Film Fatale: Small Towns, Stephen King and Cinematic Grief
Words: Charlotte Amy Landrum
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Daylight savings arrives and I get shifted into my favourite state: a functioning, multi faceted human being. All of a sudden I forgive the people I decided were my mortal enemies based on a vibe. I stop worrying about where I will be in 5 years' time. I think about Ted Kaczynski a lot less. It is in between the floating dandelion seeds and easy paced mid morning bike rides where I am able to get in touch with hope.
Just like those sickly nostalgic TikTok videos where birds are tweeting and the images are of hazy fields - shot close to the ground that evoke the experience of summer as a child - the warming of the seasons makes me think back to what I did best during those beautiful days when I was younger: sit in my room and watch horror films.
I remember begging my mum and dad to put on the “scariest horror film you have ever seen” when I was around 10. I wanted a challenge, They put on The Shining (1980) and I fell asleep about an hour in. The slow pace and empty hallways was boring to my younger self, a girl who craved creatures and ghosts neatly packaged into 90 minutes or less. The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) was more my thing. It took me a few years to give The Shining another go, and then I fell into the pit of Stephen King adaptations. Immediately I became infatuated with small town tales of idealistic American families living in Maine experiencing otherworldly terror.
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The stories of seemingly insignificant characters we can all recognise in our own day to day lives being placed in unusual situations hits every time. High school teachers and gravediggers facing an infestation of vampires in Salem’s Lot (1979), sadistic 1970s teenage bullies coming across a telekinetic Carrie (1976), and, maybe my favourite, a young family who move into a new home finding an ancient burial ground over the way in Pet Sematary (1989).
Stephen King is labelled as the Master of Horror, but he is really the master of the ordinary: his stories would fall flat without his flawless exposition. The backstory of a humble gravedigger must be on the same level of importance with the ancient vampire, otherwise why would we care when the creature sinks his teeth in?
A few minutes from my house growing up was a large cemetery filled to the brim with mausoleums, graves, and sometimes teenagers defacing flower arrangements left by mourners. It was a special place that contrasted against the neighbourhoods that surrounded, mostly council houses built in the 1970s and a few new builds. We drove past countless times in the family car and the place always radiated an atmosphere that nowhere else on the peninsula dared. With my personal connection to burying grounds, Pet Sematary ticked a considerable amount of boxes for me - the director was even a woman, Mary Lambert. A notable music video director who created Madonna’s Like a Prayer and Material Girl music videos, probably the two most memorable videos ever gracing MTV. The screenplay was written by King himself, unlike most of his adaptations including The Shining which he famously hated, giving the film unique potential.
“Stephen King is labelled as the Master of Horror, but he is really the master of the ordinary: his stories would fall flat without his flawless exposition.”
Pet Sematary is a film about grief and the importance of accepting loss. Like a parent carefully explaining why your family pet is no longer around, the film starts us off with the death of a cat - easing us in. Then, the son dies after he’s run over by a lorry on a monstrous road right next to the family's home. Despite the cat being resurrected as a demonic kitty with glowing eyes and a sharp temper, miles away from the loveable pet they once knew, the father cannot help but to bury his son in the same grounds in a desperate attempt to bring him back. Usually I would not fancy watching a film that deals with grief and loss - it is a quick route to becoming bed bound and only eating microwave meals for a week - but through a Stephen King story, it is not just doable, but oddly therapeutic.
Like most Stephen King adaptations, Pet Sematary has an unmistakable TV movie feel, and that is far from an insult. 1970s, 80s and 90s America had a knack for making everything look like a soap opera with a faint haze and an over dramatised score. The show Unsolved Mysteries - which ran from the 1980s to 2010 - has to be my favourite version of this phenomenon. The series recreated, as you may have guessed, unsolved mysteries, with amateur actors embroiled in stories of murder, cheating and disappearances set in American suburbia. The show reminds me of staying home from school as a kid with the flu, in and out of fever dreams, ears switching focus between the sounds of American voices and the birds outside the window. Today, you would never catch me watching Bailey Sarian as she packs on green eyeshadow whilst nonchalantly describing an infamous and brutal criminal case, but Unsolved Mysteries feels unmistakably fictional with its grainy recreations and nostalgic tendencies. The lack of a HD camera and memeification of language makes Unsolved Mysteries feel like it was made in another lifetime - one where these events even possibly did not even happen.
Mary Lambert offers us this TV movie style, remixing classic horror iconography of full moons and graves and hissing cats. The titular, cursed cemetery is somewhere between a place that could be real and a high end Spirit Halloween product display. The real and the unreal play off each other - heavy with forced atmosphere, but the type you can find in your local cemetery when the sunlight hits a certain way. It is an accessible, recognisable feeling. For these reasons, I can face a story about grief in King’s world.
A remake of Pet Sematary was released in 2019, and I happened to be staying in a small town in Indiana. It was the type of place I would want to read books about - no new builds, just overgrown train tracks and a gas station where the cashier gasped when they realised I was from England. It made little sense why anyone who wasn’t born in the area was hanging out there, but I could finally act out my fantasies of having a cigarette next to a corn field, unbothered. It was a more than ideal spring, and I sat in the AMC and watched the awful remake of Pet Sematary. I can hardly remember it, but I do remember feeling pleased with myself in the back row puffing on a mint JUUL. It felt good to be in the world in the way I would daydream about on warm days watching horror films as a kid.