The Science of Stephen King

I can remember crossing the road, and thinking that the cat had been killed in the road and (I thought) what if a kid died in that road? And we had had this experience with Owen running toward the road, where I had just grabbed him and pulled him back. And the two things just came together: on one side of this two-lane highway was the idea of what if the cat came back, and on the other side of the highway was what if the kid came back, so that when I reached the other side, I had been galvanized by the idea, but not in any melodramatic way. I knew immediately that it was a novel.1

That night he dreamt of a reanimated corpse and that spurred him to thinking about death and burial customs.

Is it possible for corpses to be reanimated? Although reanimation has been talked about in myth and legend for centuries, it wasn’t until the 1700s that experiments were documented. Lazzaro Spallanzani, a Catholic priest and natural history professor, believed that the dead could be reanimated using water. He noticed that microscopic life, which appeared dead, seemed to come back to life when water was added to it. Spallanzani never observed reanimated life but did end up observing white blood cells. In 1794, the Royal Humane Society of London carried out experiments on corpses in the hopes to alleviate the public’s fears about premature burial. This process included pouring liquor down the corpse’s throat, blowing smoke up the rectum, and massaging the dead body to attempt to awaken it. In the 1800s, physicist Giovanni Aldini became famous for his demonstrations of “reanimating” human and animal corpses. The process involved stimulating them with electrical shocks that would cause the corpses to convulse as though they were alive. In the 1930s Robert E. Cornish, a biologist at the University of California Berkeley, began experiments to bring dead dogs back to life. He used a contraption that would swing the corpse around, as if riding a seesaw, while he administered oxygen, adrenaline, liver extract, and anticoagulants. Cornish was able to bring two dogs back to life who reportedly both lived for several months afterward. Animal experiments of this type continued in Russia and the United States throughout the subsequent decades.

In the Bible, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead after four days of burial.

In 1999 a woman named Anna Bagenholm was brought back to life after being clinically dead for almost four hours. She went on to make a nearly full recovery.2

Why is it so difficult to bring living things back to life? Scientifically speaking, when our bodies die they begin the process of cell death.

All of our cells are covered with a thin membrane that essentially protects it from its surroundings and filters out molecules that are not necessary to its survival. When a cell approaches death, this membrane becomes thin and the cell will either be absorbed by surrounding specialized maintenance cells, it will basically eat itself, or the cell membrane will rupture, its contents spectacularly spewed into the surrounding tissue. Once any of these three things happen, there is no going back and the cell’s death is final. When this final cellular death occurs, reanimation becomes impossible.3

When someone dies, the lack of oxygen to their brain causes cell damage or even cell death. This is why when many people are revived or brought back to life, they are essentially brain-dead. This may explain why zombies in the media act the way they do! It also gives credence to the way the cat and son behave after being revived in the novel Pet Sematary.

Every year over one million people worldwide are affected by meningitis 5

A character in the novel that played a bigger role in the film version is Zelda Goldman, Rachel’s sister. She suffered from spinal meningitis and Rachel still feels a combination of guilt and resentment over her condition. What is spinal meningitis? According to Cedars Sinai Hospital, spinal meningitis is “an infection of the fluid and membranes around the brain and spinal cord. Once infection starts, it can spread rapidly through the body.”4 Symptoms may include a blank, staring expression, a dislike of being touched or handled, a high-pitched, moaning cry, an arching back, and a pale, blotchy skin color. All of these symptoms could have been terrifying for Rachel to witness and incredibly painful for Zelda to endure. This trauma, and the trauma of her son’s death, had a tremendous impact on Rachel’s life.