Pet Sematary
Louis Creed is living the good life; a new job as the head of a college infirmary, a beautiful new house, a loving wife, a precocious daughter, an adorable toddler son- and even a friendly family cat. His neighbors, Jud and Norma Crandall, are good people, and it’s not long before that Louis finds himself spending every few evenings having a few beers with Jud to while away the hours. However, when the cat dies, Jud has something to show Louis, something that might help him get out of an awkward situation; or might put him in an even worse one…
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Pet Sematary, by Stephen King
Some books hurt to read.
You know what I’m talking about, if you’ve ever read anything before. I’m not talking about being scared of monsters, or staying up past your bed time to make sure everything turns out okay. I’m talking about books that make you cry, make your face scrunch up and your eyes get red and the tears pour out onto your checks like acid. The books that make it so you can’t sleep, the books that you hurl across the room, only to crawl after five minutes later and finish just to be sure. Generally, the books that hurt us the most are the ones we read as children: Bridge to Terabithia, Death Be Not Proud, Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, On My Honor, and so forth. These are the ones that teach us happy endings don’t really count, and that the most you can hope for against death is an unsettled draw; and even that won’t last forever.
As you get older, books lose the power to hurt you. There are some that still wound; 1984 manages to get me down no matter how many times I read it (and the fact that I’ve reread it already knowing how it will effect me, should tell you more about me than you’d ever care to know), and I doubt that I’ll go through the rest of my life without stumbling across a few others. What’s interesting to me is just what it is about certain novels that gives them such devastating holds on us. After all, ink on paper, not very impressive. And there are truly great, incredible, mind-blowing pieces of literature out there that will never echo the effect of the last few chapters of Terabithia.
Which brings me, of course, to Pet Sematary. I remember my first copy- it was as though the publishers knew exactly what sort of book they were selling, and chose to promote it accordingly. The cover- well, if you want to look at the cover, scroll up a few lines. Cool, huh? Most impressive, though, was on the back. No plot summary, no multiple gushings from infatuated critics. Simply black cardboard, and in the center of it, in big white letters, a quote from Publisher’s Weekly: “The most horrifying book Stephen King has ever written.”
Man. With an intro like that you, you knew it had to be good.
And it was; scary like of all King’s best work, with a solid grounding in familiar settings to make you feel at home while you read it. The thing is, though, it’s not just scary like his usual stuff. This isn’t just a book of friendly chills down the back your spine, and bad nightmares that you relate in grisly detail in the daylight. This is a novel that follows through on its premise without qualm, without wincing, without blinking away. It’s a painful novel because it isn’t safe; the heroes don’t win, the innocent suffer, the evil is unpunished. No “the magic of believing” to save us here. Just miles upon miles of unrelieved darkness, and-
Oh dear, I’m going off again, aren’t I. Apologies; this is the danger of me writing about a truly excellent bit of work. I’m not much for literary theory, and while I can grasp symbolism, I don’t enjoy writing about it in other’s writing. The best I can do is use hyperbolic phrases to either raise your expectations to impossible heights, or set you to giggling. (“miles of unrelieved darkness,” indeed- where do I get this stuff? Anne Rice novels?)
Pet Sematary is about death; how we deal with it, and how it colors every moment of our lives. It is also about the need to accept the natural turn of things in our lives no matter how much we may cry out against it. It is a truly horrific novel because horrific things happen in it- the most horrific of them being something that literally happens every day.
Reading the book again for this review- and I’ve read it a good four or five times by now (let’s pretend that means I’m clever, and not repetitive)- what impressed me the most was the expert pacing. Horror is all about pacing, of course; and King has shown himself to be especially good at setting up a dangerous situation, and then slowly tightening the screws. The terrific thing about Pet Sematary is that, for the first three hundred or so pages, nothing much happens. Sure, there are creepy events, but as much time is devoted to the establishing of a happy, normal family life as is given over to spectral visions and reoccurring cats. We are not assaulted with horror, not at first; we are given time to get to know the main characters, to start taking things for granted that they take for granted, so when the nastiness hits, we are nearly as surprised as they are.
A good example is a dream sequence that takes place early in the narrative. One day at work, Louis bears witnesses to a young man’s death; before man dies, he refers to Louis by name, and says some strangely specific things about the land around Louis’s house. It’s a nice scene, and a mildly troubling one, but it comes off as more rote than creepy- the “foreshadowings of doom” is a standard trope in horror fiction, and once you’ve read enough of it, you get used to folks near death mumbling inarticulate, nonsense phrases about horrible dangers just over the horizon.
