Streamin’ King: The ‘Pet Sematary’ Reboot Largely Succeeds At Making The Familiar Source Material Feel Fresh

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching Pet Sematary, the 2019 adaptation of the 1983 novel. (No, you’re not imagining things. This is the second attempt at a Pet Sematary movie; the first, directed by Mary Lambert, was released in 1989.)

STREAMIN’ KING: PET SEMATARY (2019)

THE GIST: Arriving exactly 30 years after 1989’s original film, the setup is identical: the Creeds (Dr. Louis, trauma-stricken Rachel, toddler Gage, almost-9-year-old Ellie, shockingly adorable cat called Church) are new to rural Maine, befriend surrogate dad/grandpa Jud Crandall, and have a generations-old, misspelled-sign pet cemetery on their property, in the woods. Unsaid: anything buried beyond it will rise again, tainted and violent. Be a shame for that to happen to any of the Creeds.
PEDIGREE: Stars six-time Emmy/two-time Golden Globe winner John Lithgow (who has played the cat’s namesake, Winston Churchill), Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty, The Great Gatsby), and Amy Seimetz, who acted in Alien: Covenant, created The Girlfriend Experience, and has directed for Atlanta. First big-budget outing for co-directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmeyer (Starry Eyes, the Scream show), script by Jeff Buhler (upcoming Grudge reboot) with a story credit to Matt Greenberg, who was hired to script Pet Sematary in 2010 and has worked on 1408, Children of the Corn III, and Mercy.
Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura also did 1408, and composer Christopher Young previously Kinged it with George A. Romero’s The Dark Half (also set in Ludlow). Honor of covering the Ramones’ end-credits song “Pet Sematary” goes to young L.A. band Starcrawler.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Yes, although die-hards of the Mary Lambert-helmed/King-penned movie are liable to find this one a tough hang. In places—and possibly as an overall vibe—it’s clearly more faithful to the novel than the last (…weak) attempt, despite King scripting the original. Its biggest draw or sticking point is how it remixes and reroutes the Creed family’s tragedies in a way that gives the last act a completely new dimension, peeking into an unexamined corner of the story rather than changing it for change’s sake. Fan-fave Zelda shows up 15 minutes in, and her creepy story also goes differently—and kinda more horrifically.

John Lithgow does a solid Jud (with a great beard), even deliberately without the Maine accent that suffuses the book and Fred Gwynne’s portrayal. The cemetery is fine, but the atmosphere and design of the burial grounds beyond the deadfall are super well done. Shoutout to the Wendigo shoutout.
WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? There probably won’t be a ton of people falling head over heels for this one, but an equally small amount will hate it. Most will find it somewhere between “OK” and “thoroughly good-enough.” It’s nice people occupying a nice house by some nice woods, polished enough to keep up with 2019 horror and look far superior to the last one, strong enough on the technical side to warrant a re-experiencing of a touchstone story. (Opening in media res with fire and blood is a great touch for such familiar material.)
But Rachel and Louis don’t really click, interacting in strange and dull ways. Almost every piece of dialogue is exposition and plot-talk, with a token bit of clumsy scratching at themes of death. (“So you really don’t think there’s anything after we die? No heaven, no nothing?” isn’t a question a couple of 10+ years with 2+ kids asks each other like it’s the first time.) It does certainly make you feel silly for how much a big loud dumb truck can jump you, though.
**BRIEF SPOILER**
Worth your 95 minutes: turns out a 9-year-old girl who knows she just died and came back, but is still working out the details, flatly saying “I’m dead, aren’t I?” is wild.
15 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Pet Sem kicked off a 2019 that’ll see (at least?) four SK movies. It Chapter Two hits in September, the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep in November, and In the Tall Grass, from the novella co-written with son Joe Hill, at some point on Netflix.

2. The infamous Church of the original film was a striking grey British Shorthair; this one uses a lovable Maine Coon, the directors said, “because it resembled the cat on the book’s original cover by Linda Fennimore.”

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#Petsematary screening at @brooklynhorrorfest @petsematarymovie @petsematarymov

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3. Following this debut King-based project, Blumhouse Productions (Us, Midsommar), the Marvel Studios of horror, is developing Firestarter. They started dabbling in SK in 2012, with a still-in-development Scott Derrickson adaptation of “The Breathing Method.” It’s the final novella from 1982’s Different Seasons to yield a film, following Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and Apt Pupil. Blumhouse and King also exchanged kind words in 2018 about the studio’s psychological thriller Cam.

4. The kids in animal masks are a close echo of a scene in Hulu’s Castle Rock, which in 2018 channeled Sematary by having Alan Pangborn dig up a decaying dog to prove it had stayed dead.

5. Jason Clarke has read the novel roughly eight times. Co-star Amy Seimetz said she first read it at age 8, finding its “very adult conversations about how a father doesn’t always have the nicest thoughts about his daughter or kids” to be “way too much for a kid at 8 years old.”

