I walk down my own hall/hell of relationship horrors to find the truth, to find peace after years of suffering from love addiction and codependency. Folk Horror contains eight poetic tales of love lost and the stories we tell ourselves that make that loss worse.
Ritual is about obsessive behaviors around love.
Cemetery is about not being able to accept the death of a love.
Cursed Object is about the limited belief that love is not meant for you.
Dungeon is about feeling trapped within a cycle of sex and interpreting it as love.
Into the Dark Forest is about blindly following love.
Old Medicine is about being addicted to love.
The Reaper is about twin flame love.
Bell Jar is about finding spiritual love.
Illustrations by Stefanie Caponi of Moon Void Tarot
Length: 28 pages
Release date: On the witch’s sabbat, Samhain, October 31, 2022
Origin story
Folk horror series
It is no accident that on July 26, 2020, a short but meaningful romance in my life ended - then on July 28 Lana Del Rey's audiobook came out, which I listened to in full the very next day, July 29, on a ride up to see a new spiritual shop that just opened.
I was feeling very down from the ending of the romance and wanted to buy an inspiration-intention candle, which I did that day. I got home, opened the box which stated that the candle on the inside was “inspiration” and discovered the candle had a label which read protection. So the candle was a protection-intention candle. I smelled it, and it smelled like a candle I received in Salem at the end of a very educational tour about witches. You can read my Salem post in full here. I contacted the shop owner and she agreed to exchange it - even though I loved the way it smelled, it’s not what I had intended on getting. After I exchanged it a few days later at the shop, I walked out and smelled it, and the smell made me feel I should re-exchange it for the original, by-no-accident, protection-intention candle I received. So I did.
My thought was that I needed the protection candle for a reason unknown to me or the shop owner. Little did I know a few days later I would start and not stop writing about all the significant romantic relationships of my past. I loved that this was pouring out of me in such a flow kind of way. I also began having dreams about all of these people soon after. I then contacted my friend Stefanie about an idea I had - she could draw the images and I would add the writings, and we would share them on each other’s Instagram accounts in October for Inktober.
All this to say that the story behind this fascinates me, as does magic when you open yourself up to it. The shop owner checked every inspiration candle labeled box to make sure she hadn’t placed more protection candles in them by accident, and she hadn’t. What’s also interesting is that the intention behind this candle was to protect the buyer from someone or something harmful OR to protect from low vibration. It made me think of me and how I felt uninspired and wanted to reconnect with myself in that way (hence going for the inspiration candle). But I also wanted to work through being disappointed that someone I thought would be very special turned out to not be the right fit for me. The idea in itself of creating all of this poetry to eventually release of myself by putting it out there in the public eye for everyone to see, very personal deeply heartbreaking experiences that I went through, to even have the courage to do it made me so happy.
I believe - since I lit the candle almost every day since I began writing and it was very close to the bottom when I finished writing - that the candle came to me to protect me not only from my own doubts about this project, but from also being worried about getting my resources together to make it happen and gathering the courage to push through and release these feelings that have been living inside me for well over a decade. The candle was there to protect me through that whole process.
I am calling the series folk horror because in my research I found the genre has to do with “monsters terrifying and eliciting sympathy in equal measure,” which to me reflects me and who I am, who I thought I was, who I am now, etc. You can find the entire project on my Instagram accounts, to be posted throughout October.
.Jennifer Diane is a goddess of darkness, writer and model based out of New Jersey. She’s authored Folk Horror, Rural Horror, Devil’s Manifesto, Emotional Horrorshow, and Salvation. She writes for Healing with the Occult and speaks for the Enlightenment through Hellfire Podcast. Find her on Instagram.