Tear Jerker / Pet Sematary

• Gage's death is this mixed with Nightmare Fuel. Just the shot of his bloody sneaker, and Louis' Big "NO!" is as heartbreaking as it is blood-chilling.
  • This is also a big helping of Reality Subtext, as the book was partly inspired by King barely saving his son from being hit by a truck, and then being unable to stop thinking about what would have happened if he'd been a second slower.
• Louis weeping and cradling Gage's deceased body, and when Louis weeps as he carries Rachel's body to the burial ground, hoping she will come Back from the Dead whole and not wrong.
• The scene, both in the movie and the book, where Louis and his father-in-law start to fight at Gage's funeral, and knock over his coffin.
  The coffin did not actually open and spill Gage's sad, hurt remains out onto the floor for all of them to gawp at, but Louis was sickly aware that they had only been spared that by the way the coffin had fallen—on its bottom instead of its side. [...] Nonetheless in that split instant before the lid slammed shut on its broken latch again, he saw a flash of gray—the suit they had bought to put in the ground around Gage's body. And a bit of pink. Gage's hand, maybe. Sitting there on the floor, Louis put his face in his hands and began to weep.
  • While Irwin is being an asshole, he's still utterly heartbroken, perhaps just as much as Louis is, by the whole ordeal. In the book and radio play, the line "Where were you when he was playing in the road?" are only meant as a kick when Louis is down, but in the film, they're delivered with a terrible weight of grief and soaked in Manly Tears.
• Gage in general, but the scene where Louis remembers the cap full of blood, then dreams a whole life for Gage through his late teens...and then wakes up. Devastating.
  • Ellie carrying around Gage's picture, and sitting in his little director's chair. Trying to keep Gage alive, on her Hot 100, you know, in case he comes back…
• In the film when Louis has to kill Gage so he can stay dead, and the boy starts crying before childishly going "No fair!" and stumbling until he hits a wall and slumps down dead.
  • Even worse in the book, where the real Gage comes back for a second and has just enough time to cry "Daddy!" before he dies again.
  • Also in the film, the look of utter devastation on Louis's face as he injects Gage and then watches his son stumble and then slump down. Oh, God...
    • To make things even worse, Louis briefly remembers a happier Gage right before he kills his son.
    • The music cue that plays during this scene (rather appropriately titled "Adieu Gage"), courtesy of Elliot Goldenthal, just drives the whole thing home. Crowning Music of Tearjerking, anyone?
• Rachel's memory of Zelda's death in the film, as scary and unnerving as it is, is also really tragic because of the circumstances. Here is this little girl home alone with a sister that she subconsciously wished was dead, felt like she would be blamed for not only wishing her sister was gone but for being unable to help her.
  • Zelda, while a memorably cynical subversion of standard sickness tropes (she was deeply embittered by her circumstances and got her only semblance of joy out of inconveniencing her caretakers, a circumstance which Louis notes is far more common than the romanticized stereotype), was nonetheless a child whose illness had deformed her so much that her own family found her frightening to look at, isolated by her parents, treated as a shameful family secret, and likely driven insane by all of the above. It's noted that in her final days, her painkillers stopped working and she was constantly screaming in agony. By the end of the ordeal, it's fully possible that her entire family, not just Rachel, was secretly looking forward to her death. Rachel believes that Zelda hated her because she was aware that she was doomed to die in bed while Rachel was going to live.
  • While the motif of "Oz the Gweat and Tewwible" is a classic example of the Subverted Innocence typical of the horror genre, think of what the choice of the Oz illustration (said to have once been a favorite of Zelda's) for her room represents: our only glimpse of the version of Zelda who was not an insane and insanity-inducing Creepy Child, but a normal little kid who loved books a kid would love. Even Rachel can't remember that version of Zelda beyond what she's been told about the image.
• Ellie, at the age of six, is the Sole Survivor of the story, having lost her entire immediate family (and, for good measure, both of her beloved elderly neighbors and her cat). This happens less than a year after she had her first inkling of the reality of death and cried bitterly at the mere thought of even losing the cat.
  • This may sound weird with all the other goings-on, but if you have loved and lost a cat it's sad twice. First because Ellie is so scared of losing Church, and then because coming back isn't exactly nice to Church. He's still got a shadow of the cat things that made Ellie love him, now everyone hates him and kicks him. Poor Church.
• Chapter 35 lovingly chronicles "the last really happy day" of Louis's life, a basically unremarkable afternoon spent flying a kite with Gage, and hits us with our first explicit knowledge of Gage's death with debilitating precision:
  "Kite flyne!" Gage cried out to his father, and Louis put his arm around Gage's shoulders and kissed the boy's cheek, in which the wind had bloomed a wild rose.
  "I love you, Gage," he said—it was between the two of them, and that was all right.
  And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. "Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!"
  • The equivalent of the same scene from Stephen King's screenplay for the '89 film takes place immediately before Gage is hit by the truck and includes this scene direction:
    This is the last moment of happiness in this man's life—so let's make it very happy.
• When Irwin Goldman calls Louis with a tearful, sincere apology for the events of Gage's funeral, Louis—who has already begun to put his plan to resurrect Gage into motion—fleetingly but seriously contemplates abandoning the whole doomed enterprise, finally making peace with his wife's family, and spending the summer with Rachel and Ellie in Chicago, giving them a chance to recover to the point where they can all resume their life together in Maine. It's pretty much the last point in the book where anything faintly resembling an uplifting ending is possible, and the door is closed as quickly as it's opened.
• When Rachel decides to go home due to Ellie's premonition that something very bad is happening involving Louis, her parents become concerned for her sanity and try to talk her out of it.
  "Don't let them stop you, Mommy," Ellie said in a low voice. "Please."
  "No way, big sister," Rachel said and then winced—it was what they had called her ever since Gage had been born. But she was no one's big sister anymore, was she?
  "Thank you," Ellie said.

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