The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen...

Celebrated as one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, Kobayashi Masaki’s scorching depictions of war and militarism marked him as a uniquely defiant voice in post-war Japanese cinema. A pacifist drafted into Japan’s Imperial Army, Kobayashi survived the war with his principles intact and created a body of work that was uncompromising in its critique of the nation’s military heritage. Yet his renowned political critiques were grounded in spiritual perspectives, integrating motifs and beliefs fr...

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” cultur...

Lost Transmissions weaves amongst brambled pathways to take in the haunted soundscapes of electronica, the rise of the occult in the 1970s, cinema and television’s dystopian dreamscapes and hauntological work which creates and gives a glimpse into parallel worlds. It is a recording of a personal journey that delves amongst both the esoteric fringes and mainstream of culture, and which at times holds a shadowed scrying mirror up to the modern world and some of its ills, while also reflectin...

It was believed that September 11th would make certain kinds of films obsolete, such as action thrillers crackling with explosions or high-casualty blockbusters where the hero escapes unscathed. While the production of these films did ebb, the full impact of the attacks on Hollywood's creative output is still taking shape. Did 9/11 force filmmakers and screenwriters to find new methods of storytelling? What kinds of movies have been made in response to 9/11, and are they factual? Is it eve...

"A mighty slab of a book in which Stephen covers an awful lot of ground with his writings on film and TV, directors, writers, books, musicians, record labels and so on... from Bagpuss to Jane Weaver, The Eccentronic Research Council to John Carpenter, Excalibur, Quatermass, Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, Delia Derbyshire, Cosey Fanni Tutti and so much more. If you know about Stephen and his fine work you won't be hesitating to pick up a copy of this mighty tome." Neil Mason, Moonbuilding...

A Year In The Country is a set of year-long journeys through spectral fields; cyclical explorations of an otherly pastoralism, the outer reaches of folk culture and the spectres of hauntology. It is a wandering amongst subculture that draws from the undergrowth of the land. As a project, it has included a website featuring writing, artwork and music which stems from that otherly pastoral/spectral hauntological intertwining, alongside a growing catalogue of album releases. In keeping with t...

Exploring the Haunted Airwaves Before the ubiquity of streaming, British television was a landscape with room for strange experiments, folk-horror nightmares, and "wyrd" transmissions. Today, many of these programmes have vanished from official channels, leaving behind only "ghost signals": a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet. Ghost Signals maps this territory from 1968 - the foundational "wyrd" year of acid folk...

A Year In The Country: Other Worlds intertwines and cross pollinates the A Year In The Country project's core exploration of wyrd and hauntological culture with journeys to far off lands and seeks out hidden links in the cultural undergrowth. Amongst other "far off lands" of films and music etc it wanders to the Winter of Discontent witchcraft battles of the 1979 television adaptation of M.R. James' Casting the Runes and the timeslip folk horror Cold War dread of Hammer House of Mystery an...

A Year In The Country: Wyrd Explorations collects writing from the first decade of the A Year In The Country project, which has explored and documented the interconnected rise of interest in the wyrd, eerie and re-enchanted landscape, folk horror, the further reaches of folk music and the parallel worlds of hauntology. The book includes a selection of revised and at times extended writing from the first five A Year In The Country non-fiction books and the first ten years of posts on the pr...

The book undertakes in-depth studies of films, television programmes and documentaries and wanders amongst depictions of rural areas where normality, reality and conventions fall away and the landscape becomes deeply imbued with hidden, layered and at times dreamlike stories, taking in modern-day reinterpretations of traditional myth and folklore and work that has become semi-obscured from view through being unofficially available or otherwise having become partly hidden away. It explores ...

Vivid images of the apocalypse proliferate throughout contemporary cinema, which pictures the death of civilization in wildly different ways. Some films imagine a future where humanity is wiped out entirely, while others envision humans as an endangered species, enslaved by alien invaders or hunted by zombie hordes.This book provides a lively overview of apocalypse cinema, including alien invasions, nuclear annihilation, asteroid collisions, climate change, and terrifying plagues. ...