Hey friends. It’s been a while. Like…a long while.

The last time a transmission successfully made it out of the ol’ We Have to Go Back Bunker was sometime in 2024, a halcyon time before the Current Horrors settled in for the long haul. A lot of stuff has happened since then, both within WHTGB HQ and in the outside world. But, the good news is, we’re back! (The bad news is, the frogurt is also cursed.)

Anyway, your humble host had the ghoulish good fortune to spend the first weekend in May at Salem Horror Fest, a four-day celebration of all things horror in the heart of Witch City USA. If you’ve never made it out to SHF, put it on your calendar for next year — it’s a righteous time with the weirdos, freaks, and maniacs (complimentary) who create and appreciate horror movies, books, art, comics, clothes, and, well, everything else.

I could spend a whole newsletter recapping all the fun stuff I did at SHF, but instead, I want to talk Pet Sematary (1989). I caught a screening of the classic Stephen King adaptation during the fest (followed by a live recording of an episode of the Moviejawn podcast), and friends, I left the show feeling relatively floored.

Spoilers follow, obviously. If you’ve made it the 43 years since King’s original novel was released, or the 37 years since the film came out, without knowing what happens, you may want to jump ship now and return once you’ve caught up. Or not! I trust you to make good choices.

It had been some years since I last watched Pet Sematary, a double-digit amount of years, and I found my memories of the movie clashing with what was playing on the screen. Scenes I had no memory of were splashed brightly on the screen, while sequences I thought were firmly lodged in my brain were nowhere to be found. The pacing was different, the performances didn’t match the ones I thought I knew so well, and I felt pleasantly unmoored.

Pet Sematary still slaps (mostly), but for reasons far different than I had remembered. My love for the original novel goes way back to when I was a tween — I read most of the book in one giant gulp while hanging out in the kitchen at some sort of ballroom dance event my parents were attending (one of the least strange places I read a Stephen King book as an adolescent, if you can believe it). Though I was but a babe, I understood where Louis Creed was coming from — how intense longing and nostalgia drives a splinter into your brain that is so disruptive and painful that you’ll pay any cost to pry it out. Even as a kid, I wanted to go back to a long-gone past and try to set things right. I know now that’s some deep-rooted adoption trauma peeking out, but back then, I just knew that Louis wasn’t entirely wrong to use the “sour ground” of the pet sematary to resurrect his family.

The first few times I watched Pet Sematary, I thought it was good — a rarity among King adaptations at the time for how closely it hewed to the novel and how effective it was at capturing a sense of familiar dread. Church the cat and Rachel’s sister Zelda were horrifying, the special effects were gnarly, and Gage’s death was deeply unsettling. I remembered a straight-forward story with a slow burn that culminated in a creepy kid using a scalpel to slash his way through the primary cast.

Watching Mary Lambert’s adaptation (from a screenplay by Uncle Steve himself) this time though, I was struck by how dream-like Pet Sematary plays out. There’s the gruesome specter of Victor Pascow (Bruce Greenquist’s performance is better than you remember), who manifests himself in Louis’ dreams, and later in real life, in an attempt to divert Louis from his path to damnation. The Creed house and Jud Crandall’s homes take on the uncanny similarity you find when familiar locations merge in dreams — “I was my high school English class, but it was also my grandparents’ house"?” — and during the climax, Jud’s house becomes a liminal space in which the titular burial ground’s malevolence transforms the house into nightmares tailored to Rachel and Louis’ fears and Jud’s regrets. For the first time, I noticed that the frock Zelda wears in Rachel’s nightmares is the same frock in the disturbing painting of a Victorian child in Rachel’s childhood home — and is ultimately the same outfit Gage is wearing upon his return from the grave. It’s a dream that’s real, subtext that’s text, metaphor that’s literal, and there is no escape from the collapse.

Most interesting on this rewatch was the (admittedly under-baked) plot thread of the burial ground’s will. It wants, it hungers — as Rachel rushes home during the climax, the burial ground exerts its influence and stops her from sidetracking Louis. Pascow tries his ghostly best to disrupt the machinations, but what is one ghost against an ancient evil? There are some implications that King’s script waves away (if the Pet Sematary wants Louis to keep burying bodies there, what’s the end goal?), but it’s an interesting idea.

It’s also an idea that highlights the (still) problematic “Indian burial ground” trope on which Pet Sematary hinges. The ground is “sour,” Jud Crandall tells Louis, and the area’s indigenous Mi’kmaq inhabitants fled because of the evil spirit haunting the very soil (not named in the film, but implied to be the wendigo) and not, say, colonial settlers. The spirit itself remains unseen until the film’s final act, when Louis sees a glowing, malevolent face appear (and scream!) on his way to bury and, he knows, resurrect, his son. As Dixa Ramírez D'Oleo wrote in a 2019 essay for the LA Review of Books:

There is that fear, yes, but the primary fear at play in Pet Sematary is the fear that the past can never be reclaimed. The “sour ground” is nostalgia at its deadliest, a desire to bring back some better time (that has either passed irrevocably or never existed) so strong that it annihilates everything in its path. It’s a desire that Jud Crandall has never made peace with — when he gives Louis the option to resurrect Church the Cat and spare Ellie Creed’s feelings, Jud is trying to right his own past: the double-loss of his childhood dog, the pain of killing a neighbor and his resurrected son. Jud means well, but he’s also Pet Sematary’s true villain — he knows nothing good comes from the burial ground, but he points Louis’ in that direction anyway, out of hubris, vanity, and ultimately, nostalgia.

Okay, so Pet Sematary is a pretty clear statement about how you can’t go back to the past (and if you bring it back to you, well, hide your scalpel collection). But can nostalgia ever be good?

Well, yeah, as long as you don’t get literal about it. Victoria Price, daughter of horror legend Vincent Price, spoke at Salem Horror Fest (along with her dog/applause coordinator Allie). Unlike her father, Price was never a horror fan, and when she began writing and speaking about her father’s legacy, she wasn’t sure what to make of the horror fans who revered her dad. Her childhood memories of a doting parent didn’t square with fans’ memories of her father’s ghoulish, garrulous, and grandly dramatic film personas. But over time, Price found that a sense of joy and love were at the roots of these two distinct flavors of nostalgia. Horror turned out to be healing. And so she became a fan not of horror, but of horror fans. It’s a neat bit of alchemy — turning that longing for the past, which can so often weigh down a person like a chunk of lead, into a tangible community in the present. It’s not gold — it’s something better: a fertile ground from which the present grows and stretches out into the sun.

Reading/Watching/Listening

Whew, we made it. Thanks for bearing with me. Here’s a quick rundown of what I’m reading, watching, and listening to this week.

Reading: I’m listening to audiobooks of The Fort Bragg Cartel and folks, you gotta check this out. Seth Harp’s expose of murder and drug trafficking among US special forces members is scary and stunning. The writing is phenomenal, the reporting deep, and the storytelling propulsive.

Watching: I swear I’m going to catch up on Daredevil: Born Again this week. Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.

Listening: Countless generations have asked the question, “What if the Wu-Tang Clan did all the music for the James Bond films?” Someone answered that question two years ago, and thanks to a rare instance of The Algorithm being kind to me, I’ve been listening to this mash-up on repeat.