We’ll stay spoiler-free for now before we get to the end of “Cemetery of the Cuddly Toys” – and then there’s a spoiler warning. Anyone simply interested in information about the Stephen King adaptation and its new streaming home can safely read on.
The book ‘Stuffed Animal Graveyard’ occupies a very special place among Stephen King’s novels. Not only is it one of the best and best known of his publications, it is also considered one of the author’s most commercially successful works. But whether it’s good or not, successful or not: almost every Stephen King book is made into a film at some point. This has happened twice so far with “Cuddle Cemetery”.
Stephen King’s Scary Indian Cemetery Story
The new film of “Cemetery of the Cuddly Toys” (2019) starring Jason Clarke, John Lithgow and Amy Seimetz is available today on the Paramount+ streaming subscription. There you can comfortably watch the horror film without commercial breaks and in different language versions.
For those who don’t know the story of “Cemetery of the Cuddles” at all: The Creed family moves from the turbulent city to the countryside. When the family cat is run over, children Ellie and Gage are heartbroken. Then new neighbor Jud Crandall reveals a secret to family patriarch Louis Creed: there is an old Indian cemetery in the woods. And what you bury there returns to the world of the living a little later…
After ‘Cemetery of the Cuddly Toys’ was adapted into a film by Mary Lambert in 1989 with rather mediocre results, Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s 2019 remake was at least superior in terms of craftsmanship. ‘Cemetery of the Cuddly Toys’ is a solid horror drama with atmospheric images and good acting – in Christoph Petersen’s FILMSTARTS review there are 3 out of 5 possible stars.
“Cemetery of Stuffed Animals”: a reasonable film, but…
Of course, a few changes were made to King’s original material; an adaptation may not be a pure one-on-one film adaptation, even if Kölsch and Widmyer follow the original very closely – except for the ending, which unfortunately largely cuts off the King horror, which had been quite convincing up to that point. Warning: There will be spoilers from here!
+++ Opinion +++
As so often with Stephen King, ‘Cemetery of the Cuddly Toys’ is mainly about horror and shock effects. Animals and people crawling out of their graves, slightly rotten, staring at their families with ominous eyes and then carrying out bloody attacks with bared teeth – that’s classic horror, which King likes to celebrate in disgusting detail in his descriptions.
But beneath this surface, Stephen King is almost always about human depths and the horror of negative, sometimes unbearable emotions. King’s tale of a cursed Indian cemetery is not only a horror story, but also a play about themes of loss, grief and guilt, and how they can tear us apart and bring out the worst in us.
New is not always better!
At a certain point, the horror situations can even be easier for the protagonists to bear than the suffering contained in them – or, in another reading, even simply a visual expression of it.
Of course, you don’t have to see it that way, but because Stephen King often structures his stories, you at least have room for interpretation. And Kölsch and Widmyer take that away from us with their new ending, the “Cemetery of Cuddly Toys” in its last meters just degenerates into a zombie movie. The mental anguish is suddenly less important and only the cheap shock of an undead attack takes center stage.
Book ending versus movie ending
This is what happens at the end of the novel ‘Cemetery of the Cuddles’: After the Creeds’ cat returns to the family by burying itself in the Indian cemetery, Louis Creed also buries his son Gage there, who was run over by a truck. Gage returns, but is now changed and gruesomely kills neighbor Jud and his own mother. Louis sees no other way out than to kill the cat and his returned son with medication injections.
Despite this experience, he now buries his wife Rachel in the Indian cemetery, assuring himself that Gage only became angry because he waited too long between his death and the burial in the Indian cemetery. The book ends with Rachel returning from the forest – we learn nothing about her nature.
This is what happens at the end of the remake of “Cemetery of the Cuddly Toys”: In the film, it is daughter Ellie (Jeté Laurence) instead of son Gage (Hugo & Lucas Lavoie) who is run over by a truck. The rest is initially similar: Ellie comes back from the dead and kills Jud and her mother. But then the story goes differently…
Ellie drags her mother Rachel to the Indian cemetery to get her back – because then they both wouldn’t be really dead and not really alive, maybe they could even be a family again. Father Louis runs after them and wants to kill Ellie, but is overpowered and killed by Rachel, who has since returned. Louis will now also be buried. The undead family returns to the house together to grab little Gage. He’s in a locked car – and the last thing we hear is the lock being opened.
Zombie film instead of human tragedy
In my opinion, there is a world of difference between these two endings. Of course you won’t be bothered by the ‘new ending’ if you don’t know the ending of the book. But whether you know the ending of the book or not: Ultimately, there’s simply no emotional punch here that pushes the story’s tragedy to its limits.
Instead, there is an ending that is at least bad, but also very simple: now everyone is simply (un)dead, boom. The drama becomes a zombie movie – only with burial instead of biting. Theater-wise, it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the film, in which the zombie horror took place more on the sidelines, and it even comes across as a bit ridiculous when the entire undead family suddenly buries each other and now also wants to put them in the bag. a small fee.
The classic King ingredients of pain and madness are eliminated
Worse still, the tragic dimension that Louis Creed, after having to kill his murderous son with his own hands, once again decides in his pain to bury a beloved family member in the cemetery, is completely eliminated at the end of the film. Here it is the undead killing each other and then bringing them back again – the question of conscience and reason does not even arise: The undead Ellie kills her mother Rachel and brings her back to life. The undead Rachel kills her husband. Finally, the undead Creed family grabs little Gage.
The part in which Louis Creed decides to kill his child, who still looks like his child but now behaves like pure evil, is also omitted. He fights Ellie in the woods and wants to kill her because she cannot be stopped from her plan to reunite the family as undead – but ultimately he does not carry out the deed and is killed by Rachel.
All the pain and madness that condenses into the character of Louis Creed at the end of the novel and even drives him, against his better judgement, to carry out his wife’s cursed funeral because he probably doesn’t care about anything anyway, simply evaporates. in the film adaptation. So much of the psychological horror of the original, of the deep, brutal, emotional horrors ingrained in the human soul, is lost.