Pet Sematary: Bloodlines Reminds Us Why Some Franchises Shouldn’t Be Resurrected

If you read Stephen King’s horror novel Pet Sematary when it was released in 1983, you may have thought “Wow, they should adapt this into a movie.” After they did that in 1989, with director Mary Lambert’s take on the material scarring a generation of children and establishing its preeminence as a cult classic, you may have thought, “Wow, they should make a sequel to this.” They did that too, with Lambert returning to direct a junky follow-up. After this movie was largely forgotten and more time passed, it was natural enough to think, “Well, maybe they should remake the original movie.” This, too, came to pass: 2019’s Pet Sematary was met with a tepid critical and audience response but did some decent international box office. 

With that in mind, and despite that film’s success, it’s highly unlikely you were thinking, “Oh, well they should make a prequel to the remake that overexplains all of the mysterious lore and loses the domestic tragedy of the original story, thereby rendering it hopelessly ineffectual.” Alas, Hollywood works in puzzling, self-sabotaging ways, which is how you end up with a movie like Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, a straight-to-streaming horror film with a direct-to-video horror title if I’ve ever heard one, and a quality level matching the worst of them. The generic moniker proves accurately foreboding for the run-of-the-mill film, one that desperately latches onto the goodwill of a familiar title but has nothing meaningful to add to its legacy.

Bloodlines derives its story from a plot point omitted from the remake, but one that was a crucial source of character motivation in both the original film and King’s novel. That would be a memory recounted by Jud Crandall (memorably played by Fred Gwynne in 1989, passively played by John Lithgow in 2019, and his younger self now played by Jackson White), the neighbor of the newly-arrived Creed family who introduces patriarch Louis to the ancient Indigenous burial ground that reanimates anyone buried within the “sour ground.” In an effort to prevent Louis from reanimating his deceased son Gage, Jud recounts when a man named Bill Baterman once brought his son Timmy back to life, only for him to suffer the same fate as everything else that comes out of that ground by turning into a murderous husk of who he once was. 

Bloodlines draws an entire film from this incident. It fills in gaps with extraneous details as you may expect: Jud is a young man in 1969, about to leave his rural town of Ludlow, Maine with his girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind) in order to join the Peace Corps after failing to secure a spot to ship off to Vietnam in the draft lottery, potentially because of a word put in by his parents Dan and Kathy (Henry Thomas and Samantha Mathis). But right when the two are hitting the road, an accident involving a vicious dog bite and a sociopathic Timmy Baterman (Jack Mulhern), allegedly back from the war with an honorable discharge, leaves the two stuck in town for a few days more—just long enough to uncover some good ol’ small-town secrets. As Jud tries to get to the bottom of Timmy’s mysterious behavior before something even worse happens, an assemblage of older locals fill in the periphery, including the curiously frigid Bill Baterman (a wasted David Duchovny), as well as the thinly-sketched character of Marjorie (a wasted Pam Grier), who leads the charge in having the older residents come face-to-face with the skeletons in Ludlow’s closet (or boneyard).

It’s an achingly typical ordeal. Instead of trying to locate some of the same melodramatic mania present in the book or the original movie, Lindsey Anderson Beer’s film is happy to coast off the same perfunctory sense of triviality of the remake. The remake, though, at least had an inherent suspense built into it, residual from a meticulously calculated and emotionally involved King story. As a prequel, Bloodlines loses that default pathos; we already know the horrible power of that plot of land eternally cursing Ludlow. The shock of the original story came from the emotional calamity faced by a grieving family in tandem with the accumulating events that led to Louis reviving his dead son. Here, we’re stuck with a much more tedious, sterile extrapolation on such a gut-wrenching tale. It takes the base signifiers of the narrative and mangles them into an anonymous supernatural horror about stopping a possessed killer. 

The film’s prequel status didn’t have to undermine it so thoroughly. There should be an added layer of despair to Jud’s predicament knowing what lies in store for him years down the road, but the script (co-written by Beer and Jeff Buhler) narrows him down to the point of anonymity. The 1969 setting, with its backdrop of Vietnam and heavy recurring throughline of uncovering long-hidden generational terrors amidst peaceful Americana, should evoke some angst related to the loss of American idealism moving into the ‘70s, but the film is too broad and muddled to bring that to light with any clarity. Bloodlines is instead content to hit its required beats without further investigation. Add in a few impotent jump scares and frenetically edited sequences of bloodshed and you’ve got a strained horror prequel that’s as shallow as it is flimsy. It’s difficult to think of anything consequential the viewer could take away from this besides the fact that, for as many good King adaptations that have been made, the bad ones may never stay dead.

Director: Lindsey Anderson Beer
Writer: Lindsey Anderson Beer, Jeff Buhler
Starring: Jackson White, Natalie Alyn Lind, Jack Mulhern, David Duchovny, Henry Thomas, Samantha Mathis, Pam Grier
Release Date: October 6, 2023

Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.