Pet Sematary

I love Stephen King (I once argued the literary merit of his novels with one of my English professors in college).  I especially love his earlier novels and I read them all when I was an impressionable teenager.  All of them scared me but Pet Sematary terrified me, so much so that I slept with the light on for over a week after I read it in eighth grade.  The story about an ancient Micmac Indian burial ground haunted by a malevolent spirit known as the Wendigo was entirely believable to me because I grew up in eastern Canada and was very well acquainted with the folklore surrounding the Wendigo.  I was so unnerved by this book that I debated for quite some time whether or not I should see the 1989 adaptation.  I finally decided to see it and I was very disappointed because it replaced what actually made it scary with gore.  After similar deliberations I decided to see the new adaptation last night and it is both more and less faithful to the source material than the 1989 movie.  Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) and his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) decide to move from Boston to the rural town of Ludlow, Maine with their two children, Ellie (Jete Laurence) and Gage (Hugo and Lucas Lavoie), and their cat, Church.  Their house is surrounded by forests but it is also near a busy highway.  As Rachel and Ellie explore the forest they discover a cemetery used by the local children for burying their dead pets.  When Church is killed by an Orinco truck on the highway, Louis wants to bury him in the pet cemetery but the Creed's neighbor Jud Crandall (John Lithgow) shows him the ancient Micmac burial located beyond the cemetery and instructs him in the ritual of burying his cat.  Later that night, Church is discovered to be alive but much more aggressive.  When another tragedy strikes the family, Louis is grief-stricken and decides to make use of the burial ground again with catastrophic consequences.  The biggest difference from the novel is that the other child is killed (but that decision makes the third act even more terrifying, in my opinion, because it enhances the physical threat) and the ending is a bit hokey (although I loved the Starcrawler cover of "Pet Sematary" by the Ramones during this scene).  What is retained from the novel is the story of the Wendigo and the unsettling and dread-filled atmosphere of the burial ground which scared me as much as the novel did.  This version is definitely much more menacing than the 1989 movie and I just might need to keep the light on at night.