The Pumpkin King: PET SEMATARY (1989)
I’ve never admitted this to anyone but now I will come clean to all of you: I was a pre-teen poseur. When I was nine years old, THE MONSTER SQUAD was released. My obsession with the film was pretty intense. Lead character Sean (Andre Gower) wears a red shirt with bright yellow letters that read Stephen King Rules on it.
I thought that Sean was the coolest.
So cool, in fact, I started writing Stephen King Rules on literally anything I could.
Here’s where the poseur part comes in: People thought I loved Stephen King when, in fact, I hadn’t read any of his books or seen any of the movies based on them.
That was until Christmas of 1990.
Of course, like all movie fans of that time, my favorite thing to get as gifts were videos. Specifically, horror movies. Unless it was wrapped in a bigger box, I could always tell which presents were VHS tapes, and which weren’t. Those were the ones I was most excited about.
The tag read “To: Jeremy, From: Elliot.” Elliot was my sister’s big black lab. Hmmm…what movie would a dog pick out for me?
I furiously opened the packaging, and there it was, PET SEMATARY. Holy shit! Real Stephen King horror. “I know how much you love Stephen King, and I thought it would be cute if I put that it was from Elliot. I hope you don’t already have that one,” my sister Debbie related. No way I could let on to my fabricated fandom. I played it as cool as possible, but up until that point I mainly watched campier horror and horror comedies. I loved A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS, GHOULIES 2, and WAXWORK—but now it was time for the real deal.
The day after Christmas and all the adults go back to work—but not me, I’m on Christmas break. I’ve got the apartment to myself, a bag of yogurt covered pretzels that Santa left in my stocking, and I was ready to tackle real Stephen King horror.
Or at least, I thought I was.
The next 103-minutes were filled with horror, drama, emotion, and a lack of humor. I was terrified and I loved it. My adolescent mind trying to wrap itself around the Creed family moving from a major city to a rural area, like the one in which I grew up, only to find more terror than they could have ever imagined. The living bringing the dead back to life, only to be killed off by those same people. It was all so shocking.
The subtext of Mary Lambert’s film, dealing with grief and guilt, was absolutely lost on me at the time.
But the imagery of Peter Stein’s cinematography and the creepy production design haunted me to my core. Pascow (Brad Greenquist) dying from a major head injury, and then coming back to continuously warn the Creeds of their fate. Zelda (Andrew Hubastek) suffering from spinal meningitis. Gage Creed (Miko Hughes) slicing the Achilles tendon of friendly neighbor Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne). Having it all unfold without any jokes, without any winks or the safety valve of laughter, made it all that more impactful.
My pre-pubescent mind had now been permanently scarred. There was no going back. I was no longer a liar, and I was proud of that. I quickly got my hands on CARRIE, CHILDREN OF THE CORN, and CHRISTINE. They were awesome, but it is the 1989 adaptation of PET SEMATARY that still has me saying, “Stephen King Rules.”
