Pet Sematary

After the family cat, Church, is killed on the highway and secretly resurrected by Louis Creed with help from his neighbor Jud Crandall in the ancient Mi'kmaq burial ground beyond the town's pet cemetery, the cat comes back wrong: dull-eyed, foul-smelling, and viciously predatory. This sets the stage for the novel's true horror. Months later, Louis's two-year-old son Gage is struck and killed by a speeding truck on the same road. Shattered by grief, Louis begins to contemplate doing to his son what he did to the cat, despite everything he has seen.

Jud, sensing what Louis is planning, tries to stop him by recounting the story of Timmy Baterman, a local soldier whose body was buried in the same ground by his father after being killed in World War II. Timmy came back as a malevolent, knowing entity that terrorized the town until his own father was forced to kill him and then took his own life. Jud tells Louis that whatever returns from that ground is not truly the person who died, and that "sometimes dead is better." Louis refuses to listen. He sends his wife Rachel and daughter Ellie away to Rachel's parents, exhumes Gage's body himself, and carries it into the burial ground to reinter it, hoping for resurrection.

What comes back is not Gage but something wearing his shape, cunning and murderous. Rachel, disturbed by Ellie's ominous dreams, returns home early and is killed by the creature with one of Louis's own scalpels; Jud, waiting at his house, is killed first. When Louis discovers what has happened, he kills the resurrected Church and then the thing that was once Gage, using lethal injections of morphine, finally accepting that nothing good can come from the ground's power.

Utterly broken, Louis sets fire to Jud's house and then carries Rachel's body back into the woods, driven by the same desperate hope that acting immediately might yield a different result. A colleague, Steve Masterton, glimpses him vanishing into the trees with her corpse. The novel ends with Louis sitting alone in his house playing a game of solitaire, seemingly resigned or catatonic, when he feels a cold hand fall on his shoulder — Rachel, resurrected, has returned to him, closing the story on an unambiguous note of horror rather than resolution.

The 2019 film swaps the child, and that one change turns the ending inside out. King kills two-year-old Gage on the highway. The film kills Ellie, hit by a derailed tanker truck during her own birthday party — old enough to talk when she comes back, and to plan.

Both bury the child, and in both the thing that returns kills Jud and then Rachel. But King leaves Louis standing: he puts Church and Gage down with morphine, burns the Crandall house, and carries his wife's body up to the burial ground himself, betting that fresher means better. The last line of the novel is her cold hand landing on his shoulder while he plays solitaire alone. The film makes Louis the one who gets buried. Ellie knocks him out; a grave marker goes through him from behind; and the family that walks out of the woods afterwards — Rachel, Ellie, the cat, and a resurrected Louis — sets Jud's house alight and turns toward the car, where Gage, the survivor in this version, is locked inside.