jud ceases to become anything that drives the plot of the story, which is what he is in the book. Instead, he becomes just as much of an observer as we are. He is there to provide some basic information to Louis and that’s pretty much it. The beautifully colorful character from the book becomes little more than a set piece in this.

In the book, the family all finds the Pet Sematary together, while on a walk in the woods with Jud. They find the main cemetery, the one the town uses, not the ancient burial ground. In the movie, Ellie finds it on her own, at which point we are introduced to Jud as he stumbles across her. She witnesses a masked procession of children, taking a pet off to be buried. When Louis asks Jud about the masks and the procession, Jud makes a remark about how seriously people around here take it and from that point on, it’s just kind of left behind by the writers.

What’s the point? Why add this aspect of the kids conducting a funeral procession? It wasn’t in the book and there’s never any explanation given that I picked up on as to why the kids wear masks. It would be like if I thought I could make myself look tough by wearing a leather jacket. Or the filmmakers thought that if they showed some kids wearing some vaguely creepy looking masks, it would make the film more unsettling, despite the fact that they never really explain it. Is the soup coming out kind of on the bland side? Just dump in some more salt. To me, that’s how it comes off.

And in the end, the nature of the power in the woods is taken in a completely different direction. Instead of a chilling conclusion of a story in which we see the darkness of a man’s soul take him over, instead we find ourselves in a story where the dark presence in the woods becomes a sentient force that is plotting against the Creeds. It’s hard for me to talk about this without spoiling the ending so I apologize for the vague language. But where the book on a chilling and tragic point, the movie takes it farther and goes for a kind of silly ending where it turns into an almost body-snatchers type of story. If that’s the kind of movie you want to make, then make that movie and stop calling it Pet Sematary.

I realize that this review is largely going to come off like an “old man shaking his fist at the sun” kind of a moment. I’m not an on-face critic of taking things in a new direction. Just to prove my point, I didn’t really have an issue with how they changed the crucial death scene from the book, that of Gage. Because in this case, they still managed to capture the heartbreaking tragedy of that moment and they created a crucial tipping point for the characters. The effect of the death of Gage Creed in the book is still accomplished by what they did in the movie.

When I started watching Pet Sematary I had high hopes. I was clutching to those high hopes, actually. And the first act or so of this movie is pretty good. As I said, the acting was solid and though there are some minor departures, I was willing to live with those as there actually is a decent atmosphere of foreboding and buildup. But in the last ten minutes or so they manage to dash all of that against the rocks. The ending of the film turns the story in a completely unnecessary and superficial direction. I’m sure this movie will appeal to some and I am thrilled for those who are able to enjoy it. Structurally, there isn’t much I can fault about the film from a purely technical perspective. And I’m the first to shake my head and mutter under my breath at the legion of fans that bemoan how much a movie “ruined the book”. But in this case, I feel like the source material was so fantastic, I can’t bring myself to support the decision to separate from this so radically, just in the pursuit of landing on an MTV-like ending moment.

So I will say this. If in the end, this movie inspires people to go and check out the book who wouldn’t have maybe done so otherwise, I will consider those examples to be a success story. But speaking as someone who was excited for at least a year for the chance to see another adaptation of one of his favorite books, this one fell far short of the mark.

Sometimes dead really is better.