Pet Sematary: Difference between revisions

 

 

Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, moves to a house near the small town of Ludlow, Maine with his wife Rachel, their two young children, Ellie and Gage, and Ellie's cat, Winston Churchill ("Church"). Their neighbor, an elderly man named Jud Crandall, warns Louis and Rachel about the highway that runs past their house; it is used by trucks from a nearby chemical plant that often pass by at high speeds. A few weeks after the Creeds move in, Jud takes the family on a walk in the woods behind their home. A well-tended path leads to a pet cemetery (misspelled "sematary") where the children of the town bury their deceased animals.

 

----

* [[Ascended Extra]]: Pascow has a much bigger role in the movie.

* [[Arc Words]]: "A man's heart is stonier, Louis."

* [[Dead Hat Shot|Dead Kite and Shoe Shot]]

* [[Downer Ending]]: Like you didn't see this coming.

** Averted in the film: "No fair!"

* [[Eldritch Abomination]]: ''Very'' possible explanation for what the burial ground is.

* [[Filk Song]]: [[The Ramones]] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7f2LZK3zsY provided one].

* [[Foreshadowing]]: Almost to the point where everything is spelled out to the audience

** To the extent that it's obvious Gage's death is not meant to surprise the reader. From the moment the discrepancy between the two death dates of Jud's dog is revealed, it's clear that Gage is doomed.

* [[Genius Loci]]: The Micmac Burying Ground, in the sense that it is 'addictive' (people who have buried pets there keep making up excuses or finding reasons to use it again) and can project its will on people {{spoiler|(it essentially drives Louis insane, and it makes Jud fall asleep so that he is too late to prevent Louis from going up there again to bury Gage). It's also heavily implied that it influenced the truck driver to hit Gage.}}

* [[It Got Worse]]: The ''entire'' second half of the novel. Heck, it starts with this sentence: "It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience."

* [[Jerkass]]: Rachel's father, Irwin Goldman. Though, to be fair to him, he is genuinely upset about {{spoiler|his grandson's death when it happens}}, so he's not all bad.

** Eventually, her mother believes her, but that just makes things worse: {{spoiler|she goes back to Maine, and gets killed by Gage}}.

* [[Locked Into Strangeness]]: When {{spoiler|Louis goes insane after killing Gage, his hair turns white}}.

* [[Monster From Beyond the Veil]]: This is what happens to almost anything the burial ground resurrects.

* [[More Than Mind Control]]: In the book, the influence of the [[Eldritch Abomination|whatever]]-[[Wendigo|it-is]] in the burial ground is implied to be responsible for Gage's death and {{spoiler|Rachel not making it back in time to stop her husband}}, and Louis's [[Too Dumb to Live]] behavior is in fact a combination of its influence and the emotional wringer it's been putting him through.

** "And Gage, [[Mood Whiplash|who now had less than two months to live]], laughed shrilly and joyously." Later on in the very same page, King even explains that "marbles were really not the problem [i.e. the hazard that would soon take Gage's life], and chills were really not the problem, that a large Orinco truck was going to be the problem, that the road was going to be the problem..." A few pages and two months later, and Gage is dead.

* [[Orphaned Punchline]]: A joke is mentioned about a Jewish tailor who bought a parrot whose only line was "Ariel Sharon jerks off."

* [[Our Zombies Are Different]]: Type R. They look and act alive enough, but it's fairly easy to tell that they're functionally dead. At best, they're just not themselves (most animals turn out like this) and are occasionally a fair bit nastier. Humans, however, return as terrifyingly violent and sadistic abominations with few if any human characteristics, behaving less like an actual human and more like some sort of ''thing'' that happens to be taking a human guise.

* [[Real Life Writes the Plot]] - King mentions in ''On Writing'' that it is a parent's job to save your kid's life. His son bolted towards a road where semis blew by on a regular basis, and King caught him. What he couldn't stop thinking about was what would have happened if he hadn't. As he put it, he not only found himself thinking the unthinkable, but writing it down.

** Also in On Writing (or possibly another book, I forget), King mentions his young daughter jumping on plastic wrap bubbles and ranting "Let God have his own cat!" after the death of her pet, Smucky. This rant appears in the book, as does Smucky's grave ("He was obediant.").

* [[Sanity Slippage]]: Rachel and (especially) Louis go through this.

* [[Scare Chord]]

* [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog]]

* [[Spirit Advisor]]: In a way, Pascow, as he tries to warn Louis and later Ellie from beyond the grave.

* [[Swamps Are Evil]]: Especially when they are as lousy with spectral beings as Little God Swamp. On the first trip through, the swamp is generally creepy, but they don't witness anything too strange aside from a white opaque fog that covered the ground like "the world's lightest snowdrift." Jud tells Louis about some advice given him by the town drunk, Stanny Bouchard, who was the person who took Jud up to the Burying Ground for the first time. Stanny said you might see St. Elmo's Fire, what sailors called "foo-lights" and to just ignore it. You might hear voices, but "those are just the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It's funny." And most of all, do ''not'' speak to anything, should it speak to you. On Louis's second trip, though, Little God Swamp is wide awake and humming:

* [[Technology Marches On]]: In the book, a terabyte (and even 64 kilobytes!) is spoken of as an obscene and unthinkable amount of memory for a computer to have.

* [[Wendigo]]: The book implies that one may be responsible for the burial ground's power.

** The Wendigo is actually glimpsed in the book, but glossed over in the film. This leads to the above accusations of [[Too Dumb to Live]], because the film shows what the characters are led to do, but doesn't indicate that their actions are not entirely their own.

----

=== The sequel provides examples of: ===

* [[Your Head Asplode]]: {{spoiler|Cylde's head explodes after Jeff shoves a cut wire in his mouth.}}

----

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:World Fantasy Award]]

[[Category:Horror Films]]

[[Category:The Eighties]]

[[Category:Films of the 1980s]]

[[Category:Horror Literature]]

[[Category:Zombie Stories]]