Telling Stories and Deploying Diegetic Folklore: A Short Incursion into Folk Gothic in Literature and Cinema

Abstract

This review examines Dawn Keetley’s Folk Gothic as a concise yet theoretically ambitious contribution to contemporary Gothic studies, foregrounding its argument for Folk Gothic as a distinct generic and analytical category. It highlights Keetley’s central claim that Folk Gothic displaces anthropocentric narration in favour of non-human agencies—landscapes, objects, ritual, and recursive temporality—as primary drivers of meaning and affect. Particular attention is paid to the book’s clear differentiation between folk horror and Folk Gothic, supported by close readings of literary texts and films that demonstrate how non-human agency reshapes narrative structure and spectatorship. The review concludes that Folk Gothic offers both a rigorous conceptual framework and an accessible critical model, making it valuable for specialists and non-specialists interested in Gothic literature, cinema, and ecocritical approaches.