It was summer in the early 90s. I was seven or eight years old and I was attending a slumber party in honor of my friend April’s birthday (we were friends through summer camp). I think there was a total of eight of us giggling girls at this sleepover and we had great food, fun talking and goofing around, and when night fell, the sleeping bags came out, and April popped in the night’s horror movie into the VHS player.

1989’s Pet Sematary.

I had seen clips of horror movies before on TV but never really sat down and watched any of the movies in full because I was too scared. I’ll always remember Johnny Depp’s character being sucked into his bed and the huge bloodbath that erupted from it in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Seeing stuff like that, I was pretty much like, nope.

Except…I love horror and scary things! I think the Ghostbusters franchise really turned me on to loving creepy things and being (slightly) scared, and they were some of my favorite films growing up (along with the cartoon series!). So some sort of precedence was there to love horror, but as a kid growing up, I didn’t really love it until middle school.

I had never heard of Pet Sematary when April chose it for the party. I was going in completely new to the story and visuals, and…the movie scared the crap out of me. It gave me nightmares and I had to hide my face underneath my blanket. The creepiest images for me were Victor Pascow, the doomed jogger who haunts Dr. Creed; the sounds, hallucinations, and atmosphere of the forest leading to the Micmac burial ground; and lastly… the character Zelda. She was absolutely nightmare fuel for me.

Pet Sematary scared me so badly I avoided watching it again for years. But at some point in my young adulthood, I felt the nostalgic pull to watch it again, and really enjoyed myself. Sporadically over time, I find myself coming back to this movie (of course sitting through all of it with eyes uncovered), and I also own it on DVD (should probably upgrade to Blu Ray).

When I lived in Japan, there was a strong pull to rewatch the 1989 film, so I rented it and found some of it still unnerved me, yet it was still highly watchable. Some stuff in the film is dated (like Dr. Creed ordering his wife to take valium to “calm down,” or the use of a doll instead of an actor when the toddler Gage Creed attacks people). There’s some genuine creepiness in this movie!

On top of that, it led me to finally read the original Stephen King novel, which is also scary (those forest scenes, yikes!). I keep going back and forth between choosing Pet Sematary as my #1 King novel, or The Shining as #1. They are memorable books with genuinely scary moments.

I did watch the 2019 film that sought to update Pet Sematary for newer audiences, and while there were a couple interesting elements (the children’s procession into the cemetery) I was profoundly disappointed with a lot of the creative choices made. I prefer the 1989 film. Maybe nostalgia’s a big part of that.

To my surprise, the 1989 film has bad reviews. It’s at a 58% on Rotten Tomatoes and is critically panned. But I feel like aside from some awkward effects, the movie holds up. I make a habit of watching it every Halloween season.