That night, the dead man visits Louis in his bedroom, and leads him out to the Pet Sematary. He tells Louis more unpleasant things, and Louis becomes more and more convinced that what is happening is no dream, until finally he collapses to the earth in a dead faint.
The next morning, he wakes up to find himself back in his bedroom, with the usual sounds running through the air. Thank heavens, he thinks, it really was a dream. His wife calls up from downstairs to ask him if he’d like some eggs. He pulls back the covers to get out of bed- and sees his feet and the undersheets stained with mud and pine needles.
Now, the incident in the infirmary was disturbing, and the dream was pretty damn eerie. But the real killer is that moment afterwards, where you think everything is okay; and then you find the pine needles. It’s mundane, but it packs a wallop; it brings us back to every nightmare we ever had, and reminds us how relieved we were when we woke up and came back to the world- and it forces us to question just how we’d react if it turned out the real world wasn’t quite as real as we’d thought.
This ability to connect so intimately with his readers is one of the reasons King is as successful as he is; most halfway decent writers can come up with a good gore scene, or a stalk or two to chill the blood, but King is able to get us where we live, which makes it so enjoyable to read his novels when things are going well- and so enjoyably unenjoyable to read them when they’re not.
There’s oodles more to say on this, but I’m going to save it till the final section- some of it, anyway. (This review is already two weeks overdue, let’s not stretch it.)
SCREEN:
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Pet Sematary, directed by Mary Lambert
It should be obvious by now that I’m a big Stephen King fan. He’s probably the person I’ve never met whose had the biggest effect on my life- and while I don’t quite worship him these days with the fervor I did in my youth, I respect the man for his talent and his integrity.
And I think it’s amusing when he cameos in his movies.
But dear god, what idiot thought he should deliver a sermon at a funeral? Bad enough that the sight of him immediately pulls you out of the picture- but his voice is nasal and pointed and, well, it doesn’t inspire gravity in the listener, let’s just say.
Of course this isn’t the worst thing about the movie, but it is pretty distracting; thirty seconds in all, and if you managed to buy anything happening on the screen before it (more power to you if you did), those thirty seconds will bring back your unbelief but quick. It’s just so blatantly ill-advised; if the movie had been a great one, King’s appearance wouldn’t have ruined it, but even in a great film, such moments stick out like sore thumbs. Here it just a dip below the specter of mediocrity that haunts much of the picture, and you just want to shake everyone involved and ask what the hell were you thinking?
Actually, if you got the chance to do that, the first thing you’d ask about is Fred Gwynne’s absolutely atrocious Maine accent. The man isn’t a terrible actor (he was funny on “The Munsters,” and made a good foil for Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny), and he’s not horribly miscast; in fact, for the thirty seconds of screen time he gets before he opens his mouth, we are allowed to entertain a brief hope that the rumors were wrong, that the poor man won’t humiliate himself. He’s old, he’s striking in appearance, he’s tall. That works.
Whatever it is that falls out his lips, though, doesn’t. Oy. It’s impossible to ignore, that accent; it’s muddled and over-pronounced and hideous. Let’s make it a rule, shall we? People who are not from Maine are no longer allowed to attempt the dialect. Hell, let’s go further; no one should ever do a Yankee accent on screen ever again. It certainly doesn’t add much authenticity- I’ve lived in Maine the majority of my life, and while some people here do talk a bit different than those elsewhere, it’s not so striking that I need to have it represented by guttural vowels and dropped r’s every time a film happens to take place in the Mosquito Capital of the World.
But look past the accent. I’ve seen community theater- I can look past most anything. Unfortunately, Gwynne’s performance is not very good; but fortunately for him, much of the blame can be laid on the director. Because it’s not so much that his line delivery is wooden, or he has no screen presence. More that the choices he makes for the character just don’t work- something a good director would have seen and changed right off the bat.
Gwynne plays Jud Crandall, across-the-road neighbor to the Creeds and knower of town lore. It is crucially important that a relationship of trust and mutual affection develop between him and Louis Creed, due to events that take place thirty minutes into the movie that spark off the plot. Crandall should be laid back, genial, and friendly, and above all, self-assured. He’s the guy who’s been around so long that nothing much bothers him; and you’ll go along with what he suggests for the simple reason that he’s seen more than you have.
This is not the interpretation that we see on screen. But am I perhaps trying too hard to judge the movie by its literary counterpart? Not yet- for Gwynne’s performance makes it very difficult to buy into some of the most important parts of the story. From the moment we see him, the screen Jud is friendly; but too friendly, to the point of being eager to please. He’s lonely, clearly, and he wants the new neighbors to like him. He’s unsure of himself, and while that doesn’t make him unlikable, it does turn him into someone you’d be reluctant to trust absolutely. Needy people are off-putting. Needy old people are even worse.
