Though I’ve loved horror movies since as far back as I can literally remember, it’s never been because I find them all that scary. There are plenty of reasons why I love the genre more than any other, but being scared isn’t one of them. It’s the rare horror film that can really terrify me. The 1989 Stephen King adaptation, Pet Sematary, is one such film. And it’s all Zelda’s fault.
Ironically, the scariest aspect of Pet Sematary is only tangentially related to the actual plot. The 1983 novel (and subsequent film adaptation) is about a Chicago family that relocates to a small New England town and has their lives destroyed when their youngest son, Gage, is hit by a car and killed. Things are made worse when the father, Louis Creed, buries Gage in the magical cemetery nearby—an ancient Indian burial ground with the power to restore the dead to life. King, who adapted his own novel for the screen, is dealing with real-life horrors here: the nightmare of losing a child and the lengths to which a person will go to bring that child back.
Watching Pet Sematary as a kid, the pain infused into the film by King and director Mary Lambert was mostly theoretical, something I understood as being sad but to which I could not relate. Seeing Pet Sematary now with two young kids of my own makes it almost impossible to watch. That’s because the grief is handled all too well, not sensationalized nor exploited. Compare that to, say, the child’s death in King’s sole directorial effort Maximum Overdrive, which exists only to shock and push buttons—to seem “dangerous.”
Not so with Pet Sematary, a film that does its best to look at the real human cost of death. There is no casual loss here; the few characters who do die in the movie echo through the story, whether it’s little Gage or Missy the housekeeper or Victor Pascow (Brad Greenquist), the college student who dies in Louis’ care early on but spends the rest of the film appearing as a ghost warning the Creeds about the danger coming to them. Whereas many horror movies of the ’80s were all about racking up the highest possible body count, Pet Sematary carries the weight of every loss.
All of this makes the movie sound like some grim, heavy drama, which it isn’t. What makes Pet Sematary such a singular and powerful movie is the way it exists at a crossroads between genuine emotion and slightly trashy ’80s horror. The violence is gorier and more mean-spirited than it needs to be, whether it’s the smashed skull and visible brain matter of Pascow’s reappearing ghost or arguably the most painful ankle slashing in movie history. The acting is often crude, the narrative sometimes overstuffed. There are unnecessary characters and subplots, flashbacks, dream sequences, flashbacks inside of dream sequences. The whole thing feels raw, but it’s the rough edges that make Pet Semetary special.
And then there’s Zelda. Without Zelda—Rachel Creed’s disfigured sister seen in flashback (and played by Andrew Hubatsek under prosthetics)—it’s possible that Pet Sematary wouldn’t still be as talked about as it is today. It certainly wouldn’t be by me, because Zelda is still the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in a movie and one of the few horror images to ever truly cause me nightmares. While Zelda’s inclusion makes thematic sense—King’s story is all about the Sins of Past literally returning to haunt us—it’s a diversion that doesn’t even necessarily belong in the movie, seeing as she doesn’t factor directly into the plot. If any other screenwriter was adapting King’s novel, there’s a good chance that Zelda would be one of the first things to hit the curb. But this version of Pet Sematary doesn’t try to make a ton of sense, instead going for the most primal emotions and scares. In this, the film succeeds.
Though pulpier than most of the “classic” Stephen King adaptations that earn critical respect—films like The Shining, The Dead Zone and Misery—Pet Sematary is one of the rare films that gets right to the heart of what makes King a great writer, mixing relatable human drama with supernatural terror. Under the atmospheric and sometimes schlocky direction of Mary Lambert, Pet Sematary gets it right. It’s gory and ugly and haunting and unshakable. It has a great Ramones theme song. It has Zelda. Goddamn Zelda. It’s so scary for a movie this sad. Or is it sad for a movie so scary?
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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