[Tons of spoilers for Pet Sematary to come]
Pet Sematary ranks among Stephen King’s scariest novels (just ask the Master of Horror himself), and the movies aren’t exactly lighthearted kid flicks, either. The original 1989 adaptation plays it close to the source material, with the reanimated corpse of Rachel returning to Louis, while the new version, starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, and John Lithgow, goes off in a different, no-less-terrifying direction. Rachel is dead, Louis is dead, and Ellie is dead, leaving only young Gage alive. But not for long, the ending implies. It’s mighty bleak, which is why King pitched an alternate ending for the film… that went unused.
“I talked about an ending where Gage is walking up the middle of the road,” King told Entertainment Weekly. “We hear a truck coming, and think, ‘Oh my God, he’s gonna get greased in the road. That’s how this is gonna end!’ Then at the last second, this woman pulls him out of the road and rescues him, and says, ‘Where’s your mommy and daddy?’ And that’s how you end the thing.”
This was King’s attempt at undoing a death that made him feel “horrified by what I had written,” but directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura turned it down and went with the non-happy ending. Y’know, the one where a family of corpses is about to murder a kid. It: Chapter 2 is going to seem like a feel-good romp compared to Pet Sematary.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
