A Year In The Country: Threshold Tales: Crossing the Boundaries of Woodland Wraiths, the Uncanny City, Edgeland Expeditions and Frontier Dreamscapes

By Stephen Prince

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Year In The Country
• Release date: Sep 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781916095298

Book preview

A Year In The Country: Threshold Tales

Crossing the Boundaries of Woodland Wraiths, the Uncanny City, Edgeland Expeditions and Frontier Dreamscapes

Stephen Prince

A Year In  The Country

Copyright © 2023 Stephen Prince

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without permission from the publishers.

www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk

The right of Stephen Prince to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patent Act 1988.

ISBN: 978-1-9160952-9-8

Cover image and typesetting by A Year In The Country/Stephen Prince.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Notes on the Text

Preface: A Definition of Hauntology, its Recurring Themes and Intertwining with Otherly Folk and the

1: Without Name: Stepping Over the Threshold of a Liminal Landscape

2: Dark Tower: Otherworldy Dysfunction

3: Columbus: Stasis and Escape Amongst Faded Utopian Dreams

4: The White Reindeer: A Folk Horror Precursor

5: The Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes: Disney Darkness and Curious Shadowe

6: Nadja and Vampir-Cuadecuc: Hinterland Vampire Hunters and Spectral Hallucinatory Genre Flipsides

7: The Shock of the Future: Creating and Discovering New Electronic Worlds

8: Stephen Poliakoff’s Hidden City and Glorious 39: Unearthing Buried Secrets

9: Mike Hodges’ Black Rainbow: The Thinning of the Barriers of Time and Place

10: No Surrender and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: Views and Stories from the Rooftops and Urba

11: Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock: A Rudderless Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole

12: Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus: Journeys Through an American Wyrd Frontier

About

Other A Year In The Country work by Stephen Prince

Thanks to

Introduction

AYear 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 and the hidden from view alongside 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 woodland wraiths, a love letter to a time capsule of modernist architecture, media phantom reimagining of genres, a tower block bound haunting, spectral hip-hop intertwined with ancient Japanese tradition, black comedy set amongst 1980s urban decay, the creating and discovering of new worlds of electronic sound, the seductive temptations of a preternatural carnival and much more.

The past four non-fiction books that I have written and released as part of the A Year In The Country project have tended to be somewhat longer than this book but this time I wanted to create something a little different.

And so, with that in mind, this book reflects a personal journey that I’ve taken over a number of years amongst the psychic borderlands of cinema that has been distilled into a relatively slim volume.

I hope you enjoy the threshold tales in the book and that they help you start out on and take your own journeys of discovery.

Thanks as always for reading. See you on the other side.

Stephen Prince

27th September 2023

Notes on the Text

The structure of the A Year In The Country project, which this book is part of, is inspired by the passing of time and the cyclical nature of the years, and so, as with months in a year, the book includes 12 chapters.

It can be read in a conventional start-to-finish manner; however, each chapter can also be read as an individual, standalone article. In keeping with this - and also reflecting the recurring and interwoven exploration of particular themes and reference points within the wider A Year In The Country project - certain observations, theories, quotes, definitions and reference points recur throughout the book. In addition, there is also some intertwining with themes explored in the previous A Year In The Country non-fiction books.

Where appropriate, the year of release of films, books, albums etc is included each time they initially appear in a section or chapter.

Preface: A Definition of Hauntology, its Recurring Themes and Intertwining with Otherly Folk and the Creation of a Rural and Urban Wyrd Cultural Landscape

One of the recurring themes of this book and the A Year In The Country project as a whole is a consideration of hauntology. This is a relatively niche cultural phrase and area of work that not all readers will necessarily know of, and so below is a definition or overview of hauntology.

Although it is hard to precisely define what hauntology is, it has come to be used as a way of identifying particular strands of music and cultural tendencies. As a cultural category, it is fluid and not strictly delineated and rather than being a well-defined genre is more a way of identifying work which explores and utilises certain kinds of atmospheres, themes, characteristics and source material, some of which are listed below:

1. Music and culture that draws from and examines a sense of loss, yearning or nostalgia for a post-war utopian, progressive, modernist future that was never quite reached, which is often accompanied by a sense of lingering Cold War dread.

2. A tendency to see some kind of unsettledness and hidden layers of meaning in previous decades’ public information films, TV idents and young adult-orientated British television drama programmes, from the late 1960s until approximately the early 1980s, which had surprisingly complex and/or dark themes and atmospheres, particularly considered their intended audience. This includes the likes of The Owl Service (1969-1970), Children of the Stones (1977) and The Changes (1975).

3. Graphic design and a particular kind of more-often-than-not electronic, often analogue synthesiser-based and/or previous period-orientated music that references and reinterprets some forms of older culture and related artifacts, often focusing on the period from approximately the mid-1960s to 1979 (or at times the early 1980s)¹and generally of British origin. Such reference points include previous decades’ library music (i.e., music created for industry use in films, television, adverts, etc, rather than for public sale); the electronic music innovations of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; educational materials and book cover artwork, including period school textbooks; Pelican non-fiction titles which tended to have a distinctive aesthetic that combined functionality and a sense of idealism; and the stark sometimes seemingly almost accidentally darkly- hued designs of the Penguin Modern Poets books of the 1960s and 70s, which often featured minimalist, heavily- posterised images of nature.

4. A reimagining and misremembering of the above and other sources to create forms of music and culture that seem familiar, comforting and also often unsettling and not a little eerie; work that is accompanied by a sense of being haunted by spectres of its, and our, cultural past, to loosely paraphrase philosopher Jacques Derrida who coined the phrase and created the original concept of hauntology.²

5. The use and foregrounding of recording medium noise and imperfections, such as the crackle and hiss of vinyl, tape wobble, and so on that calls attention to the decaying nature of older analogue mediums and which can be used to create a sense of time out of joint and edge memories of previous eras.

6. The drawing together and utilising of the above elements to conjure a sense of an often strange, parallel or imagined world, or Midwichian³Britain.

Hauntology is often, but not exclusively, used to refer to British culture and music, and it is thought to have been first used in relation to this by the writers Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds to describe a loose cultural grouping of music and attendant culture which began to coalesce in the UK around the early-mid-2000s.

As a loose cultural category, hauntology has retained a fair degree of cultural and aesthetic diversity that takes in the eldritch educationalism of some Ghost Box Records’ releases, the playful psychedelic whimsy and breakbeats of Blank Workshop/Moon Wiring Club and the darkly humorous reinterpretations of period official warning posters of Scarfolk amongst others.

The term has also been used more widely to describe the likes of American hypnagogic pop and Italian Occult Psychedelia: musical categories which also reimagine and create spectral echoes of the past but which tend to utilise as their source material or inspiration, different