The new movie “Pet Sematary” manages to shock and keep the horror lovers in the chair, being macabre and visceral. It’s frightening, it involves you, the characters are well built, with significant and sensitive motives and stories. Dr. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) makes a monstros gesture from a deep human experience. All the actions of the characters have motivations that excite.
For those who have not read the book and have not seen the original, the movie is (but in part) about possessed animals: you will find common fence elements including The Shining or Frankenstein.
Horror is not limited to events in a haunted land and the mental degradation of a character; it’s a horror horror, because one of the heroes has their own horror story in the biography, a story that comes back to flashbacks. In addition, if horror is often criticized as a commercial genre that overcame human fears, Pet Sematary has some mythological references from universal culture: it sends to the demonic beings Wendigo of the American mythology, but also to the myth of the threshold (Ianus) – the protagonist receives warnings about a barrier, and the reason for the barrier is repeated.
The movie does not lack bloodshed, but directors do not overdo it, so the movie does not become a gore-horror. There is a leitmotif as to the jump-scares, but we have the stress scenes highlighted by a soundtrack (or broken glass) that creates the feeling of a permanent threat.
With the exception of the beginning that gives a clue to the horrors that will follow, for several dozen minutes everything was under the most banal appearances, in fact preparing the spectator for the horror and imagination that would follow.
Pet Sematary follows the life of Dr. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke), who – after moving with his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and the two little children from Boston somewhere in the country to Maine – discovers a mysterious cemetery in the forest, not far of the family home. When the family is confronted with the loss of their beloved pet, the bastard Church, Louis, heads to a strange neighbor, Jud Crandall (John Lithgow), triggering a dangerous chain reaction that will let go of an evil force with terrible consequences.
The zombie universe is credibly and excitingly built on a magical / mystical background, and even with a wave of originality from previous genres – especially via the “live zombie” hypothesis – in contrast to the various clichés by which they operate mechanically, animated of cannibal hunger and having all the brain-damaged functions.
The two directors are scared by the fact that they know how to build their horror sequences – using the clichés of the genre not in the foreseeable sense, but on the contrary: the manipulator; make you wait for something, and serve you else, anyway, working fine with the spectator’s psychology.
Pet Sematary remains, however, more of a class of the genre than an innovator. But the horror it brings manages to be of good quality and not to disappoint.
photo source: imdb.com
Watch the trailer below:
