Stuffed Animals Cemetery (1989)

Movie
German title	Pet Sematary
Original title	Pet Sematary
Country of production	United States
original language	English
Publishing year	1989
length	103 minutes
Age rating	FSK 1989–1990: FSK 18 (no youth approval) 1990–2003: indexed (advertising ban and no youth approval) 2003 – July 2013: FSK 18 (no youth approval) since July 2013: FSK 16
Rod
Director	Mary Lambert
script	Stephen King
production	Richard P. Rubinstein
music	Elliot Goldenthal
camera	Peter Stein
cut	Daniel P. Hanley , Mike Hill
occupation
Dale Midkiff : Louis Creed Fred Gwynne : Jud Crandall Denise Crosby : Rachel Creed Brad Greenquist : Victor Pascow Michael Lombard : Irwin Goldman Miko Hughes : Gage Creed Blaze Berdahl : Ellie Creed Susan Blommaert : Missy Dandridge Mara Clark : Joan Charlton Kavi Raz : Steve Masterton Mary Louise Wilson : Dory Goldman Andrew Hubatsek : Zelda
chronology
Successor  → Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals II

Stuffed Animals Cemetery is a 1989 horror film based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King , who also wrote the screenplay for the film.

In 1992 a sequel was released under the title Friedhof der Kuscheltiere II . A remake was released in 2019 .

action

The physician Dr. Louis Creed assumes the post of Medical Director of the University of Maine . Together with his wife Rachel and the children Elli and Gage, he moves into a single-family house in the fictional small town of Ludlow near Route 15 , which is a "road of destiny" in several of King's novels, including here. Louis develops a friendship with his older white-haired neighbor Jud Crandall, who has a lot to say about Ludlow and who eventually shows the family the Ludlow pet cemetery.

The family settles in Ludlow quickly, but work in the infirmary begins with a shock for Louis Creed. The student Victor Pascow is hit by a truck while jogging and dies in the infirmary of a severe traumatic brain injury . With his last words, Pascow gasps a warning at Louis, in which he mentions the animal cemetery. In the course of the plot, the dead Pascow appears to the young doctor again and again as a benevolent helping spirit, since Louis Creed has tried to save his life, albeit without success.

While Rachel and the children are visiting their parents, the family cat, Winston Churchill (Churchill for short, named after Winston Churchill ), is run over by a truck on Route 15. Jud leads Louis to the pet cemetery to bury the cat. To Louis' surprise, however, he leads him to a hidden rock plateau far behind the animal cemetery, an old burial place of the Micmac Indians, which - as he learns from Jud - is said to be cursed, as it was once touched by the Wendigo , a creature that makes the earth sour. After Louis buried the pet Church, the cat appears the next day at the Creed's house. But the cat's "rebirth" has its downsides: He smells penetratingly of earth and his being has changed in a disturbing way. A little later, while playing with a red dragon , Gage was run over by a truck on Route 15 and killed. First, the desperate family buried the body of the young child with a funeral service in the city cemetery. After the funeral service, Jud Crandall tells his neighbor Louis about a local resident named Bill Baterman who buried his son Timmy Baterman in the Indian cemetery after he was killed in World War II . Afterwards that Timmy returned as a terrifying zombie, who with his disturbing behavior horrified the entire population. That's why a group of men, including Jud Crandall, set fire to the Baterman family's house at night in order to burn Timmy and his father Bill in the fire. Despite this story, intended as a warning, Louis makes the momentous decision to exhume his son alone and also to bury him on the enchanted rock plateau in order to bring his beloved son back to life through the forces prevailing in this place, although Jud urgently warns him against it.

Thereupon Gage returns as a hateful revenant and invades the house of neighbor Jud Crandall. When the malicious boy emerges from under a bed, he cuts through the right Achilles tendon and the cheeks in the face of the neighbor Jud with a scalpel, which the boy stole from his father's doctor's case . Then Gage kills Jud Crandall, who is lying on the ground, with a powerful bite in the carotid artery. Rachel, who has returned from her parents, also goes to Jud's house and is initially happy to see her little son alive again, but Gage also kills her. The next morning, Louis wakes up in his bed at home and recognizes from the footprints in his house that his resurrected son was there and took his scalpel with him. In the kitchen, Louis receives a call from his giggling son, who says, “ Will you come over and play with me? “Tried to lure into the neighboring house. Louis realizes that burying Gage at the Micmac Indian burial site was a mistake and goes to Jud's house armed with lethal syringes.

There Louis finds the murdered Jew under a blanket. When a hatch to the attic in the ceiling suddenly opens in the hallway, his dead wife Rachel falls down dangling from a rope. To do this, his son appears in the opening and jumps down on his father with the scalpel drawn. After a bloody scuffle, Louis kills his son with a lethal injection in the throat. Then he carries his wife's body out of the house and sets the building on fire with gasoline . He believes that his son only got angry because after his death too much time had passed before he was buried on the rocky plateau. Because his wife died only a few minutes ago, he buried her on the rocky plateau against the advice of Victor's ghost.

