Analysis: Pet Semetary (Lambert, 1989)

A film I chose to analyze for this project is Pet Semetary (Lambert, 1989). This film is based around a doctor and his family, they move into a small town where the main character got a new job at the local hospital, though soon after their arrival they are faced with the loss of the youngest member of the family after he wandered into the road. In order to grieve the doctor and neighbor bury the body in a specific area that is known to bring people and animals back to life. Although once they are brought back they are no longer the same and they are similar to monsters. The rest of the film follows the family as each of them is killed by one another followed by their burial and rebirth until all of them have gone through the same. While this is an older film it does show important conventions that my group mates and I desire to include in our film introduction, such as in the opening clips when the child is wandering into the road, the viewer is expecting something bad to happen in that moment but the child is swiftly rescued. This specific scene foreshadows the death of the same child in the road later in the film. I believe we would like to follow a similar course of action such as a sense of normalcy, a foreshadowing near death experience, followed by the characters returning to their normal lives as if nothing has changed or happened at all. Much of this film adopts intense dark lighting or it occurs during night time, this lighting is commonly associated with dark emotion in the viewer and furthers the use of foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is something that occurred multiple times throughout the film, especially at climax points where it was anticipated that a character was going to be killed soon or that the course of the film would be changing. https://youtu.be/b35XksE5Xko