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.

 

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* [[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.

* [[Obnoxious In-Laws]]: Rachel's father disliked Louis from the beginning, and even tried to bribe him (offering to pay his tuition through med school) if he breaks up with Rachel. Louis told him to take his checkbook and plug up his ass with it. Not exactly a promising first step toward good relations with the future in-laws.

* [[Oh, and X Dies]]: Two examples.

** "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."

* [[Screw This, I'm Outta Here]]: Steve Masterton, {{spoiler|literally seconds away from Louis when he's carrying Rachel's body to be buried}}, decides that whatever is going on in the Pet Sematary filled up his weirdness levels for the rest of his life and bolts away. By the time he gets to his apartment, [[Forgot the Call|he doesn't even remember going to the town in the first place]].

* [[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.

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

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[[Category:World Fantasy Award]]

[[Category:Horror Films]]

[[Category:The Eighties]]

[[Category:Films of the 1980s]]

[[Category:Horror Literature]]

[[Category:Zombie Stories]]