That’s where the problem comes in. The big turning point of the plot, the tragic mistake, if you will, is when Jud takes Louis to the Micmac Burial Ground to bury his cat. It seems ridiculous, watching Louis follow him; he might be upset over the death of the cat, and unsure how to explain that death to his daughter, but nothing in his relationship to Jud that we’ve seen previously indicates that he’d turn to the man for help, or walk for miles in the woods simply because Jud tells him too. It’s an event that happens more because the plot needs it to happen, then out of a natural turn of circumstance.
Which is one of the biggest problems of the movie. We see it again later on when Jud explains to Louis why he brought him to the Burial Ground. By now, Louis’s cat has returned from the dead, so we at least understand why Jud did what he did. (Still don’t understand why Louis went along with it, but let it go.) Jud talks about how when his dog had died, he’d done the same thing; only, in the flashback when we see the dog, the animal is vicious and dirty and damn near rabid. Why on earth would Jud want to risk that sort of thing with the pet of a friend? Especially if, as he claimed, he was doing it to help Louis’s daughter Ellie deal with grief. He says it’s to teach her that “Sometimes, dead is better.” An admirable lesson; but there are easier ways to do it than putting an eight year old in contact with a psychotic feline.
So if the movie’s main weakness is an over-reliance on automatic plot mechanics, what are its strengths? Surprisingly enough, there are a few; the most surprising being, the number of very effective scare scenes. Some are of the long-silence-and-then-POW variety, that I once thought any schmuck with a camera could pull off. (Having seen a few movies where even the jump scares failed, I have since revised my opinion.) However, some are of the honest to god chilling kind, the sort of scares that give you bad dreams- if you can manage to get to sleep at all. I won’t list them all here, for fear of
spoilage; watch out for Zelda, though. She’s an inch shy of ridiculous- but it’s a nasty flippin’ inch.
Also, the last twenty minutes of the movie, while not great, are surprisingly effective. Dale Midkiff (Louis), who spent much of the hour proceeding wandering from scene to scene with a blank look on his face, truly rises to the occasion and delivers some solid, convincingly around the bend work. Makes you wonder what the movie would have been like in better hands.
Still, this is a horror movie; when you get down to the bone of it, it’s there to freak you out, and if it manages to do that, well, shouldn’t that be enough? It is possible to ask for too much, and though I hate to admit it, standards can be set too high. Nowhere on the ad work for the movie does it say anything about making some grand statement, or having thematic integrity; you can’t sue a company for not putting in its product what it doesn’t advertise in the first place.
But. (And with me, there’s always one of those.)(You can keep your crappy puns to yourself, thank you very much.) Pet Sematary is not considered to be one of the upper tier Stephen King adaptations; and I’ve got to say, I think that’s right. As to why, well, that’s what third sections are for. Shall we continue? It’s best to stare straight ahead and not look down; it may look dangerous, you’ll make it out okay.
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
King himself wrote the screenplay for the movie- but since he also wrote the screenplay for Sleepwalkers, Cat’s Eye, and Maximum Overdrive, that’s not going to instill anyone with a lot of confidence.
I’m being flippant; I have a tremendous amount of respect, even awe, for King as a prose writer. But making the transition from print to screen is, as this website is partially intended to show, a damnably difficult task. Especially if one is adapting one’s own work; I’d hate to imagine trying to pick what’s crucial and what’s not out of a five hundred plus page novel, when my blood and sweat has gone into all of it. Some writers can do it: Richard Matheson did excellent work in the area, as does Harlan Ellison and
Clive Barker (although Clive’s results are less dependable). But King just can’t. Perhaps he could have had he been writing scripts back in the days when he wasn’t a brand name. Who knows.
Anyway, to look at what King choose to keep from the novel, and what he choose to change. The opening is similar to the book, except for one fairly large subtraction; Jud is no longer married. Whether he’s a widower or not is left up to the viewer’s imagination, but there is no Norma Crandall in the movie. Which, on the surface, doesn’t seem such a big change. (ooo, I’m leading up to something, can’t you tell?) After all, while Norma is a nice character in the novel, she does almost nothing in terms of forwarding the plot- except for one little bit of motivation. Jud tells Louis that the reason he took him up to
the Burial Grounds is because Louis helped Norma earlier in the story- Jud then dismisses this as his own justification for an action he himself doesn’t truly understand, but it does provide a more obvious way for Jud to get involved. In the movie, it just seems like he’s eager to please, and while that’s realistic, it weakens the character, and makes it more difficult to trust him.
