Stephen King adapts his own novel and Mary Lambert films it as though the story would do the frightening by itself. Fred Gwynne and one bedroom flashback earn the 18 certificate; the rest is flat, hurried and led by a man who never looks worried.
Stephen King wrote the screenplay for this one himself, from his own novel, and Mary Lambert directs. Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff), a doctor, moves his wife Rachel (Denise Crosby), daughter Ellie (Blaze Berdahl), toddler Gage (Miko Hughes) and the family cat to a white house in Ludlow, Maine, on a road where the lorries do not slow down. The neighbour, Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne), walks them up to the pet cemetery, where local children bury what the road kills. Beyond it, past a wall of fallen trees, is older ground, and Jud knows what it does. That is the whole engine, the monkey’s paw told again with a cat, and it is a good one. The film has two or three scenes as horrible as anything a mainstream horror film of its decade put on screen, and between them it is flat, hurried and oddly calm.
Gwynne is the reason to watch. A long way from The Munsters, he plays Jud as a lean old Mainer in a cap, with a voice like a gate that wants oiling, and he delivers every warning with the sorrow of a man who knows he will be ignored. “Sometimes dead is better,” he says, and the film uses it as its tagline. The other thing that works is the flashback to Zelda, Rachel’s sister, dying of a wasting disease in a back bedroom. Andrew Hubatsek plays her, twisted in the bed with her spine bent like a hook, and when she laughed at the child Rachel we were horrified, in a way the rest of the film keeps reaching for and missing. Brad Greenquist’s Victor Pascow, a student who arrives at Louis’s infirmary with his head open and keeps turning up afterwards to give advice, is nearly as good and is played, sensibly, half for laughs.
Then there is Midkiff. Louis is told, in plain words, what the ground does, and goes up there anyway, and the performance never shows us why. He is handsome and even-tempered and seems to be waiting for someone to tell him how worried to look. King’s script does not help him. The novel takes its time over grief and over Louis’s reasons; the film cuts the reasons and keeps the events, so that people do terrible things because the book says it is time. The second half takes the turn the title has already promised, and we will not describe it, except to say that the film gets there in a rush and seems relieved to arrive.
Peter Stein’s camera is at its best in the woods. The night walk to the burial ground, over the deadfall and up on to a shelf of stones, is shot in blue mist with the sky turned orange behind it. Michael Z. Hanan has built the pet cemetery as rings of crooked little crosses behind a misspelt sign, and it is the one place in the film that looks old. The house, by contrast, is lit like a show home, and the lorry road that is meant to hang over everything is just a road. Elliot Goldenthal’s score, a choir over low strings, does a good deal of the work the direction does not, and Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill cut every scare the same way: a short silence, then the noise. The cat, when it comes back, is mostly a hiss on the soundtrack and a close-up of an annoyed animal.
Set beside the King adaptations that came before it, Carrie (1976) and The Shining (1980), this is a small, plain thing, directed as though the material would do the frightening by itself. Most critics at the time thought it slow and mean-spirited, and they were not wrong about the slowness. We are a little kinder, because of Gwynne and Zelda, and because the idea underneath, that a grieving man will do the stupid thing even after he has been told, is one the film at least understands, even if it cannot act it.
The 18 certificate is earned, though not for blood. It is earned for what the film is willing to do to a family, and for the stretch where we sat with our hands over our mouths, less frightened than appalled. If you can forgive a lead who never seems to be in the film he is in, there are two scenes here you will not forget. How badly you want to be reminded of them is a question for you and the sofa.
