Pet Sematary/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The book/movie provides examples of:

  • Complete Monster: Human resurrectees of the burial ground are this. Psychotically violent, extremely sadistic, and fond of deranged Hannibal Lectures designed to further terrify and demoralize victims. By extent, if you believe that the burial ground is a Genius Loci, it could qualify itself.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: I don't wanna be buried in a pet sematary...
  • Nightmare Fuel
    • One example in particular would be Zelda, especially the second scene she's in.
      • Also, the story Jud tells of Bill Baterman, who buried his son in the burial ground, and everything that followed. Doubles as Nausea Fuel in places.
      • King waited a year after finishing this manuscript before submitting it to the publisher because he was so horrified by what he had written. Stephen King scared himself with this story.
    • "Mommy, I brought you something!"
    • A more prosaic example, when Louis mulls over resurrecting Gage.

Do you want to resurrect a zombie from a B-grade horror picture? Or even something so prosaic as a retarded little boy? A boy who eats with his fingers and stares blankly at images on the TV screen and will never learn to write his own name? What did Jud say about his dog? "It was like washing a piece of meat." Is that what you want? A piece of breathing meat?...Did he believe it would be impossible for him to love Gage even if Gage had to go on wearing diapers until he was eight? If he did not master the first-grade primer until he was twelve? If he never mastered it at all?

      • Unfortunate Implications most definitely into play here, as regardless of our supposed tolerance for the mentally disabled, the fear of having a disabled child is still an extremely potent source of HONF for most young parents.
      • Nightmare Retardant here for parents of profoundly disabled kids or other people who've worked with them. At least one reader's first thought here was, "He'll be able to master the first-grade primer at any point in his life? Good for him!"
  • Paranoia Fuel
  • Squick: Once again, all over the place
  • Tear Jerker: Louis weeping and cradling Gage's deceased body, and when Louis weeps as he carries Rachel's body to the burial ground, hoping she will come Back from the Dead.
    • The scene, both in the movie and the book, where Louis and his father-in-law start to fight at Gage's funeral, and knock over his coffin.

The coffin did not actually open and spill Gage's sad, hurt remains out onto the floor for all of them to gawp at, but Louis was sickly aware that they had only been spared that by the way the coffin had fallen--on its bottom instead of its side. ... Nonetheless in that split instant before the lid slammed shut on its broken latch again, he saw a flash of gray--the suit they had bought to put in the ground around Gage's body. And a bit of pink. Gage's hand, maybe. Sitting there on the floor, Louis put his face in his hands and began to weep.

  • The Woobie: Ellie Creed. At the end of the story she's sedated in the hospital, perhaps driven half-mad from unheeded psychic warnings, her brother is dead, as is her mother, and her cat, and in the movie her father (though it's a given that he'll also die soon in the book). And all this at the age of six...
    • Jerkass Woobie: Louis, who just won't learn his lesson about letting dead stay dead, but you can't help but pity him anyway.
      • Zelda, somewhat, too. She wasn't exactly nice, but she was a little girl in HORRIBLE PAIN and nobody could do anything about it.
    • Rachel.

The sequel provides examples of: