A Year In The County: Threshold Tales is an exploration of the edgelands, borderlands and liminal places in film, of the places both literal and in the mind as well as culturally and 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: The Way of the Samurai’sintertwining 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 seductive temptations of a preternatural carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Elsewhere, the book explores the folk horror precursor The White Reindeer, journeys through an American wyrd frontier in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, Stephen Poliakoff’s unearthing of buried secrets in Hidden City and Glorious 39, a 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.
A Year In The County: Threshold Tales is an exploration of the edgelands, borderlands and liminal places in film, of the places both literal and in the mind as well as culturally and 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: The Way of the Samurai’sintertwining 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 seductive temptations of a preternatural carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Elsewhere, the book explores the folk horror precursor The White Reindeer, journeys through an American wyrd frontier in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, Stephen Poliakoff’s unearthing of buried secrets in Hidden City and Glorious 39, a 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.
