Publisher's Synopsis
A Year In The County: Threshold Tales is an exploration of the edgelands, borderlands and liminal places in film; of the places whether literal, in the mind, cultural or amongst the paranormal realm where the boundaries between worlds, ways of life, the past and the future become thin and porous. The book wanders amongst the overlooked, the hidden from view, isolated spaces and parallel planes of existence in cinema, taking in films that interconnect with both rural and urban "wyrd" culture from the shores of Albion out into the American Deep South and across the snowbound landscapes of Europe. Amongst its pages, you'll find a wide-ranging interthreaded journey that takes in the woodland wraiths of Without Name and The Watcher in the Woods, Columbus' love letter to a time capsule of modernist architecture, Nadja and Vampir-Cuadecuc's media phantom reimaginings of their genres, Dark Tower's concrete bound haunting, Ghost Dog's intertwining of spectral hip-hop with ancient Japanese tradition, No Surrender's black comedy set amongst 1980s urban decay, the creating and discovering of new worlds of electronic sound in The Shock of the Future and the darkly seductive temptations of a preternatural carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Elsewhere the book journeys through the American wyrd frontier in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus and explores the folk horror precursor The White Reindeer, the unearthing of buried secrets in Stephen Poliakoff's Hidden City and Glorious 39, the rudderless tumbling down the rabbit hole in Kate and Laura Mulleavy's Woodshock and the thinning of the barriers of time and place in Mike Hodges' Black Rainbow. * * * The book also considers and makes reference to the work of David Cronenberg, David Lynch, John Carpenter, Jesús Franco, Brian Clemens, John Hough, Alan Bleasdale, Colin Finbow Edgar Allan Poe, Harry Crews, Carroll Baker, Ray Bradbury, Jennifer Agutter, Nouvelle Vague, Bob Moog, RZA, Jim White, Birney Imes and 16 Horsepower and the films and television series The Wicker Man, Passion Play, Carnivàle, The Avengers, Doombeach and Edge of Darkness amongst others. It is released as part of the A Year In The Country project which is an exploration of "otherly pastoral" or rural "wyrd" culture that incorporates the undercurrents and further reaches of rural and folk-orientated music and culture, and where these meet and intertwine with both "urban wyrd" and the parallel worlds of hauntology.