A short time later, his wife comes back, completely filthy and wounded several times, and Louis, who believes Rachel is normal, hugs and kisses her. While doing so, he does not notice how she takes a knife from the kitchen table. The audience only hears Rachel killing Louis.

Soundtrack

• The punk rock band Ramones wrote the title song Pet Sematary , which sounds in the credits and, contrary to the gloomy atmosphere of the film, is composed of bright and major- tuned pop harmonies.
• During the accident scene on the street with the toddler Gage, the approaching truck driver listens to the song Sheena is a Punk Rocker , also by the Ramones, on the radio.

synchronization

Thomas Petruo , who wrote the dialogue book and directed the dialogue, was responsible for the German dubbing on behalf of Berliner Synchron .

actor	role	German speaker
Dale Midkiff	Louis Creed	Manfred Lehmann
Fred Gwynne	Jud Crandall	Arnold Marquis
Denise Crosby	Rachel Creed	Evelyn Marron
Brad Greenquist	Victor Pascow	Thomas Petruo
Michael Lombard	Irwin Goldman	Ulli Kinalzik
Miko Hughes	Gage Creed	Andrea Wick
Blaze Berdahl	Ellie Creed	Vanessa Petruo
Susan Blommaert	Missy Dandridge	Kerstin Sanders-Dornseif
Mara Clark	Joan Charlton
Kavi Raz	Steve Masterton
Mary Louise Wilson	Dory Goldman
Andrew Hubatsek	Zelda	Eva-Maria Werth
Chuck Courtney	Bill Baterman	Wolf Rüdiger Reutermann

Others

Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor served as one of the filming locations for the film

• The slogan for the film was Sometimes dead is better (Eng. "Sometimes dead is better"). This saying is also on all DVDs .
• Stephen King made a cameo as a priest during the funeral scene (around 40 minutes) .
• Tall actor Fred Gwynne , who can be seen in the role of neighbor Jud Crandall, used to play the idiot Franconian character Herman Munster in the comedic TV series The Munsters .
• At the box office, the film grossed $ 57,469,467, making it the fourth best-selling feature film based on a Stephen King original.
• For a long time, George A. Romero was scheduled as a director.
• The truck that takes Rachel to Ludlow is number 666, which is also known as the devil's number .
• In the German dubbing, Vanessa Petruo , who later celebrated great success from 2001 as the singer of the TV casting girl group No Angels and the debut single Daylight In Your Eyes, speaks the voice of little daughter Ellie Creed. In addition, her father Thomas Petruo dubbed the benevolent good spirit Victor Pascow in German.
• There was a version shortened by around a minute, which was given an age rating of 16 and over by the FSK .
• In 1990 the film was indexed, but in 2003 it was removed from the index.
• In July 2013, the film was re-examined by the FSK and then downgraded from the age rating “18+” to “16+”.
• The original title of the novel and film Pet Sematary is a deliberate misspelling of Pet Cemetery . In the story, the wrong spelling appears on a sign written by children at the Stuffed Animal Cemetery . This misspelling was lost when the film title was translated into German.

Awards

• Nomination for the International Fantasy Film Award at Fantasporto 1990.
• Nomination for the Saturn Award 1991.
• Blaze Berdahl and Miko Hughes were each nominated for a Young Artist Award .
• The title song of the film Pet Sematary (on the Ramones album Brain Drain , 1989), composed by Dee Dee Ramone and Daniel Rey, was nominated for a Golden Raspberry .

Reviews

“Adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller, for which the author himself contributed the script; Disappointing, because after the sedate, carefully designed exposition, it exaggerates the rather gentle horror of the original with the genre-typical garish effects. "

- Lexicon of international film

“In Stephen King's novel, horror comes on velvet paws like the reborn cat and knocks its claws into the cracked facade of an intact family that threatens to break apart under a stroke of fate. Mary Lambert's film adaptation is not quite as subtle. Nevertheless, her shocker is one of the better King films: dark, exciting, effective and compactly staged. Conclusion: from the top league of King films. "

- Cinema

continuation

→ Main article : Cemetery of the cuddly toys II

In 1992 a sequel appeared with Friedhof der Kuscheltiere II , which was also staged by Mary Lambert. Basically, the plot has only been modified slightly and is far more bloody than the original. It got off badly in the reviews.

literature

• Stephen King: Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals . unabridged 1st edition. Ullstein, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-548-26310-6 .
• Stephen King: Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals . Deutsche Blindenstudienanstalt, Marburg 2000 (edition in Braille; from the American by Christel Wiemken).

Web links

• Pet Sematary in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Pet Sematary at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
• Pet Sematary at Metacritic (English)
• Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals in the online movie database
• Cemetery of the cuddly toys in the German synchronous file

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Release certificate for the cuddly toy cemetery . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , July 2013 (PDF; test number: 62 645 V).
2. ↑ German synchronous index: German synchronous index | Movies | Pet Sematary. Retrieved April 5, 2018 . 
3. ↑ Box office ranking on stephen-king.de
4. ↑ Comparison of the cut versions FSK 16 - FSK 18 from Friedhof der Kuscheltiere at Schnittberichte.com
5. ↑ Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .  
6. ↑ film review on cinema.de