© Schlock Webzine
Today is May 1st – May Day, halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and seen in ancient times as the beginning of summer. It was – and, in some parts, still is – a day of celebration. Bonfires would be lit and rituals conducted to ensure bountiful harvests and protect livestock being driven out to their summer pastures. Flowers would be used to decorate the doors and windows of houses and byres. Offerings would be made to the fairy folk. Sacred wells would be visited, Beltane bannocks cooked, Jack-in-the-Greens and hobby horses paraded, May bushes assembled, Maypoles danced around and May Queens crowned.
And if you live on the Scottish island of Summerisle, I assume it’s still the day when you make sure any virginal and sanctimonious Free Presbyterian police officers have an appointment with the wicker man.
Today is also the day that my latest short story – appropriately a folk horror one attributed to the penname Jim Mountfield – sees publication in Volume 20, Issue 1 of Schlock Webzine. Entitled Encapsulated and set during the Covid-19 pandemic in rural England, it’s about a father trying to help his daughter combat the boredom of lockdown by assembling and burying a time capsule. He then suffers disturbing visions after the burial of the capsule results in something else, something strange and mysterious, being unearthed.
Though it’s May Day, and two paragraphs ago I invoked Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), the greatest folk-horror movie of all time, Encapsulated is actually closer in spirit to another classic British folk-horror movie of the early 1970s, Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970). In fact, though I don’t make any explicit connections with Blood on Satan’s Claw, I’d like to think Encapsulated inhabits the same universe as it.
For the next month, Encapsulated can be read here. Meanwhile, the main page of Schlock Webzine, Volume 20, Issue 1, can be accessed here.