So I watched the "Pet Sematary" remake, and then I read all the other reviews online, and I started to understand that our different reactions to the movie might be part of a bigger misunderstanding about the whole story. Who knows.
So when I was a kid, "Stephen King" was the name that represented " horror and everything bad" with the world. My whole chdhood, my mom told me could never read Stephen King books until I was old enough to "understand them." At some point that became when I was 12 years old, so soon after my 12th birthday, I asked her if I could read a Stephen King book, and she sighed, and said yes, as long as it wasn't her nemesis "The Shining." She had seen the movie, and that was too perverse for her. So I ran to the horror section the library, and the only title I recognized on the shelf was "Cujo," so I went to check that book out, but it turned out someone had just turned in the book "Pet Sematary," so I asked the librarian which book was better, and she told me "Pet Sematary" was her favorite, so I decided to check that out instead. So that was the first book I read of Stephen King's. "Pet Sematary."
The funny thing is, the first time I read that novel, my reaction was what every publicist would want: that the book was scary and terrifying. Because it was. But the thing is, I read the book like 2 years later (I was a kid trapped at home, I didn't have much to do) and the second time I read the book through, I discovered the secret. The book isn't scary, it's SAD. Like totally depressing, in a soul-crushing way.
This main character tries to start a family, and it gets hard and scary, because the world is totally dangerous for kids, so he moves to a place where life is supposed to be better, but death follows him, but then he discovers that maybe death can be overcome, so he tries to beat death, but death and evil corrupts everything he loves until he has no choice but to surrender to the evil in the hope he can turn it around. And that's how the book ends. With him trying to turn the evil around, but we know it probably won't work.
So here comes the remake movie, and almost from the beginning it takes a different path from the one the original movie takes, so it goes in a different direction, but it ends in the same way the original ends. And maybe that's the problem. See, I'm not the same 12 year old who read the original novel back in the day. I'm over 20 years older than that. I've lived through a lot. So I can see different ways out that probably 12 year old me couldn't see. But still...the ending of the remake of the movie resonates with me in a way that a way the original might not. Because...I can see death triumphing over life. Depressing, right?
Maybe it doesn't feel right, but it seems wrong to condemn a movie just because it ends the horrific way i always feared the original would. To darkness and to death. This is how the book is heading, and that movie, with the "car door unlock sound" that it ends with, seems fitting in a way the original movie failed to capture. Everything will be corrupted. Here it comes. Maybe the original movie didn't have the guts to say it, but here it is. The end of everything. To darkness and to death.
The part of me that tries to believe that things can be good wants to argue with this. Say not all hope is lost, things can still turn around. But part of me holds fast, because it remembers a time when no one listened to me because I was "crazy." I used to try and tell my family that things were wrong, things were broken, and everything was going to sink into darkness and to death if we didn't turn things around...and it all came to naught. Because it turns out, everyone would rather I disappear than listen to what I was saying. So either I had to disappear or leave...so I chose to leave, and I lost the only family I had known.
The trick of being the only person who sees the bad in the midst of everyone who insists everything is fine is that you spend the rest of your life worried that everything might be ending even when everything might be ok. And it's ok. You're not broken. You've just been gifted with the curse that you see the terrible truth that no one else wants to see.
So when the ending of this movie comes, are you surprised? I wasn't surprised, but I felt like my stomach had been punched, and I felt the horror that I think the original movie was supposed to give me, and I couldn't be mad.
This story is horror, no matter what form it takes. Boo. Just like a 12 year old who doesn't know what she's getting herself into, let's approach this story and say "damn, you got it right." The real horror. Whether we want to see it or not.
