Journalist Adam Nayman conjures Fessenden’s WENDIGO in article on the new PET SEMATARY

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Watching Pet Sematary, I couldn’t help but think of Larry Fessenden’s gorgeously melancholy Wendigo, one of the great, underrated horror movies of the 21st century, which features the shape-shifting Native American spirit as its title character and antagonist. Fessenden’s conception of the Wendigo is more positive than King’s, which reduces it to a generic demon, and also more political: It appears as a kind of avenging angel on behalf of Mother Nature, wreaking vengeance against rednecks. The allegory is pure eco-horror (as it is in the director’s Wendigo-themed The Last Winter), but the film’s blindsiding power is located in the authentic love generated in its main father-son pairing of Jake Weber and Erik Per Sullivan. They’re beautifully drawn, both as archetypes and as characters, and the mix of myth and specificity gets channeled in the direction of genuine, unabashed tragedy. The movie isn’t scary, exactly, but it’s sad in a way that’s close to terror—its sense of loneliness like an open existential wound. In Fessenden’s masterpiece, monsters are real but so is loss. What’s dead stays dead, and so you learn to live without it.

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Read whole article in The Ringer HERE