Do Gooder Press

Somehow, when he was in the second grade, my 8-year-old kid knew more about the movie IT than I did. Apparently, his peers either had older siblings that had seen the film and passed the high points down like legends told around the campfire, or they’d seen it themselves somehow and had returned to pass the terror on. While Josh is still leery of clowns, explaining the main plot points of the original novel made it a little less scary. Stephen King’s novels largely rely on making compelling characters for us to root for so that we’re scared of something happening to them, not so much the actual monster. So when I described the clown’s true form (no spoilers), it took the edge off. It was kind of like saying “Jason Voorhees? He’s basically a hulk-zombie in a hockey mask.”

Flash-forward to today when we were in the car and the radio mentioned the release of the Pet Sematary remake. It mentioned some of the plot, and Josh wanted me to fill him in on what the movie was about. “It’s about a family that moves to Maine and buys a house near a dangerous highway on one side and a pet cemetery on the other. Past the actual pet cemetery where people buried their dogs and cats and whatever was the ‘Pet Sematary.'” I decided to skip the specifics about what gets buried there in the story. “If you bury anything dead there, the ground brings them back to life, but ‘wrong.’ They kind of become monsters.”

Josh considered this. “Even if they were good people before they died?”

“That’s what the story is about, pretty much. People are tempted to bring their loved ones back to life even though they know it’ll probably make things worse.”

Josh thought a little more. “If the sematary makes good people bad, what if you buried a bad person there?”

I had to admit I hadn’t thought of this being like a math equation using positive and negative integers.

He went on: “So maybe burying a really bad person, like a killer, would make them come back as a really good person.”

I want this to be the plot of Pet Sematary 2, where the locals try this out, maybe as a way to bring a murderer back from the dead so they can be executed again, and they wind up with a really nice version of that person. The horror is that they’re so nice that they make people uncomfortable, until they can’t stand it anymore and have to rid themselves of this overbearing goodness that has descended on their town.

“This summer… witness good that’s so good… it’s evil!“

I think Simon Pegg should be involved somehow. I don’t know why, but I figure it can’t hurt.

Also, I think my kid either should or shouldn’t work for the SCP Foundation. I can totally see him in a lab coat burying bodies in cursed graveyards to see what happens. Unfortunately, I can see him treating safety protocols as mere suggestions, like picking up his skateboards from the front lawn. I guess it all depends on how much and what kind of data we want.