The other thing you notice about the opening scene is that it’s maudlin as all get out. Not only is the sun shining brightly- not only are the kids smiling, the parents smiling, the whole frigging world smiling- but we have this overlay of thick, sentimental music swaddling it all, forcing it down your throat till you have to either laugh or gag. This does not bode well for what comes ahead; and indeed, the inability to find a believable, realistic happiness for the Creeds at any point in the story makes the nightmarish descent they slide down far more unaffecting than it should be.
And that, really, is what’s at the heart of my problems with the movie. At the start of this review (three weeks and six pages ago), I said there are stories that truly affect us in ways that their mere ink and paper creation would seem to belie. The major reason they do this, I think, is that we identify with them. Something on the page not only moves us for its own sake, it also calls to mind our own lives, which then drives the point home with even greater brutality. When characters die in the novels we love, we cry; and while we cry for them, we also cry because it reminds us that everyone we know will die. And that includes us, and while we may not be sure about our friends and family sometimes, we know we’re not fictional.
None of this is exactly revolutionary theory; but I’m homing in on a point here, so bear with me. King is excellent about connecting with his readers. People always talk about how great he is at the scary stuff, but scary stuff isn’t all that impossible to do. Throw in a few creaks, take out a few lights, put on some scary music, and you’re made in the shade. What is difficult to do is to evoke a world that is either so like our own that we can’t help but feel personally threatened; or so like how we wish our world was, that the danger is that much more acute. I’ve gotten in discussions elsewhere about how King isn’t always the greatest at writing “good” characters; but while he might not create figures with startling realism, he does create ones that we’d like to be. The version of life in a Stephen King novel is not real, even if you subtract the monsters and the killer cars, but it’s the sort of unreal that just about everyone can get along with.
Which brings us to the Creeds, and to what is the essential difference between the movie and the novel, and why one succeeds beautifully and the other- doesn’t. The Creeds have their problems; the daughter is occasionally bratty, the wife has some serious issues about death, and Louis has a bit of a temper. But they are good, upstanding members of the community; they are a family that has some of the same run-ins that we all did, they’re quite likeable, almost to the point of being cipher-ic. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that our family was never like this when we were growing up, or it’s not like that now with our wives and our husbands and our bills that never get paid on time and the kids out doing god knows what and the neighbors who won’t turn down the stereo no matter how many times you call the cops… But even admitting that doesn’t mean we don’t still like the novel Creeds. They’re idealized, but idealized in an easy to accept sort of way. It’s like listening to a country song, and telling yourself that the idiot slob who drinks too much and never takes you anywhere is “still the one you run to.”
Which makes their eventual downfall all the more painful. There’s a clear shift in tone and velocity, about three hundred pages in- you’ll know it when you hit it. The last third of the story is well nigh unbearable, but you read it anyway, because it’s King, and you have to see what happens. And while it may seem that the horror moments are few and far between in that first half, it is absolutely crucial that that half be there for novel’s conclusion to mean anything at all. This can happen to anyone, King tells us. Even the people you wish you were; and while not all of us live near Wendigos, we do live near death, and that won’t go away when the story is over.
Contrast that with the movie version, and you are forcibly reminded at just how inept the film is at conveying domestic ideality. As I said, it’s overdone; there’s a jittery tone which seems to spring up in a lot of King pictures, as if the director mistook his prose style for some sort of sugar junkie episode of “Tales from the Crypt.” That actually works well enough for the horror sequences, especially when they are played straight, but it makes the daylight stuff all the harder to swallow. Also, since I spent a few paragraphs picking on Gwynne, I might as well say it here: the rest of the cast doesn’t make the job any easier. Miko Hughes is a good Gage, but Denise Crosby is bland as Mom, and Blaze Berdahl’s Ellie is pretty much everything I can’t stand in child actors.
But, again, the scary stuff works pretty well. So why complain? Because it could have been better. As it is, the movie is a time-waster with some moments of clarity and effectiveness. It’s been said that you can’t have sunlight without darkness, but I believe it works both ways; the scare scenes could have been a thousand times more affecting if we’d actually cared about the characters involved. The novel is about death, and the horrors that it brings into our lives, and how even with those horrors, it is still better to make whatever uneasy peace we can with it. The movie is an excuse to show a dead kid waving a knife around.
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SCREEN: QQ.5
We got a pretty sweet Ramones song out of the deal, anyway.