Media and Pie (with Holly Huffstutler)

Pet Sematary: Then and Now [many spoilers below]

“Pet Sematary” was my first R-rated movie; that or "The Untouchables" I saw both way too young.

I watched the former for the first time since I was either 9 or 10. My first experience of it was in the basement of my sister’s junior high best friend’s house. Either she told me when to plug my ears and cover my eyes, or I did it on my own whenever I started to freak out. Consequently, what I actually remembered about the film were these fractured, terrifying images of whatever I saw when I peeked or didn’t shut my eyes/ears fast enough. Usually something blue and bent over (may have been an old lady) crab walking behind a bed, or quickly darting out from beneath that bed. In greater detail I remember a gray man with exposed brains who I wasn’t that scared of.

Now, twentyish years later, AMC aired it as part of their three day Steven King fest in anticipation of Halloween and “The Walking Dead” season two premier (what they have in common I don’t know) and I had to watch it for reals this time.

The movie follows the Creed family who has moved into an appropriated creepy New England town so the father, Louis (Dale Midkiff) can be the doctor at the college.

Obviously, what with not actually watching it at that first 'screening,' I missed some things. But I assumed those things were plot based. What I remember was the existence of a pet cemetery, which was a good place; and a people cemetery built over an Indian burial ground, which was a bad and scary place.

In reality there was no official people cemetery built over the burial ground, it was a place that animals and humans could be buried if you wanted them to come back [Because the Indians were magic!]

Apparently, I absorbed what their new neighbor, Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne) said about the “pet semetary” being an initially scary place that really wasn’t bad. But, at my young age, I had no idea the extent to which the movie was about death. Specifically, how disastrous it may be to deny death.

This time around, I found the Rachel, the mother (Tasha Yarr from Next Generation) infuriating. Crandall defends his decision to tell the whole family about the purpose and history of the pet cemetery with the assumption that their young (terribly acted) daughter needs to learn about death. Rachel incredulously and angrily shoots back “Why!?”

“Because we all die! And it’s sad and normal and permanent!” I thought, nearly screaming in frustration, as do all the people in the movie. They don’t scream really, but they frequently do butt heads with her dangerous denial. Louis, the creepy dad [textually, he’s not meant to be creepy, but I found him creepy then, possibly because I had just seen him in “Elvis and Me” and my reaction to him was the same many years later] is forced into telling his daughter that there is no chance that her cat will die when he goes to the vet to be neutered.

He’s rational in this instance, making his wife promise that she’s the one who has to explain it to their daughter if the cat dies under anesthesia. He’s less rational later when their son Gage is killed, the victim of one of the semis that speed past their house, killing tens of pets and a few humans every year.

He brings the body to the resurrection burial ground so he’ll come back in the predictably “dark and unnatural” way.

Meanwhile we are told (via nightmares) of the childhood trauma that made Rachel suppress any thought of death, and this is where the bent blue thing of my frightened memories came from. Her spinal meningitis afflicted older sister Zelda was kept in the back room of their house “like a dirty secret” so secluded and ignored and hated that she apparently took to taunting and scaring the younger sister who was sent in to feed her every now and again.

In reality, Zelda was not in fact a blue old woman crawling on the floor, but a man in unconvincing drag writhing on the bed while screaming at his much much much much younger sister.

Nor was he the blue thing that sped out from under that bed. Zombie Gage did that, poking his hand out to cut Fred Gwynne’s ankle tendon with a scalpel while wearing a blue dress and oversized top hat combo of the type that Victorian parents used to torture their sons with on picture day.

So we’ve got a lot of creepy elements here and few of them are temporarily effective before they get funny. Zelda’s odd appearance stays jarring even after her writhing and screaming antics have gotten ridiculous. And Zombie Gage is a pretty solid evil kid when he’s not being told to make a scary face or engage adults in hand to hand combat. Then “It’s all short arms and whining” to quote Zach Handlen, the AV Club writer who clued me into the existence of “Orphan” which, by the way, features just about the best evil kid performance in film history.

Anyway, the evil baby has to be put down, but Louis learns nothing and carries his recently murdered wife off to the resurrection area, the grim reaper weeps in frustration because he’s just trying to do his job and presumably it continues on like that forever.

Speaking of which, am I ever going to stop being surprised when I build up something and find it less scary than my imagination or memories? Probably not.