by Charlie Kennedy
In the opening minutes of Mary Lambert’s 1989 film Pet Sematary, based on the novel by Stephen King, we see a young Gage Creed escape the watchful eyes of his parents and wander towards the open street. This moment, which is an obvious piece of foreshadowing for the horrors to come, is a great microcosm for everything that doesn’t work about Lambert’s film. It shows a movie that is itching to get to the supposed good parts, and characters that only exist to serve their base narrative function. Gage isn’t a child, he’s a puppet who must die before he can be reborn. Perhaps I’m being too harsh; foreshadowing is an incredibly common narrative device. The scene also works to establish the necessary danger that the road, and the trucks that speed down it, pose to the family. It’s functional, but what bothers me is in how it plays on the audience’s understanding of the arc of the story. Gage running towards the road in the first minutes of the movie isn’t played for real drama, it’s meant to remind the audience of a thing that hasn’t even happened yet. It’s difficult to tell the story of King’s book without leaning too heavily on the vehicular manslaughter at the center of it, which is an interesting hurdle for any adaptation to get over, but it’s a hurdle that this film doesn’t even try to jump. As this opening moment shows, the adaptation presupposes a working understanding of the story and shape of the novel to the point that it doesn’t ever invest much time or energy in building the drama of the Creed family. It’s less an adaptation of King's Pet Sematary, and more a showcase of it as a piece of iconography. This isn’t to say that it’s a terrible movie, or even a bad one. It has Fred Gwynne, and a few moments of well constructed suspense, which is more than a lot of King adaptations have going for them, but it takes a great book and turns it into an alright studio horror film.
Which brings me to 1992’s Pet Sematary Two. Mary Lambert returns for this follow up, which is an original story set in the same town and world as the original. The film follows teenage Jeff Matthews, who moves to Ludlow, Maine with his father in the wake of the tragic death of his mother. All the iconography is there— the titular sematary, the burial ground, the undead corpses, the vehicular homicides— but the freedom of building an original story doesn’t tie Lambert down to servicing something that she assumes everyone watching already knows. She loosens things up, no longer feeling the pressure to check off plot beats along the Creed family journey as laid out in King's novel. Instead, Lambert is able to relish in the joys of an undead psycho cop, played by Clancy Brown, terrorizing local children. There is no pretension of telling a compelling drama, and therefore we don’t have to trudge through domestic scenes of Louis Creed explaining death to his troubled daughter because the movie still has 45 minutes to go until Gage can come back to life. It’s a true example of pop horror, which is a far cry from the original text, but is the perfect antidote to the limitations of the original film. It takes all of the great iconography and interesting ideas from King’s book, but it doesn’t have to go through the motions of a preexisting structure. While I won’t necessarily argue that Pet Sematary Two is a great movie, it is an interesting case of a filmmaker getting to fix the issues of their previous film. Drama doesn’t have to be sped through because it’s being shaped around the murder and resurrections, which are the things that Lambert seemed interested in to begin with.
To illustrate the differences that all of this brings about, it’s helpful to look at the way in which the reanimated corpses go about their killing. In the original film, all of this is confined to the last act, when Gage has finally been woken up, and when Louis is confronted with the repercussions of his decisions. Lambert’s filmmaking in these sequences is very restrained, pulling more from Alfred Hitchcock than Steve Miner. The standout scare sequence, which ends with Jud Crandall getting carved up with a scalpel, is built around patient steadicam shots that follow Fred Gwynne throughout the house. You only see a few shots of the blade cutting through flesh, and the rapid editing around the actual moment of violence is what gives it its intensity. I don’t mean to in any way knock this sequence, it’s the most effective moment in the film and the restraint works, but it also speaks to a stylistic choice that’s dictated by the tone of the movie. The supposed juicy parts of the story that Lambert has been teasing and withholding are still forced to be presented in the same faux dramatic tone that the rest of the film had been built around. There was a slight feeling of disappointment for me on rewatch when, this late in the movie, Lambert was still holding onto the idea that Gage’s violent shenanigans held any dramatic weight. As effective as that single sequence with Jud may be, the movie can’t seem to enjoy the violence that it has been teasing out. It’s so assured of its own seriousness that it seems to lose sight of its own goals. Lambert obviously relishes the image of Gage as a flesh and blood Chucky doll, giggling his way around the corpses he has created, which once again does not click with the facade of drama that they’ve committed to.
On the absolute flip side, we find the always wonderful Clancy Brown. While Edward Furlong’s Jeff Matthews is technically the lead of the movie, the real star of the show is Brown's local sheriff, the all around irredeemable piece of shit Gus Gilbert. In line with the violence-first approach the sequel takes, the structure of the script seems to revolve around giving Gus another nasty thing to do every fifteen minutes or so. From shooting dogs to abusing his stepson, he is the centerpiece of the film's most entertaining moments, and the driving force behind most of the action. Gus is the film's true villain, something that the first film doesn’t really have. He is a face for the evil that lurks beyond the deadfall. Gus releases the tension found in the character of Gage, allowing Lambert to find her slasher villain without having to untangle the emotional complexity inherent to the first film's drama-first approach. Nobody is conflicted about Gus, so the film can enjoy the violence that he brings, and therefore follow through on the promise of these movies as glossy horror spectacle. In one of the movie’s most dramatic and violent sequences, a now undead Gus chases down his new wife and stepson in a frantic car chase set to The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Reverence,” which ends in a sudden collision with a potato truck. This scene encapsulates Lambert’s interest in the iconography of King’s original work, calling back to Gage’s death, but rather than focusing solely the tragedy that horror can bring, she shines a light on the joy that these gruesome and intense situations can give to an audience. Lambert takes the pieces and images from King that she is most attracted to, and though Gus, turns them into something poppy and energetic. In moments like this, it feels as if you’re watching the movie that she had wanted to make the first time around.
Now is a good time for me to say that Pet Sematary the novel is a better, more effective, and more emotionally involving work than any of its film adaptations. It is both an excellent horror story and an honest depiction of a family in crisis. But even if Lambert's movie counterparts aren’t able to strike that balance as well as King, I’ll still take the gnarly romp of the second film any day, compared to the conflicted drama of the first. I guess my point in all of this is that if you’re only interested in the iconography of a book, or a movie for that matter, that should be ok to admit. Pet Sematary Two is completely honest and open about that fact, and it’s the better movie for it. A filmmaker’s interests always shine through in the final product, and the energy that the sequel has compared to the sleepy shambling original just can’t be ignored. Maybe I just feel defensive because it seems like people have an issue with the second film due to there not being any source material from King, but if the leading argument for a movie is that it was adapted faithfully from preexisting material, then things are in a pretty dire place if you ask me. Or maybe I just like watching Clancy Brown skin rabbits, but who knows. Hey ho?
****
Charlie Kennedy is an independent filmmaker based in Richmond, VA.