If there's any human experience more universal than love, it's loss.
And that's the exact flavor of optimism explored in Pet Sematary.
Plus horror.
And creepy masks.
And cats.
"Mrrrrrrr.
Heh heh heh."
Pet Sematary opened to relatively good reviews, largely due to a few key themes and moments
of crucial character development.
But as the ending swirled into gory mayhem, you might have lost track of those themes.
Let's dig in and resurrect the ending of Pet Sematary.
Spoilers ahead!
The film's protagonist, Louis Creed, is shown to be blunt and realistic.
For him, sugarcoating things like dead cats is an unhealthy approach to parenting.
"Perfectly natural.
Just like dying is natural."
This rationalism is what makes Louis' decision to upset the natural balance so surprising.
Despite the fact that he already watched his undead cat Church go totally bonkers, Louis
abandons common sense and tries to reincarnate his daughter.
Initially, Louis achieves his goal, and Ellie is raised from the dead and returns home.
Even though Louis makes a costly mistake in his decision to spend more time with his daughter,
he does come full circle and regain a degree of level-headedness in his final moments.
As he fights with his daughter, he decides to take Jud's advice about dead being better,
making the painful decision to re-end Ellie's life.
Ellie inarguably goes through the most change throughout the course of the movie.
She starts out as a curious, friendly 8-year-old who loves her cat and enjoys the company of
her new friend and neighbor.
That changes when Church comes back from the dead and starts acting like hell's Grumpy
Cat.
"Die, bad guy.
Meow, meow.
Die."
Ellie begins to feel isolated and asks her father if they can move back to Boston, but
the real changes come during her ninth birthday party, when she dies.
That's a pretty big change!
Ellie is resurrected by her father, and nothing is ever the same again.
Now, Ellie makes it her mission to kill all those around her so she can resurrect her
family.
As she carries out her nefarious plans, she displays an impressive array of abilities.
She seems to be able to channel the spirits of others who have died: she does this once
with the spirit of Jud's wife and once with her late aunt's spirit.
Despite all this, Ellie is able to accomplish her goal of feeling secure in her family by
the end of the film.
Awww, it was a happy ending!
Pet Sematary places a heavy focus on death and the emotions associated with it.
Throughout its runtime, the film manages to explore all of the five stages of grief: Denial,
anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Louis can't accept that his daughter is gone forever and decides to resurrect her, showcasing
classic denial.
When Rachel talks about her sister, she starts to tell Louis that if she had only brought
her sister her meal in person that things would be different.
At this point, Rachel shows that she's stuck in the bargaining stage of grief.
However, once she's confronted with an undead daughter trying to kill herself and Gage,
her demeanor is much more in line with an angry form of grief.
Jud seems to be in a stage of acceptance, saying that what is dead is best left dead
by the time the Creed family meets him.
Of course, it's strongly implied that he tried to bring his own wife back, then dealt with
the consequences.
Putting down your zombie wife is one surefire way to accept loss.
From the abusive mother in Carrie to the reverend in Revival, religion is a common theme in
Stephen King's works, and the 2019 adaptation of Pet Sematary is no different.
At the beginning of the film, Louis and Rachel are shown to have theological differences
when they have a brief disagreement about the existence of an afterlife.
Later, after Ellie is brought back to life, she mentions when she was dead she'd been
to a hell-like afterlife and says that heaven does not exist.
Additionally, when Ellie first returns, she describes dying as "everything went black"
and later says that she never wanted to be brought back to life, an odd statement for
someone supposedly suffering in hell.
"It's not so bad, once you get used to it!"
Besides the discussion of an afterlife, some could claim the name of the family cat is
a signifier of Stephen King's views on organized religion.
The first evil domino that falls is the insistence on keeping Church a part of the family.
Get it?
Louis may have revived his lost daughter, but the ritual doesn't come without a heavy
price.
Very quickly, Ellie's behavior turns violent, and it becomes apparent that the girl who
returned may look like Ellie, but the cheery, lovable child she once was is now gone.
Pet Sematary is abundantly clear in its message: The laws of nature should not be broken.
Because Louis is unable to accept the loss of his daughter, everything begins to spiral
out of control.
He is so focused on his grief that he forgets the simple fact that she can never truly return.
Had he come to terms with his loss, he and his family would have been able to cope eventually.
Instead, the inability to face reality leads to destruction.
In Stephen King's novel, the Wendigo plays a largely important role in the overall narrative.
The Wendigo is an evil spirit that brings the dead back to life and then possesses the
body of the reincarnated person.
It's also the Wendigo that lures those suffering from grief to the burial ground, prompting
them to return their loved ones to life.
In an interview with Slashfilm, when asked if the Wendigo was originally planned to be
shown in the film, screenwriter Jeff Buhler replied.
"There isn't anything you could think of that we didn't try once."
It's strongly hinted that the Wendigo is the cause of the magical resurrections going on.
"Those woods belong to something else."
Although ambiguous in their origin, several animalistic cries are heard coming from the
woods throughout the film, and it is heavily implied that at least some of these are made
by the Wendigo.
With many horror films that gain even some financial success, studios tend to expand
on those titles and create new series with multiple entries.
With that in mind, there's no reason why studio heads wouldn't want to see another Pet Sematary
movie if this one does well at the box office.
The only thing getting in the way of that plan?
The film's rather resolute ending.
Ellie resurrects her mother, they kill and bring back Louis, and then all three undead
family members go after Gage.
Getting around this obstacle is something that the film's producer, Lorenzo di Bonaventura,
has discussed in interviews.
According to di Bonaventura, there may be room to make more Pet Sematary films in the
form of prequels.
There are a lot of stories that could be explored in the town, from local legends to the sinister
Wendigo itself.
The town of Ludlow is filled with more than enough history to supply filmmakers with interesting
material to make a prequel, at the very least.
Or maybe they could dig into those creepy kids in the masks.
What kid does that?
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