5 Things You Didn’t Know About 1989’s ‘Pet Sematary’ Movie

PET SEMATARY, 1989 — (c)Paramount/courtesy Everett Collection

Thirty-six years ago today, audiences around the country learned that sometimes dead is better when Pet Sematary hit theaters. The adaptation of Stephen King‘s 1983 hit novel, which starred Fred Gwynne and future Star Trek: The Next Generation star (and granddaughter of Bing Crosby!) Denise Crosby, was an immediate hit, grossing $57.5 million on an $11 million budget. The film spawned a 2019 reboot, as well as a sequel and a prequel, and its nightmarish images of everything from an undead house cat to a grief-crazed father digging up his own son’s grave have become an indelible part of 20th century horror cinema.

But even though the story of the Creed family and their very bad luck with a certain burial ground was already a popular novel, it was still a fight to get it to the big screen. Read on for five things you didn’t know about the movie that taught us to always look both ways before we cross the road.

1George A. Romero was supposed to direct it

DAY OF THE DEAD, Director George A. Romero, on set, 1985.

Zombie auteur Romero had already collaborated with King on 1982’s Creepshow, and in 1984, Romero bought the rights to the film for $10,000 (King took this offer over those from other studios, which supposedly made offers up to $1 million).

In a 2013 panel at Chicago’s Flashback Weekend convention, Romero recalled that the pair met in the late ’70s, after the release of Romero’s controversial vampire horror film Martin; the two had discussed working on an adaptation of King’s The Stand at one point, but didn’t. As Romero remembered it, “We didn’t end up working together on Pet Sematary either. I actually had done a screenplay for Pet Sematary and I was going to shoot it, but I got caught up working on another movie at the time, Monkey Shines.”

2… But actually, a lot of studio execs didn’t want it to get made

(c)Paramount/courtesy Everett Collection

You’d be reasonable to assume that any Stephen King film adaptation is basically a license to print money — after all, he’s one of the most popular authors of all time. But in the early ’80s, King was still relatively early in his career; his first novel, Carrie, had only been published in 1974. A string of ’80s adaptations underwhelmed at the box office, including 1984’s Children of the Corn and Firestarter — and that’s not counting 1986’s “evil cars take over a truck stop” fiasco Maximum Overdrive, which King himself wrote and directed, and which earned back less than half its budget in the U.S.

1986’s Stand by Me, which earned director Rob Reiner a Golden Globe nomination, helped reverse King’s image as box office poison, as did a number of more modest hits in the following years. But Pet Sematary actually got put into production because of the 1988 writers strike — since the script was already finished, the studio could shoot it without violating the strike.

3Stephen King demanded it be shot on location (and makes an appearance in the film)

According to a 2019 Entertainment Weekly interview with director Mary Lambert, “Stephen had several things that he had the absolute say on, and one of them was where the movie was gonna be shot. And it was in his contract with Paramount that the movie would be shot in Maine. And it was such a glorious thing, because they always try to get you to shoot in the cheapest possible place.”

The scene where the Creed family lay their young son Gage to rest was filmed in Mount Hope Cemetery, a real working cemetery in King’s longtime hometown of Bangor, Maine — King has a cameo as the minister performing the funeral. Ironically, in 2021, Mount Hope started allowing family pets to be interred alongside their humans in a portion of the cemetery devoted to whole family plots … but it remains primarily a human, rather than pet, cemetery.

4The Ramones wrote the theme song in under an hour

Part of Pet Sematary‘s lasting appeal is tied to the utterly rocking theme song by the Ramones, which plays over the film’s ending credits. The song wasn’t just a win for King (an enormous Ramones fan — they’re referenced in several of his books, including Pet Sematary); it hit No. 4 on the Billboard Modern Rock charts, making it the band’s highest-charting hit of all time.

However, King and members of the band have different memories of exactly how the song came to be: King said he invited the band to Maine for dinner in 1982 but didn’t mention the book; Ramones member Marky Ramone said in 2015 that when King invited the band for dinner, he “gave [Ramones bassist] Dee Dee [Ramone] the book to read; [Dee Dee] read the book and wrote the song in 40 minutes.” And director Lambert, who laughingly claimed that she got the job due to her personal connection to the Ramones, told Entertainment Weekly that “I was like, ‘Dee Dee, would you write a song about Pet Sematary?’ ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, sure.’ It took him about 24 hours.”

5Pet Sematary Two was supposed to follow Ellie Creed’s continuing story

PET SEMATARY II, poster art, from left: Jason McGuire, Edward Furlong, 1992.

Lambert also directed 1992’s Pet Sematary Two, which starred Anthony Edwards and Edward Furlong as a veterinarian and his teenage son who move to town and soon have their own entanglement with the cursed cemetery. But in Lambert’s original vision, the sequel would continue the story from the first film — more specifically, it would follow what happens to Ellie, the Creed family’s daughter, who is away visiting her grandparents during the original film’s bloody climax.

“It would’ve been about a young woman coming back to Maine to discover what happened to her parents. She would’ve been in Chicago when everything [in the original film] happened,” Lambert told Entertainment Weekly. And again, a feline would be pivotal in the film’s planned plot: “Ellie would not have gone back until she was older. So I thought it would be really cool to have her come back — and bring her cat … I had this whole idea, because I love cats, that there would be a community of feral cats there, and the community wanted to get rid of the feral cats. Obviously, a lot of times communities do that, and this would be one of the things she gets involved in … the feral cats would lead her to her father in some way.” She also proposed that at least one of Ellie’s parents — who the original film’s ending suggests both end up dead and zombified — would still be undead and roaming the local woods.

That version of the film hasn’t been made yet — but as the popularity of the Pet Sematary series has shown, there’s always room for another resurrection.