The tragedy of Pet Sematary‘s Creed family, and how the loss of a kid destroys the entire family once the barrier between the living and the dead evaporates, is well established, thanks to Stephen King’s original novel and the successful 1989 adaptation. So when the second trailer for the newest adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, fans were quick to notice a major deviation from the novel.
That trailer showed that it would be 8-year-old Ellie, and not the adorable 3-year-old Gage, who would bite the dust thanks to a speeding truck. This means no cute toddler chasing people with a knife and making the audience think about whether they should scream or go “aww.” But according to the cast and crew of Pet Sematary, this change allowed them to go darker and deeper than even the previous film.
It was originally Matt Greenberg, who wrote the first draft for the new Pet Sematary, who came up with the idea, and at first, it raised a few eyebrows among the cast and crew. “It took me 24 to 36 hours before I finally started coming to terms with the change,” writer Jeff Buhler told GameSpot the day after the film’s world premiere during SXSW. “By then the initial shock wore off and I started getting excited about the implications of the change and all the things you could do with it.”
Jason Clarke, who plays Louis Creed, is a self-proclaimed Stephen King fan, and he was also surprised by the change in the script. “That’s always the litmus test,” Clarke told GameSpot. “They tell you they changed some things and when you read it you can’t believe what they did. But I loved what they did with Ellie. I don’t want to be working with a doll, or a stand-in or a tennis ball. I love that I get to work with a real actress that does a great job, and that change makes it easier to establish that father-daughter relationship, which is the core of the story. I thought it was a very smart move.”
The change opened some big doors for the filmmakers, and directors Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kölsch think they got to have a more adult conversation about death than if it was a toddler that returned from the grave. “You have a character that now is the older child and has the presence of mind to know what’s happening to her and talk about it,” said Kölsch. “We always find the psychology of this movie the most terrifying of things, and having this child, [who asks] about death earlier in the movie, now asking about her own condition, makes you see instantly why this change works.”
Buhler also added a new dimension to the story that wasn’t present in previous versions: Ellie’s relationship with her neighbor Judd. In the book, Judd, now played by John Lithgow, acts as a surrogate father to Louis, but Buhler saw an opportunity to do something different. “He’s just so likable,” the writer explained. “So by having him interact with Ellie, it makes you ask yourself if you really trust him or not. He acts like a sympathetic old man, but you get a sense that he’s hiding something. And because it’s an 8-year-old, she instantly trusts him, even if her parents don’t.”
Amy Seimetz, who plays Rachel Creed, thinks the character switch makes sense for a new adaptation. “Horror only works with the unexpected,” she told GameSpot. “You can’t just make a word-for-word remake of the book or the film, because it’s so well known.” Her co-star, Jason Clarke, agrees. He drew an interesting comparison: “You have to be bold with an adaptation,” Clarke said. “I love The Shining, and Kubrick made that movie his own. We’re not making this to read at home alone, we’re making this to watch in a room with hundreds of people.”
The Dark Humor
Along with the changes in plot, Pet Sematary has another trick up its sleeve: its humor. As our review points out, the film has a morbid humor that makes you laugh even in the bleakest of scenes. “It’s the absurdity of it all,” Clarke told us. “And you just have to play with that. There’s a scene where we’re arguing about telling Ellie about death, and Rachel doesn’t want to say anything and suddenly Ellie says ‘but mom, what about your sister?’ and it’s just like ‘Oh my God!’ It is just built in there naturally.”
The directors agree that it’s not meant to be just comedic, but a darker, more morbid humor. “I think the laughs serve as decompression,” Dennis Widmyer said. “The movie has a lot of anxiety, and these moments let you nervously laugh and enjoy the movie a bit more than if it was utterly bleak the whole way through.”
Buhler, on the other hand, was surprised to even hear people laughing during the film’s world premiere. “We played everything really straight,” Buhler explains. “I was surprised that people were really yacking it up last night and I thought ‘what is wrong with people?’ I think what happens is that the movie is so messed up and absurd, you’re laughing because you can’t believe what is happening onscreen, as opposed to an actual comedy like Shaun of the Dead that has built-in jokes.”
Sharp-eyed viewers will also notice a little nod to another famous Stephen King story in Pet Sematary. Dennis Widmyer thinks it was just natural to include something, but they made sure they did it right. “Stephen King does that himself in a kind of multiverse,” Widmyer said. “Even in the Pet Sematary book there’s a reference to the dog from Cujo, so we already had the groundwork done for us, we just didn’t want to be cute about it. The production design team really got excited and started pitching things like a Danny Torrance hardware store, and we decided against it because Danny would never have a hardware store. What we did was to think about things that could exist within this book. If Rachel Creed is driving up I-95 from Boston to Ludlow, on Stephen King’s map of Maine she would pass Derry at one point, so we could do that as long as it doesn’t go beyond the reality of this story.”
The Ending Changes
Of course, while the Ellie/Gage switch is a huge departure from the book, Pet Sematary doesn’t stop there. The film’s ending, in which both Creed parents and Ellie are seen walking out of the sematary and towards a defenseless Gage, is different than the book and the previous film–and it is also a bonkers and fun way to end such an absurd and dark film. Thing is, this was nowhere near the original ending.
According to Buhler, the production tried “every ending imaginable,” Buhler told GameSpot, with different characters coming out of the sematary and others being left behind, dead. The ending we got was sort of a surprise. “Someone suggested it as a joke on a roundtable discussion, and I thought that it sounded like a weird but maybe fun idea, so we shot it and played it with the movie. That’s when we realized that this ending worked best, because it made the movie fun again. After such a bleak story, you want to go out of the theater and get pizza with your friends, and this ending makes you want to do just that.”
While Buhler wouldn’t give up details on the other endings they tried, we did get some information on a couple of finished scenes that were cut from the theatrical version of the film. Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura told us that they should make their way into the Blu-ray. “The first scene is between Jason Clarke and John Lithgow, where they talk about family and what’s happening in the town,” di Bonaventura said. “It was a nice scene that gave some insight into John’s character, but it got cut because you already knew what the conversation was about before you got there, so it felt repetitive.”
The second one sounds super interesting, and we are bummed that it got cut. “The other was about Rachel when she goes back to her parents’ house,” explains di Bonaventura. “When she sees the blood coming out and her kid starts crying. We had her parents come down and they sort of fight, because Rachel’s parents think she is hysterical. She’s saying she knows something is wrong with Louis and she has to go back, and they try to calm her down while Gage is crying. She tells her parents to give her back her kid, and they say ‘not in your state’. Then she finally gets mad at them and yells ‘I’m not going to be like you, you pretended that Zelda never existed. Ellie did.’ It’s a heavy scene, and a great scene, and there’s not really another scene that duplicates what it tries to say. Unfortunately the place that scene is in, it just gets in the way of the movie’s flow, so it got cut.”
Pet Sematary is in theaters now.
Read next: GameSpot’s Pet Sematary review