Five-Legged Iguana

13 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
[12 of 13]

PET SEMATARY

(March 2019)

“There are places in this world... that are older than either of us. Places that a rational doctor brain like yours will never understand.

“Nobody knows what that place is, what happens in that stony ground.

“But the soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis.”

For the record, I’ve never read the original Stephen King novel.

My only exposure to a complete narrative of Pet Sematary was the 1989 film adaptation directed by Mary Lambert.

At least, until now.

Now that I’ve also been exposed to the new adaptation from Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, who broke onto the ¡Qué horror! 2015 main list with Starry Eyes. (While I would have probably checked out a Pet Sematary remake anyway, based on my familiarity with the 1989 film, Kölsch and Widmyer’s presence at the director’s chair(s) sealed the deal.)

Clearly, there are marked deviations from Lambert’s version, though given that, again, I’ve never read the novel, maybe these deviations bring the narrative closer to the original source material. (I was always under the impression that Lambert’s adaptation made changes to the original text, as is par for the course with any adaptation, really.)

 

All I know is, with death as a major theme and reality of Pet Sematary, it’s a bleakly harsh vision of a parent’s perhaps vain struggle to protect a child from the brutal truths of existence.

And another thing… what I am sure I miss from Mary Lambert’s adaptation?

The original Ramones title track.

Sorry, Starcrawler…

“Yeah, they knew the power of that place. They felt its pull.

“They came to believe that those woods belonged to something else. That the ground was bad.”

(Pet Sematary OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)