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]
