Pet Sematary is arguably Stephen King’s least enjoyable novel. That’s not to say it’s bad; in fact, it’s one of his best novels, immediately sinking its claws into the reader’s brain and not letting go to the very end. But it’s brutal and unsparing in its depiction of what happens when you try to interfere in the natural order of things, even if it doesn’t seem very “natural.” It’s a particularly rough leave-the-lights-on-when-you-sleep read if you’re a parent, and can understand the madness that drives grieving father Louis Creed to do the unthinkable.
Mary Lambert’s 1989 film adaptation was perfectly fine, though it dialed back some of the more nightmarish aspects of the novel, such as how poor doomed Gage Creed, killed by a truck, looks after he returns from the dead. The 1992 sequel was also fine, though that’s thanks largely to Clancy Brown’s no-holds-barred performance. Even the 2019 remake, while not as fine as the original, is passable, despite significant (and unnecessary) changes to the plot. This isn’t a ringing endorsement, but my point is that, for a minor horror franchise, you could do worse.
Though none of them could be accused of being deep and complicated, evidently the Pet Sematary movies have left a question unanswered for some viewers: why does Jud Crandall, Louis Creed’s elderly neighbor, bring Louis to the place beyond the pet cemetery, despite knowing it was a bad place? The book suggests a number of reasonable explanations:
Jud didn’t think there’d be much harm in reviving a cat
The malevolent forces in the burial ground willed it to happen
It doesn’t matter, it’s just one of several terrible mistakes all leading up to tragedy and horror, starting twenty years earlier when Rachel Creed’s parents left her alone with her terminally ill sister
If the movies don’t offer much of a reason, it’s probably because it isn’t really relevant. Someone had to tell Louis about the burial ground, and it might as well have been Jud. Nevertheless, evidently tens of people have demanded an answer, and we get one (more or less) in Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, a baffling prequel that does the opposite of what it promises.
It’s 1969 (though given the way many of the characters talk and dress you’d be forgiven for forgetting that), and the Vietnam draft is working its way through tiny Ludlow, Maine, hometown of young Jud Crandall (Jackson White). This version of Jud makes no attempt at a broad New England accent, but he is a real hunk, and blessed with the good luck to keep narrowly avoiding the draft.
Jud plans to leave Ludlow to join the Peace Corps with his girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind1), but they’re barely outside of town before they hit an animal with their car. They find themselves near the home of Timmy Baterman (Jack Mulhern), a former boyhood friend of Jud’s who’s recently returned from Vietnam on an honorable discharge. Timmy has come back a changed young man, however, staring dead-eyed at Jud and mocking him for his cowardice in avoiding the draft, then doing nothing when his dog attacks Norma. When he’s not killing and eating animals, he’s wandering around town tormenting his neighbors with their darkest secrets and saying a bunch of weird, sinister shit while gradually decaying.
Rather than staying several hundred yards away from Timmy, as any normal person would, Jud decides this warrants further investigation, and along with his other former boyhood friend2 Manny (Forrest Goodluck), tries to get to the bottom of it. If you’ve read Pet Sematary (or even just seen the original movie) you already know what’s going on: Timmy is dead, killed in combat and resurrected after his grieving father (David Duchovny, of all people) buried him in the cursed ground behind the titular pet cemetery.
Thanks to a journal at the local church that explains everything (like John Carpenter’s The Fog), Jud learns that the founding fathers of Ludlow knew about the evil in its soil from the moment they arrived. After the area was abandoned by the Indigenous people who once lived there, the founders, which included Jud’s ancestors, formed a secret council to keep the undead menace at bay, passing that obligation on from one generation to the next and refusing to leave the town for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.
While it doesn’t offer an absurd 17th-century flashback, again, the book does actually do a serviceable job explaining how the burial ground came to be. But in these current “I want it now, Daddy” times, it’s apparently better to have everything spoon-fed to you in a movie, along with a bunch of superfluous lore that doesn’t make much sense. For instance, you’d have to buy that after everything that happens not just Jud, but Norma, who is brutally attacked and nearly killed, would elect to remain in the town because of some promise Jud’s ancestor made 300 years earlier. It seems to me that a mass exodus of the town would ensure that there are less people ending up behind the pet cemetery, but what do I know, the story made perfect sense to me the first time around, without all this extraneous bullshit.
Understanding that a bunch of hayseeds are apparently locked into an eternal duty to protect a town that’s barely a flyspeck on a map doesn’t make the overall story any scarier. More importantly, it still doesn’t explain why Jud later tells Louis about the burial ground. If anything it makes his actions then more intentional, even villainous, as if bringing fresh meat to the beast. Maybe this was on purpose, but it’s impossible to know for sure, because director Lindsey Anderson Beer, who co-wrote the script with Jeff Buhler, suffers from the same affliction as David Gordon Green: too many ideas, and not enough time or interest in developing them.
It seems like Timmy Baterman’s shambling corpse is a metaphor for young men returning from Vietnam as hollow-eyed shells of their former selves, but it’s never really pursued, nor is the suggestion that Ludlow is like the Hotel California of New England, in that you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. The “secret council” thing is especially silly, and seems to exist mostly as an excuse to make more Pet Sematary movies — which, of course, Beer announced just after this movie’s release that she will, even though it scored a cool 20% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was unceremoniously dumped on Paramount+ without any theatrical release.
On the bright side, there’s some decent gore, and Forrest Goodluck gives a much better performance than such nonsense deserves, whereas Jackson White mostly just stands around looking confused, occasionally while wearing a tight t-shirt as a little something for the ladies. It can’t even be blamed for its biggest failing, because every other movie in the franchise failed in the same way. None of them so far have been able to recreate the sense of bleak dread in the novel, as it becomes clear that every seemingly innocuous step the characters take is bringing them closer to the horror that lies ahead, and that love and good intentions will not save them. I’m not even sure you can illustrate that in a movie, but God knows people will keep trying, and God bless ‘em for trying, I suppose.
Lind looks so much like Florence Pugh that her casting seems intentional, as if trying to give the movie some unearned gravitas.
Among other issues, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines looks like it was edited with a hacksaw, and that’s most apparent in the relationship between Jud, Timmy, and Manny. You want to complain about unanswered questions, how come we don’t get even one line of dialogue explaining why they’re not friends anymore? It seems like it might be important.