Pet Sematary contains some of Stephen King’s scariest moments, and Mary Lambert’s original adaptation of the tale has some of the goriest. But it’s not Pascow’s brain hanging out of his head or Jud’s heel getting sliced open that makes Pet Sematary so scary. It’s the themes of Pet Sematary that get under your skin.
The single greatest fear exploited by Pet Sematary is, purely and simply, confronting death and realizing that it’s coming for us all. It’s a fear that no one gets to avoid, not even children.
“Honestly, one of the things that the movie is about is the idea that very often, when a child loses a pet, it’s their first experience with death,” Lambert told us.
“One of the things that the movie is about is how do you teach your children about death? How do you feel when you learn that death exists and it’s going to come for you and for your mother and for your daddy and for everybody who you know? Which is a huge thing for a child, huge. This movie doesn’t pull any punches but after it’s over, you understand.”
Adults are complicit in this. Not only are Louis and Rachel afraid to talk to Ellie about death, but Louis continues to make bad decisions even after knowing that the Micmac burial ground brings back the dead as killers. All he cares about is that he can bring back his son, whose death he cannot make peace with.
“It’s definitely about that bad decision,” Lambert said. “Death is something we have to accept. We can’t change it. As human beings, we can’t bring people back to life.”
Louis is not the only adult to blame though. Jud opened Pandora’s Box by showing him the burial ground in the first place. Once Louis knew, there was no talking him out of burying Gage there.
“The thing is Jud warned him but Jud shouldn’t have told him about it to begin with,” Lambert notes. “If Jud were really wise, he would have kept all of that buried, including the knowledge that it was possible. It was a bad decision on Jud’s part to tell him, or in fact, it was an evil decision. It was the evil force that lives up there in the Pet Sematary speaking through Jud giving that information to Louis because once he knew about it, he couldn’t stop himself.”
Another franchise says, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Jud neglected his responsibility since he knows about this great power. That’s a recurring theme in horror too.
“It’s one of the big themes of most fairy tales or myths, the God that has that power and knowing how to use it wisely,” Lambert explained. “The folk tale, the archetypal story that I know infuses Pet Sematary is The Monkey’s Paw. It’s the story of the three wishes which is a classic fairy tale story. It was Aladdin and the magic lamp. But if you can have anything you want, and it’s a huge power… it’s so hard to use that power because the consequences of that kind of power are just huge. That’s one of the things.”
Another scary thing that Pet Sematary makes us face is our own human obsessions. We may not be vulnerable to Indian burial grounds, but we all have obsessions that could destroy us.
“One of the other things would be obsession. That is at the root of most ghost stories,” Lambert explained. “The reason that the ghosts can’t move on is because they’re being kept in that place by some sort of obsession, because of the tragedy of their death and the ghost is obsessed with revenge or can’t leave because they’re not at rest, not at peace. Or there’s a living human that’s keeping them there by their obsession with the ghosts. We call up ghosts. We’re the ones that summon them. They can’t move on because of obsession.”
Pet Sematary is now available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD and digital formats.
