Pet Sematary as Folk Gothic

A couple of articles have suggested that the 2019 Pet Sematary (directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer) amplifies the “folk horror” of Stephen King’s novel (1983) and of Mary Lambert’s film (1989). It does, perhaps most noticeably in the addition of the masked children forming a “procession” to the cemetery (though this ritual ends up being much less important to the film than the trailer makes it appear). As I began thinking about Pet Sematary as folk horror, though, it occurred to me that the film actually seems more akin to what we might call “folk gothic”—and that there is a significant difference between the two.[i] So, while recognizing the slipperiness of both “folk horror” and “folk gothic,” this essay represents my effort to think through, with Pet Sematary, what “folk gothic” is.[ii]

By far the most important characteristic of the gothic is the relentless return of the past in the present. Numerous critics have articulated this characteristic, including Chris Baldick who has defined the “gothic” as well as anyone. “For the Gothic effect to be attained,” he writes, a tale should contain “a fearful sense of inheritance in time.”[iii] Others have agreed. The gothic signals “the disturbing return of pasts upon presents,” Fred Botting notes. And “gothic shows time and again,” Mark Edmundson declares, “that life, even at its most ostensibly innocent, is possessed, that the present is in thrall to the past.”[iv]

What is different about folk gothic is that the past that returns is not only individual; it is also collective. It is a past of the “folk”—a collective past, a past articulated in and through folklore. In Pet Sematary, the dead return—literal embodiment of what should be past. But that return is interwoven with folk tales of a Wendigo that purportedly lives in the Little God Swamp on what used to be tribal lands, beyond the barrier. Mary Lambert left the Wendigo out of her adaptation, but the folk tale is in King’s novel, and it infuses Kölsch and Widmyer’s adaptation. As Jud (John Lithgow) tells Louis (Jason Clarke), the story of the Wendigo is a “myth passed down by old tribes.” And while it may be a “crazy folk tale,” he adds, “there is something up there that brings things back.”  Folk tales constitute a continual return of the past in the present, and the Wendigo itself, in this telling, is also all about “bringing things back.”[v]

A second crucial characteristic of the gothic is entrapment. Chris Baldick claims that the gothic combines “inheritance in time” with “a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing each other to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.”^[vi] While in traditional gothic fiction, characters are often trapped in relatively nonspecific abbeys or castles, in folk gothic, characters are mired in an always particular landscape, one that is itself thoroughly interwoven with centuries of history (human and nonhuman).

In folk gothic, then, the landscape is absolutely critical (as is also true of folk horror). Space reinforces the return of the past in the present, moreover, in that characters are trapped in a landscape that is itself steeped in history and folklore. This landscape has not only been formed by humans but has, in turn, formed those who have lived there. And in forming them, it has often trapped them. In Pet Sematary, the landscape of the Creeds’ new property—the path to the cemetery, the barrier, the forbidden terrain beyond, Little God Swamp—is all crucial; it’s also entrapping. The dead Victor Pascow (Obssa Ahmed) says to Louis that “the land is sour”—and then Jud later tells him the land is “bad,” to which Louis adds “sour.” Part of the “badness” of this land is precisely the effect it has on those who venture onto it.  As it has been for many others, the deadly pull of this land—the agency of this land—is too much for Louis.

Lastly, I would distinguish folk gothic from folk horror in the difference of its central conflict. In folk horror, an outsider (often urban) arrives at a place (often rural) and gets fatally caught up in the locals’ occult practices. Folk horror involves crossing a boundary and meeting some “other”—a group of people (and / or a supernatural entity) that is starkly alien. This happens in Pet Sematary . . . sort of. It could be that what happens to Louis Creed when he crosses the infamous “barrier” is all about the Wendigo. But that’s not really it. That’s not what really happens.

What is different in folk gothic—and why Pet Sematary seems to partake more of folk gothic than folk horror—is that there is not clearly an alien “other” living on the other side of the barrier and causing all the destruction. Pet Sematary makes it clear that what happens to the Creed family is as much if not more their doing than it is the result of the long-gone Native tribe or the fleetingly mentioned and never seen Wendigo. In folk gothic, then, the fateful encounter is as much with yourself as with an exterior “other”—whether that other be pagan villagers or a demon.

In that paradigmatic example of folk horror, The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), for instance, protagonist Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is burned alive by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) and the islanders, who are hoping to regenerate their harvest. Howie may have flaws, but he did not bring his sacrificial death on himself; he is not sowing what he reaped in that climactic scene of The Wicker Man. He is reaping what others sowed. He crossed a boundary and met irreducible others; he did not confront himself. Louis Creed, on the other hand, like all the others who have succumbed to the powerful allure of what is beyond the barrier, certainly did reap what he sowed. He crossed the barrier and met himself—his own hubris, his own recklessness, his own overwhelming grief.

In summary, then, in its dramatization of (1) a repetition of the past in the present manifest through collective folklore, (2) a powerfully entrapping landscape, and (3) a protagonist’s encounter with his own alien compulsions, Pet Sematary perfectly illustrates what we might usefully call “folk gothic.”

 

NOTES

[i] This essay emerges from a longer scholarly article I’m writing on the first season of True Detective (2014) “folk gothic.” You can find it, open access, in the brilliant collection Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene, edited by Justin D. Edwards, Rune Graulund, and Johan Höglund, from the University of Minnesota Press (2023).

[ii] I explore folk horror in “Eden Lake: Folk Horror for a Disenchanted World” and “The Resurgence of Folk Horror.”

[iii] Chris Baldick, Introduction, to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, xix; emphasis added.

[iv] Fred Botting, Gothic, New York: Routledge, 1996, 1; Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 5.

[v] The Wendigo story is a bit more elaborate in King’s novel, including, for instance, harsh winters, the threat of starvation, and cannibalism. King, Pet Sematary, New York: Pocket Books, 2001, 142-3. In the 2019 film, the meaning is pared down to bringing things back.

[vi]Baldick, Introduction, xix; emphasis added.

Check out Stephen King’s Pet Sematary:

And you can also stream Mary Lambert’s excellent 1989 Pet Sematary: