After a movie night with my best buds and this movie, I was reminded of what Stephen King is best at: slow, creeping, unpredictable characters and motives. I had seen bits and pieces of the movie before, but I never really became engaged in it, possibly because of it's supposedly obvious plot. However, the pieces of the story that freaked out a number of my friends were nothing they could have guessed. Case in point: Zelda, Gage, and Pascow. Wow. This freaked them out entirely, to the point of one of my friends admitting that Zelda screwed up his childhood dreams for many years when he was taken to the film as a child.
The music was not your typical brooding, synthesizer-pad, horror movie score all the way either, with The Ramones writing a punk rock song for the film and having another of their hits jamming in the truck-driver's cab. The cat they got to play as "Church" (the family cat) was an amazing animal-actor (I guess you could say), and the effect they used on the eyes was really cool.
The plot is almost half-given away by the cover art and title, so I'm trying to leave out as much as possible, but it seems that the story was more about past guilt and trying to make amends with your guilty conscience by bringing things back, to save them and your guilt. It's an excellent thought, but as Fred Gwynne puts it, "Sometimes dead is better."
Go rent it the next time you feel like a horror movie and see a nice twist on the zombie/ghost genre. It's a classic.
The music was not your typical brooding, synthesizer-pad, horror movie score all the way either, with The Ramones writing a punk rock song for the film and having another of their hits jamming in the truck-driver's cab. The cat they got to play as "Church" (the family cat) was an amazing animal-actor (I guess you could say), and the effect they used on the eyes was really cool.
The plot is almost half-given away by the cover art and title, so I'm trying to leave out as much as possible, but it seems that the story was more about past guilt and trying to make amends with your guilty conscience by bringing things back, to save them and your guilt. It's an excellent thought, but as Fred Gwynne puts it, "Sometimes dead is better."
Go rent it the next time you feel like a horror movie and see a nice twist on the zombie/ghost genre. It's a classic.