PET SEMATARY
Stephen King’s darkest book is resurrected by two of horror’s brightest talents.
Stephen King’s scariest book was doing ‘elevated horror’ back in the ’80s. And now, as King-mania reaches fever pitch, PET SEMATARY is set to be 2019’s most unnerving horror. Total Film goes on set in the dead of night to dig into some extremely grave matters…
Biffer, Biffer, a helluva sniffer.
Total Film is standing in a forest clearing an hour’s drive from Montréal, Canada. It’s 2am and the smell of wet pine needles and damp earth gets into your throat and lungs. It tastes like… death. Or maybe that’s the concentric circles of gravestones inscribed with the higgledy-piggledy handwriting of bereaved children, for here, in the clearing signposted Pet Sematary, lay the dear departed pets of generations of local kids.
Marta our pet rabit. Hannah the best dog that ever lived. Smucky the cat, he was obediant. Trixie, kilt on the highway. Biffer, Biffer, a helluva sniffer.
Two silhouetted figures enter the graveyard. One of them clutches a shovel and a green plastic bin bag that knocks heavily against his legs. The men trade whispers in the dark and the one clutching the bag starts off alone, past the tombstones towards a 12ft wall of fallen trees and broken branches. It almost seems like a barrier, designed to block passage. But the man begins to climb. Higher and higher he goes, at last reaching the top and swinging first one leg over and then the other. He slithers out of sight.
Beyond lies the forest. And, as fans of Stephen King’s 1983 bestseller will certainly know – once read, it’s in your bones for life – another burial ground, this one ancient and belonging to the indigenous Micmac tribe. Its stony earth holds the power to return the dead to life, or so the locals murmur. Only sometimes dead is better… “I held off on reading Pet Sematary because the back of the novel said, ‘The most terrifying book ever written,’” grins director Dennis Widmyer, who first started bingeing on King paperbacks at the age of 11. And when he finally plucked up the courage to crack open its pages, aged 12, “It shook me to the core.”
His co-director Kevin Kölsch nods. “It’s not one of those Stephen King stories about killer chattery teeth, y’know? It’s a dark one, a personal one. It’s about human emotions.”
“I read it in my early twenties,” throws in Jason Clarke. He plays protagonist Louis Creed, a doctor who moves his family from Chicago to the rolling hills and meadows of Maine, New England. “Nobody does it better than King. The descriptions of what’s going on are just too much at times – you have to put the book down.
I was really fucking disturbed.”
Amy Seimetz, playing Louis’ wife Rachel, cuts in, “I read the book when I was eight years old. My parents were just happy I was reading. But it was so disturbing. It deals with very complex, adult emotions. It wasn’t, like, pop-out scares. It was more slow dread. It really stuck with me.”
Pet Sematary is a simple tale, brilliantly told: Louis and Rachel Creed move to Maine to raise their
"LAZARUS IS DEAD... LET US GO TO HIM" JOHN'S GOSPEL
two children, five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage, away from fumes and danger, only for the family cat Church to be killed on a nearby road. Louis is told of the Micmac burial ground by his widowed neighbour Jud (played in the movie by John Lithgow) and gives it a whirl to postpone Ellie’s first confrontation with mortality. Only Church returns stinking of the grave and all messed up. And that’s just the start of the Creeds’ woes. Death is not finished with this family yet, and Louis ain’t done playing God…
But here’s the thing about Pet Sematary, King’s ninth published novel following Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo and Christine. It might, on the surface, be a zombie tale of sorts, involving animals and humans shuffling back from the grave. And it might rely on that hoary old horror chestnut of using Native-American burial grounds to reanimate stiffs. But it’s also the Hereditary of its day, with any supernatural shenanigans proving mere dressing for its wounded heart: grief, mental illness, a splintering family.
King himself was so shocked by what poured out of him that he locked the manuscript in a drawer and initially refused to publish it. Pet Sematary was a personal tale: King had moved his family next to a major truck route when he was teaching at the University of Maine in 1979; the family cat was buried in a pet cemetery in the woods; and, flying a kite, King’s own two-year-old son, Owen, had stumbled towards the road as a roaring truck approached. King caught him just in time, but was plagued by thoughts of being a terrible father – his biggest fear given his own dad did a runner when Stevie was two years old. Read Pet Sematary again with this in mind and think of what it must have taken to write the passages in which Louis daydreams of leaving his family and all of his responsibilities behind.
“How far would you go to see your child again, or to protect your child?” muses Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the producer behind such behemoths as the Transformers franchise and The Meg. This is his second King adaptation after 1408, and it was the psychological aspects that appealed. “I find that emotionally very engaging, and I really like the mental gymnastics that somebody would have to go through to rationalise something that is not rational. I look at it as more of a drama than a horror picture. What is our relationship with death, as a society? In America, we do everything we can to avoid the concept of death, to hide from it, and I think there’s something very unhealthy in that. In this book, and in this movie, we explore that fear of death, that lack of understanding.”
Seimetz’s Rachel is the poster child for avoiding death. As a young girl she was forced to care for her sister, Zelda, who was suffering from spinal meningitis – if you’ve seen Mary Lambert’s 1989 film adaptation, these are the scenes that likely traumatised you the most – and has since buried all thoughts of mortality.
