The Stephen King movie that sedated a cat: “The cat needed to be dopey”
There’s an old saying in showbusiness: “Never work with children or animals”. While this isn’t applicable all of the time, plenty of filmmakers have discovered the dangers of trying to manipulate creatures that simply won’t play ball. An elephant ate Kate Capshaw’s vintage dress during the filming of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A monkey routinely vomited on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Johnny Weissmuller once had to draw his knife on a chimpanzee co-star of one of his ‘Tarzan’ movies.
Basically, if you can avoid it, you should probably not have actual animals anywhere near your movie. Sometimes, though, there’s no getting around this, especially when the movie’s title says “Pet”.
In 1989, Mary Lambert adapted Stephen King’s Pet Sematary for the big screen. The film is set in a rural town in Maine (of course, it’s set in Maine), where a doctor discovers a magical graveyard with powers of resurrection. Louis Gage (Dale Midkiff) is warned not to use this ability as it comes with a curse, but when the family’s pet cat, Church, is run over by a truck, he buries it in the Sematary and brings it back to life, albeit as a shell of its former self. Church was played by numerous different moggies throughout the production, and one of them in particular went through quite the ordeal in the name of art.
One scene involved Louis putting Church to sleep after their accident, and Lambert wanted a very specific look on her feline actor’s face. “I really felt like the cat needed to be dopey in that shot, and you can’t train a cat to do that,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. In order to get the desired result, she turned to the obvious solution – drugs.
“After much discussion and negotiation, we gave the cat a sedative,” she revealed. “Originally, Valium was suggested and they said no to Valium, but everyone on the crew said, ‘We’ll take the valium! Give us the Valium, we’re tired of this!’” Despite some protest, the cat was eventually sedated, but Lambert assured the process was “supervised by the Association for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”
Valium is a brand name for the drug diazepam, one of the most prescribed medicines in the United States. Various sources clash on whether or not it’s safe to use on animals. Pet Place says it’s “not approved for use in animals by the Food and Drug Administration, but it is prescribed legally by veterinarians as an extra-label drug,” while PetMD warns that “diazepam oral tablets and oral suspension should not be used in cats, as a life-threatening liver problem can occur.”
This clearly doesn’t bother Lambert, though. “I give my cat a sedative when he travels with me,” she said. “Sometimes I split it with him because he likes Xanax the best. The vet says only half a Xanax, so Ulysses gets half, and I take the other half.”
Lambert explained that, because of the complexities of filming with cats, multiple different ones were used to play Church. “Cats really cannot be trained to do multiple things,” she revealed. “You find a snarly cat, and you can get it to snarl. You find a cat that likes to jump up on the kitchen cabinet, and you can probably reliably get it to do that… So we had eight or nine cats, and you chose the cat to do the thing that we needed to do.”
