'Pet Sematary' Book Vs. Film Vs. Film: Comparing Stephen King's Novel With Its Two Film Adaptations

All three versions of Pet Sematary kick-off with the Creed family moving to the rural town of Ludlow, Maine. Dr. Louis Creed has just landed a job as director of the University of Maine's campus health service. The rest of the family consists of wife Rachel Creed, and children, Ellie and toddler Gage. There's also the family cat, Winston Churchill, named Church for short.

King's novel has the family moving from Chicago to Maine, and so does the 1989 film. The 2019 film, however, reveals the Creeds are moving from Boston – trading one New England locale for another. In all three versions of the story, the move is supposed to be a fresh start for the entire family. The 2019 film underlines this the most, by having Louis state that the reason he took the university job was so that he could stop working long hours in an E.R. and spend more time with his family. All of this sounds pretty pleasant, right? Well, don't get used to it. Because it's all darkness and doom from here!

Jud is like Louis' surrogate father in King's book. King doesn't paint this picture subtly. He literally writes that Louis thinks of Jud as the man who should have been his father. The two have an easygoing camaraderie in the novel, tipping back beers, cracking wise, growing close. Mary Lambert's '89 film builds up the Jud/Louis dynamic a bit, but the story moves at such a quick rush that there's not much time for us to get used to Jud and Louis' friendship. In this year's Pet Sematary, there's almost no Jud and Louis relationship to speak of. Yes, Jud eventually shows Louis the cursed burial ground that can raise the dead. But the two of them aren't simpatico. I asked screenwriter Jeff Buhler about this decision, and Buhler told me the choice was made to pick and choose which relationships the film focused on. Instead of befriending Louis, the Jud in the 2019 film befriends Ellie, and thinks of her almost like the granddaughter he never had.

The first real sign that horror is lurking in Pet Sematary comes during Louis' first day of work at the university. As King tells it, Louis is bright and chipper, ready to face his new job with gusto, when all hell breaks loose. A student named Victor Pascow has been struck by a car, and while he's brought into the infirmary still breathing, it's clear he's going to die – there's a crack in his skull so big you can see his brain. After Pascow expires, Louis is left alone with the dead man...who then promptly wakes up, gurgles some blood, and proceeds to call Louis by name.

Louis is understandably spooked, and things only get creepier when the Pascow gives dear old Dr. Creed a warning about the Pet Sematary...and what lies beyond it. Before Louis can truly react, more people come back into the room, and Pascow appears completely dead again.

This scene plays out almost identical to the book in both film versions, although both add their own little touches – Lambert goes in for jarring close-ups, while Kölsch and Widmyer play with the lighting to create an eerie atmosphere.

In King's hands, Pascow is a harbinger; someone sent to warn Louis...before its too late. He appears as a ghost to Louis later that night, and takes Louis out to the Pet Sematary to once again issue his warning about something beyond the deadfall. As Pascow warns, the ground...is sour. After this episode, we, the reader, never encounter Pascow again – although his presence is felt, and his name is mentioned several times, as he appears to Ellie (off page).

Lambert's movie takes things a step further, and makes Pascow the comic relief to lighten all the darkness. He keeps popping up again and again, trying to prevent catastrophe. He even goes so far as to tamper with the laws of physics in order to help Rachel out.

Kölsch and Widmyer keep Pascow physically around a bit longer than King does, but he's not the comic relief character we saw in the 1989 movie. And instead of appearing to Ellie to warn her, he appears to Gage.

"Hey, when is the zombie stuff gonna start?!" you might be wondering right about now. After the Pascow experience – which Louis chalks up as a dream – the really supernatural shit hits the fan when Church is killed on that damn highway. In all three incarnations, Church is struck and killed, be it by a car or truck, we're never really sure. And in all three versions, Jud is the one who first finds the dead cat, and then comes up with a plan for what to do with it.

King's book, and Lambert's film, has this event unfold over the course of Thanksgiving weekend. Louis is alone in the house, while Rachel and the kids have gone back to Chicago to be with Rachel's parents (more on that later). King wants it so that Louis' following actions can remain unnoticed by his family.

It's in this scenario that 2019's Pet Sematary makes its first major change. Instead of shuffling Rachel and the kids out of town when Church dies, Kölsch and Widmyer keep everyone at home. Louis still keeps Church's death a secret at first, but later tells Rachel.

Church rises from the dead, and strolls back home. But he's no longer the chill kitty he was before his untimely demise. He's weird, creepy, and maybe even a little evil. Stephen King adds that the cat is a bit stupid, and sluggish now – stumbling about without grace. In the book, and the first movie adaptation, only Louis and Jud are aware of Church's undead state. Louis convinces himself Church was only stunned by the car, and buried alive. In the back of his head, though, he knows the truth.

Since the new Sematary keeps Rachel at home during this sequence, she, too, is aware of Church's return. This results in one of the funniest moments in the film. Still thinking Church is buried in the woods, Rachel and Louis attempt to tell Ellie that the cat ran away. But Ellis cheerfully tells them Church is here – and he is, hiding in the closet like a creep. "Good thing you're not a fucking vet," Rachel says out of the side of her mouth to Louis.

If someone says "Pet Sematary", it's likely you think of two things: one is Church the cat, the other is Zelda. The Zelda that appears in the 1989 film still has the power to give people the heebie-jeebies. In fact, I'd say that the Zelda in the '89 film is scarier than the one in King's book. King only gives us a vague sense of Zelda's twisted appearance, whereas the movie renders her in the flesh.

