If there's any human experience more universal
than love, it's loss.
And that's the exact flavor of optimism explored
in Pet Sematary.
Plus horror.
And creepy masks.
And cats.
"Mrrrrrrr.
Heh heh heh."
Pet Sematary opened to relatively good reviews,
largely due to a few key themes and moments
of crucial character development.
But as the ending swirled into gory mayhem,
you might have lost track of those themes.
Let's dig in and resurrect the ending of Pet
Sematary.
Spoilers ahead!
The film's protagonist, Louis Creed, is shown
to be blunt and realistic.
For him, sugarcoating things like dead cats
is an unhealthy approach to parenting.
"Perfectly natural.
Just like dying is natural."
This rationalism is what makes Louis' decision
to upset the natural balance so surprising.
Despite the fact that he already watched his
undead cat Church go totally bonkers, Louis
abandons common sense and tries to reincarnate
his daughter.
Initially, Louis achieves his goal, and Ellie
is raised from the dead and returns home.
Even though Louis makes a costly mistake in
his decision to spend more time with his daughter,
he does come full circle and regain a degree
of level-headedness in his final moments.
As he fights with his daughter, he decides
to take Jud's advice about dead being better,
making the painful decision to re-end Ellie's
life.
Ellie inarguably goes through the most change
throughout the course of the movie.
She starts out as a curious, friendly 8-year-old
who loves her cat and enjoys the company of
her new friend and neighbor.
That changes when Church comes back from the
dead and starts acting like hell's Grumpy
Cat.
"Die, bad guy.
Meow, meow.
Die."
Ellie begins to feel isolated and asks her
father if they can move back to Boston, but
the real changes come during her ninth birthday
party, when she dies.
That's a pretty big change!
Ellie is resurrected by her father, and nothing
is ever the same again.
Now, Ellie makes it her mission to kill all
those around her so she can resurrect her
family.
As she carries out her nefarious plans, she
displays an impressive array of abilities.
She seems to be able to channel the spirits
of others who have died: she does this once
with the spirit of Jud's wife and once with
her late aunt's spirit.
Despite all this, Ellie is able to accomplish
her goal of feeling secure in her family by
the end of the film.
Awww, it was a happy ending!
Pet Sematary places a heavy focus on death
and the emotions associated with it.
Throughout its runtime, the film manages to
explore all of the five stages of grief: Denial,
anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Louis can't accept that his daughter is gone
forever and decides to resurrect her, showcasing
classic denial.
When Rachel talks about her sister, she starts
to tell Louis that if she had only brought
her sister her meal in person that things
would be different.
At this point, Rachel shows that she's stuck
in the bargaining stage of grief.
However, once she's confronted with an undead
daughter trying to kill herself and Gage,
her demeanor is much more in line with an
angry form of grief.
Jud seems to be in a stage of acceptance,
saying that what is dead is best left dead
by the time the Creed family meets him.
Of course, it's strongly implied that he tried
to bring his own wife back, then dealt with
the consequences.
Putting down your zombie wife is one surefire
way to accept loss.
From the abusive mother in Carrie to the reverend
in Revival, religion is a common theme in
Stephen King's works, and the 2019 adaptation
of Pet Sematary is no different.
At the beginning of the film, Louis and Rachel
are shown to have theological differences
when they have a brief disagreement about
the existence of an afterlife.
Later, after Ellie is brought back to life,
she mentions when she was dead she'd been
to a hell-like afterlife and says that heaven
does not exist.
Additionally, when Ellie first returns, she
describes dying as "everything went black"
and later says that she never wanted to be
brought back to life, an odd statement for
someone supposedly suffering in hell.
"It's not so bad, once you get used to it!"
Besides the discussion of an afterlife, some
could claim the name of the family cat is
a signifier of Stephen King's views on organized
religion.
The first evil domino that falls is the insistence
on keeping Church a part of the family.
Get it?
Louis may have revived his lost daughter,
but the ritual doesn't come without a heavy
price.
Very quickly, Ellie's behavior turns violent,
and it becomes apparent that the girl who
returned may look like Ellie, but the cheery,
lovable child she once was is now gone.
Pet Sematary is abundantly clear in its message:
The laws of nature should not be broken.
Because Louis is unable to accept the loss
of his daughter, everything begins to spiral
out of control.
He is so focused on his grief that he forgets
the simple fact that she can never truly return.
Had he come to terms with his loss, he and
his family would have been able to cope eventually.
Instead, the inability to face reality leads
to destruction.
In Stephen King's novel, the Wendigo plays
a largely important role in the overall narrative.
The Wendigo is an evil spirit that brings
the dead back to life and then possesses the
body of the reincarnated person.
It's also the Wendigo that lures those suffering
from grief to the burial ground, prompting
them to return their loved ones to life.
In an interview with Slashfilm, when asked
if the Wendigo was originally planned to be
shown in the film, screenwriter Jeff Buhler
replied.
"There isn't anything you could think of that
we didn't try once."
It's strongly hinted that the Wendigo is the
cause of the magical resurrections going on.
"Those woods belong to something else."
Although ambiguous in their origin, several
animalistic cries are heard coming from the
woods throughout the film, and it is heavily
implied that at least some of these are made
by the Wendigo.
With many horror films that gain even some
financial success, studios tend to expand
on those titles and create new series with
multiple entries.
With that in mind, there's no reason why studio
heads wouldn't want to see another Pet Sematary
movie if this one does well at the box office.
The only thing getting in the way of that
plan?
The film's rather resolute ending.
Ellie resurrects her mother, they kill and
bring back Louis, and then all three undead
family members go after Gage.
Getting around this obstacle is something
that the film's producer, Lorenzo di Bonaventura,
has discussed in interviews.
According to di Bonaventura, there may be
room to make more Pet Sematary films in the
form of prequels.
There are a lot of stories that could be explored
in the town, from local legends to the sinister
Wendigo itself.
The town of Ludlow is filled with more than
enough history to supply filmmakers with interesting
material to make a prequel, at the very least.
Or maybe they could dig into those creepy
kids in the masks.
What kid does that?
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