6. Notable folks who’ve wanted to remake PS over the last decade: It‘s Andy Muschietti (“I will always dream about the possibility”) and Guillermo del Toro (“would kill to make it on film”).

7. After making $112 million on a reported $21M budget, is a sequel coming? Di Bonaventura would only produce a prequel, because “there’s a lot of interesting material that still sits in that book,” i.e. the Wendigo. Director Mary Lambert followed her ’89 Pet Sematary with a sequel three years later, with all new characters and no King involvement.

8. Michael C. Hall delivered the first-ever unabridged audiobook reading in 2018. King tweeted the erstwhile serial killer–portrayer “gives a bravura reading.” He does the Jud accent.

9. Quick and nearly inaudible but front and center with subtitles: offscreen Jud regaling attendees of a child’s birthday party with the joyful tale of Cujo. “Big Saint Bernard. He got rabies. He killed about four people.”

10. Rachel passes a sign with Derry on it. Kölsch said the art department “had a blast” but “almost went too far,” trying out a sign saying something to the effect of “D. Torrance Realty.” It got vetoed because it’s “not like Danny Torrance went and opened up a realtor company in Ludlow, Maine.”

11. The filmmakers wisely toned down the “Micmac Indian burying ground” mythology here—one of the book’s three sections is titled exactly that—and went more vague (but brought back the Wendigo). “It’s not only about modern sensitivities, but we thought it was interesting if this is one of those places where something supernatural happens that can’t be explained,” Kölsch said, name-dropping Stonehenge and Easter Island and how they function as “people’s ways of explaining phenomena.”

    The film also doesn’t specify Zelda’s affliction, broadening itself to be another “person with disability is a monster” movie rather than a specific hit-job on people with spinal meningitis.

12. Bangor, Maine’s Mount Hope Cemetery reappears after being the scene of King’s Sematary cameo three decades ago.

**PET SEMATARY SPOILERS**

13. So, Ellie’s death. First, it’s at the hands of a runaway tanker trailer, exactly like John Smith in The Dead Zone. The original PS had a famous Ellie quote, “Let God have his own cat.” Here, Louis justifies resurrecting Ellie by saying, “Let God have his own kid.”

    Kölsch said they chose Ellie over Gage to exercise the “self-awareness to know what is happening to her—and she has the vocabulary to ask questions about it. … The questions she was asking earlier in the movie, she can now explore from the other side of the veil. We loved the psychology that opened up for us.” Widmeyer added, “She can talk about death and almost psychologically torture Louis with those questions. ‘Does Mommy know about me? What are you going to tell her?’ … Those are the moments we kind of live for.”

14. King’s thoughts on the “fucking great” remake’s choice to kill Gage (TL;DR: “I understand why they did it”) as relayed to EW: “They did a good job. Boy, I saw all the stuff that came online when people realized that it was Ellie rather than Gage … and I’m thinking like, ‘Man, these people…’ It’s so nuts.”

    He told the New York Times, “I thought the change was O.K. Both versions … result in the same chain of events. I don’t necessarily think one version of the story is better, but I’m sure the directors found it easier to work with a girl zombie than with a toddler zombie.”

15. King wasn’t creatively involved but did float an alternate ending after seeing an early cut while they were in reshoots. We’d see Gage walking in the center of the road, King said, and “hear a truck coming, and think, ‘Oh my god, he’s gonna get greased in the road. That’s how this is gonna end!'” (AKA smashing viewers with that awful death from the source material they thought they’d been spared from reliving this time.) “Then at the last second, this woman pulls him out of the road and rescues him, and says, ‘Where’s your mommy and daddy?’ And that’s how you end the thing.”

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Every review features a snippet that embodies the exact score Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic agree upon: 57. Half-hearted mumbly things like “solid if not earthshaking,” “proficiently tense,” “a couple of the performances are pretty good,” “intermittently scary,” “competent and efficient, if not especially stylish or ambitious,” and “a decent, if inessential, take.” Infinity corny instances of “sometimes, [dead/new/original/different/less] is better.”

RogerEbert.com’s thorny comparison to the original was, “Although Pet Sematary is a largely dreadful film, it is slightly better and never as offensively bad as the first version.” King’s local paper the Bangor Daily News questioned Lithgow’s “rustic old Mainer living out in the woods” cred. “And,” they wrote, totally nailing it, “for a movie that is largely set out in the woods, I hardly saw a single pine tree, which is a bit weird for a state that is literally covered in almost nothing but pine trees.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR PET SEMATARY (1983): Came six months after Christine, along with the slim Cycle of the Werewolf. SK’s infamous early opinion was that Sematary was too fucked-up to publish. The next year he—once again hyper prolifically—branched out with a modern fantasy (The Talisman with Peter Straub), a YA classical fantasy (The Eyes of the Dragon), and the Richard Bachman book Thinner.
Zach Dionne is a Mainer in North Carolina who misses Maine accents. 

Where to stream Pet Sematary (2019)