“I find it really interesting that she is so in denial and really, really wants to avoid the topic of death and loss, and wants to protect her kids from it,” says Seimetz. “She wants to sugar-coat life, but she’s forced to face it. One of the most memorable scenes in the book is when Rachel is describing to Louis her memories of her sister, and revealing to him for the first time what that was like and what her childhood was like. That section is such an interesting insight into her psyche, so perceptive and so well-written. She goes from laughing to crying to avoiding to diving right in. The push-and-pull is so honest.”
“Everyone remembers how scary Zelda was in 1989,” says Kölsch, who actually watched Lambert’s adaptation – still the most successful femaledirected horror movie at the box office – again and again as a teenager. “Our approach to horror is grounded. Zelda is not some ghoul up in a room. It’s a 12-year-old girl – 10 in the book – who’s suffering from some ailment and the parents don’t know what to do. She’s wasting away and there’s a younger sister who has to look in on her.” He pauses as it begins to drizzle and the crew carefully cover the lopsided tombstones in plastic sheeting. “Pet Sematary is about trying not to deal with death. To push it away. And the ramifications that come with that.” Remaking Pet Sematary is a no-brainer. Lambert’s movie is decent but is now nearly 30 years old, and horror is huge right now, with ‘elevated horror’, which this most assuredly is, in vogue. Horror films tend to multiply in times of strife, and to reflect the fears of the era that spawns them. And so it is that there’s a rash of Stephen King projects in the works right now – King’s staple themes of anti-conservatism, failure of the nuclear family, the insidious nature of the white Christian community and, naturally, the shadow of mortality are as prevalent now as they were in his boom era of the 1980s. Perhaps even more so.
“Every day, King has something new being adapted,” says Widmyer with a laugh. “I keep looking at his Twitter
'I ENDED UP DOWN IN THIS GRAVE. I HAD TO OPEN UP THE COFFIN. IT WAS REALLY DISTURBING' JASON CLARKE "YOUR BROTHER SHALL RISE AGAIN" JOHN'S GOSPEL
thinking, ‘Is this the day he’s going to mention us, or is he just going to tweet about Donald Trump again?’” Di Bonaventura takes that as his cue: “Our world is increasingly numbing our senses and you need something more provocative to get through; horror is very primal,” he says.
So yes, Pet Sematary, King’s most shattering novel, is just the story to “get through”. But why make it with these particular directors and actors? Di Bonaventura answers the first part, saying he looked at the movies of 40 new horror filmmakers and it was Widmyer and Kölsch’s 2014 breakthrough Starry Eyes, an occult body-horror that tears apart Tinseltown like some low-budget Mulholland Drive, that stood out. The directors answer the second query.
“We didn’t want movie stars, we wanted great actors, real people,” says Kölsch, while Widmyer chips in to say how they’ve always loved Clarke, Lithgow and Seimetz. Clarke, or course, starred as John Connor in Terminator Genisys, but gives a better account of himself in movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, Mudbound and Everest. Seimetz and Lithgow, meanwhile, are veterans of the genre: Seimetz was the indie-horror It-girl of A Horrible Way To Die and You’re Next who then went on to star in Alien: Covenant and Stranger Things; Lithgow is a horror icon for his loopy work with Brian De Palma.
In Pet Sematary, Lithgow plays the Creeds’ elderly neighbour Jud, sharing beers and secrets with Louis on the front porch. “He’s very melancholy,” says Lithgow, wearing boots, overalls and a big grin. “He carries with him a lot of grief and guilt. He’s had a tragedy earlier in life and it’s changed him. He was a very good man, a very promising man, who became a very troubled, sad man. He’s tormented. He immediately takes to this Creed family. He sees a kind of son with Louis. And he connects with this little girl, Ellie. Jud is a good man with a good heart, but he’s a man with an enormous secret: he knows that there is a way to bring a living thing back to life. He also knows that it’s very, very dangerous. So his great conflict is whether to put that secret in play.”
It takes an actor of Lithgow’s gravitas to sell these scenes (as di Bonaventura points out, his decision comes from an emotional place, not a rational one), while the filmmakers, like King in the book, are doing all that they can to anchor the supernatural elements. King, for example, made Creed a doctor – a pragmatic man of science who is fiercely agnostic, just as Victor Frankenstein was in the book that Pet Sematary riffs on. Widmyer and Kölsch, meanwhile, are treating the text as a domestic drama (“It’s a really interesting relationship, a very intimate relationship,” says Clarke. “You get to know this couple, warts and all, so you understand the true fucking horror at the end of this story.”)
And let’s not forget that the directors are also insisting their actors traipse into a real forest to shiver in a mouldering pet cemetery rather than lounge around on a heated soundstage.
As for the book’s grandstanding scene where Louis digs up a human corpse? Over to Clarke: “We shot the scene in a real cemetery in town,” he shudders. “I ended up down in this grave and you could smell the earth. It was wet down there. I had to open up the coffin. It was so disturbing. I could smell this dirt under my nails.”
'HE WAS A VERY GOOD MAN, WHO BECAME A VERY TROUBLED MAN. HE'S TORMENTED' JOHN LITHGOW