She ends up in a clearing, staring at what looks like a scattering of junk and litter.
There’s a sideways fishbowl.
Moldy stuffed animals stare from the weeds.
Credit: Kerry Hayes/Paramount Pictures
Boards, pipes, and beaten tin jut from the ground.
Photographs and drawings that weep with dried rainwater are tacked to the occasional tree.
Then she notices the debris is arrayed in concentric circles.
“Smucky the Cat,” one of them reads.
“He wasobediant.”
At the entrance to the clearing stands a weatherworn piece of scrapwood with another misspelling:Pet Sematary.
“But are we more sophisticated about it or less?”
Parents today, he notes, are definitely more fearful and protective than they were in the ’80s.
“But another thing we’re exploring is how you could’t run” from the things that scare you.
you’re free to only face them, live with them or be destroyed by them.
She doesn’t know it, but there’s another, more sinister burial ground further beyond it.
You get down from there now!"
before losing her footing and plunging to the ground with a cry.
An old man in dirty jeans and a flannel shirt rushes to her aid.
His white beard is stained with nicotine, making his mouth a little yellow circle of worry.
His name is Jud Crandall (played in the original by Fred Gwynne and now by John Lithgow).
Jud, as King readers remember, is a lighthouse keeper, of sorts.
“And he’s grown up with some real demons.”
Jud helps Ellie to her feet, then investigates the sharp pain in her leg.
He plucks a bee stinger from her calf with his big, grimy hands.
“That’s a big ‘un,” he says.
“No prize winner, but good enough for a ribbon.”
More alarming to the little girl are the macabre graves surrounding them.
“What is this place?”
Jud tries to comfort her, but his emotions are a little clumsier than his hands.
He glances back to the entrance.
“Uhh, didn’t you see the sign?”
That’s a moment of lightheartedness in a story thatotherwise descends steeply into despair.
Not in my lifetime, anyway."
King wrote in a 2000 introduction for the paperback.
And it may be okay.
Perhaps ‘sometimes dead is better’ is grief’s last lesson."
As a physician, defying death is his trade.
“That’s what makes it more than a horror movie,” says Clarke.
“I was like, ‘Where’s the horror?
I’m disturbed.’
That was it for me, I found it insanely disturbing.
[King] reaches inside you in some way, he always does.
There is great intellect and great subconscious and subtext and thought and reason behind it.”
Widmyer describes Louis as “a guy who thinks he has death figured out.
‘I see death every day, I work in an ER.
Don’t tell me about death, I understand death.’
But he doesn’t understand death when it’s dropped onto his lap.
He’ll do whatever he can to undo it.
It’s sort of like the science world meets the supernatural world.”
Ellie shows us that through a child’s eyes, worrying about the well-being of her own cat.
“It kind of helps you accept death as a natural part of life.”
Kolsch and Widmyer compare the rejuvenating burial ground to a gambling addiction for some of the characters.
“That happens a lot inPet Sematary.
The sweetness of the Creeds is one thing that makes King’s story so unsettling.
Jud tries to show her that the Pet Sematary is not a sad or angry place.
It’s a place to remember happy memories.
“He could talk, you know,” Jud tells her.
Suddenly, she’s smiling.
For the first time.
“He really cares about this little girl,” Lithgow says.
“That’s what this scene is about, the beginning of a connection.
He can delight a child, and it’s a very interesting color to this dark man….
It gives a very genuine and human motivation to everything that happens in this genre horror film.
In this film, Jud is the damaged one healed by the embrace of a new family.
“He’s a loner, and he’schosento be alone,” Lithgow says.
“His life changed.
He was a man whose entire life was wrapped up with his marriage, his wife.
And they didn’t have children, but they wanted children.
We wanted to keep ourselves to ourselves.’
You just know that was a really, really deep relationship.
And the loss of that relationship has defined his life ever since.”
The arrangement is slightly different, but the result is the same.
Her husband may form a familial bond with this man, but she is mistrustful from the start.
The little graveyard has a lot to do with that.
“It’s a hard topic for her to discuss.
The flashback to her grim, short life scarred readers and moviegoers almost as much as it did Rachel.
“It’s more accurate to the book, I’ll just say that,” Widmyer reveals.
Neither filmmaker is trying to demean the original movie.
“You go, ‘How do you top Zelda?'”
He has no idea he will end up creating more anguish.
It was a big ‘un!”
Her mom barely looks back as they hurry away.
They leave Jud in the Pet Sematary.
But their mutual paths have already been set.
He’s thinking about second chances.
And the kind that shouldn’t be.