Zelda is Rachel's dead sister. She suffered from spinal meningitis, and her slow, painful death still haunts Rachel. When Rachel was still a child, she was home alone with Zelda when Zelda died, and the death has scarred her for life, giving her a horrible phobia of death and dying. In King's book, just the very mention of death is enough to infuriate Rachel. The death phobia pops up in both movie adaptations as well, although it feels severely underdeveloped in both.

The '89 film, like the book, has Zelda pop up in Rachel's nightmares. The 2019 adaptation takes things even further, with Zelda appearing frequently, almost as if she's a ghost haunting the Creed household. The new movie also changes Zelda's method of death. King's novel (and first film) had Zelda choking to death. The latest Pet Sematary has Zelda fall down a dumbwaiter. It sounds...silly. But it works in the movie (although a part of me feels it's just a bit gratuitous).

Speaking of Rachel's relatives, the Goldman family – Rachel's parents – have a signifiant part to play in the book. The Goldmans don't care for Louis, because they feel like he's not good enough for their daughter. In fact, Irwin Goldman, Louis' father-in-law, tried to buy Louis off when he and Rachel were dating, offering him money to never see Rachel again. This has created some severely bad blood between Louis and Irwin, which is why Louis doesn't go back to Chicago for Thanksgiving. The animosity boils over later in the story, when Goldman attacks Louis at a funeral.

This bad blood was present in the original movie, although the backstory of Goldman trying to buy Louis off wasn't added. The Pet Sematary hitting theaters this month nixed this entirely. The Goldmans do appear at one point, but they don't have any lines. Rachel's father does shoot Louis a dirty look at one point, but that's the extent of things.

Jud (and the readers/audience) can put two and two together, and assume Louis is going to bury his dead kid up in the Micmac Burial Ground. The movie from 1989, and the book, have Jud initially telling Louis no one ever attempted to bury a person up there, but later walks that back after Gage's death. There was a person buried up there – a young man named Timmy Baterman, killed in World War II. Timmy's father buried him in the Micmac Burial Ground, and Timmy rose from the grave. Timmy in the book is a ghoulish, grinning thing who has preternatural knowledge of everyone, and everything. Eventually, Timmy's father – driven crazy by the whole situation – shoots Timmy to death, sets the house on fire, and then shoots himself.

When it came time to create this moment in the first film, King's script and director Mary Lambert has it take place via flashback in a somewhat altered state. Timmy is a grunting Frankenstein-like monster who claws his own face open and apparently eats children (I think? It's unclear, we just see a shot of him holding a kid's severed leg). "Love death, hate living!" Timmy mumbles as a young Jud and his buddies burn the Baterman house down. "Sometimes...dead is better!" Jud tells Louis, giving birth to a now-iconic line.

Sadly, Timmy gets short-changed this year. Jud never tells the story at all, and the only reference to Timmy is in a newspaper headline Louis finds online, presumably after he Googles "Are there zombies in Ludlow, Maine?"

The 2019 Pet Sematary ends up going in its own direction in its third act. Ellie comes back from the dead, and she's a massively eerie figure, with a droopy eye and huge stitches on the back of her skull. And oh yeah...she wants to kill people. Rachel learns of her daughter's resurrection, and like any sane person, acts pretty god damn horrified. Louis, however, thinks this is fine. He's buried Ellie in the Micmac Burial Ground, assuming she'll come back perfectly normal. Perhaps this is ultimately the reason why the new movie cuts Timmy Baterman out completely. Without Jud's story about Timmy and his evil ways, Louis doesn't have any pretext for the Micmac ground turning people into monstrous ghouls. He just knows it raises the dead. That said, he knows Jud will try to stop him, so he drugs the old man.

Zombie Ellie goes on a rampage, first killing Jud, then killing her mother. But she's just getting started! She buries Rachel in the Micmac Burial Ground. Zombie Rachel then kills Louis, who is also buried in the Micmac burial ground. They're a big, zombie family now. Except for Gage, who is left alive in the car. But things don't look so good for him.

If you read the book, or saw the '89 film (and I hope you have, or else you just learned a ton of spoilers about both), you know this is a huge departure. In the previous incarnations, Louis buries Gage. Gage rises, and he's a little killing machine. He bumps off Jud, then does in Rachel. The Gage in the '89 film is a bit talkative, saying things like "No fair!", but in King's book, he's a regular chatterbox, spouting out vulgar dialogue ("I'm gonna fuck with you, old man!" he says to Jud in a babyish voice).

Louis, finally seeing what a big mistake he made, first kills Church (who survives in the new movie), and then kills Gage. Has he learned a lesson? No! Because he buries Rachel in the Micmac Burial Ground. King's book ends on a chilling note, with Rachel returning late at night and putting a cold, dead hand on Louis' shoulder before croaking, "Darling!"

Lambert's movie amps things up. Rachel comes back, and then she and Louis share a big, passionate smooch – while pus pours out of an empty eye-socket. That probably should've been enough, but the studio insisted on one last scare, so Lambert shot a scene where Rachel picks up a ridiculously large knife and swings it at Louis right before the screen goes black.

One thing I miss from the two film versions: the amount of preparation on display in the book. Books have a lot more room for this sort of thing, and King spends page after page setting Louis' grave robbing plan up, with Louis gathering the materials and slowly psyching himself up. The two movies (especially the new film) make it look as if Louis simply grabs a shovel and heads out to the graveyard immediately.

Ultimately, all three conclusions work in their own ways. The novel has the power to illicit one final chill as King describes Rachel's hoarse voice sounding as if she has gravel and dirt in her throat. The '89 movie goes on a true slasher-movie high-note. And the 2019 take's final shot, of the dead Creeds peering into a car at the still-living Gage, is unnerving in its implications. After more than 35 years, Pet Sematary – in any form – still has power.