Local Haunts
Adam Scovell
'In this wonderfully eclectic collection of essays Adam Scovell makes a beguiling guide, leading us along numerous haunted byways of British and European literature, television and cinema.'
– Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland
'Scovell's incisive essays, distributed across space-time, come together in this volume to form a cohesive travelogue through the hinterlands of our cultural landscape and the imaginal topographies of great artists, writers and filmmakers. It's an enriching journey that takes regular pitstops in those enchanted zones where a place and its stories are one and the same.'
– Gareth E. Rees, author of Sunken Lands
For more than a decade, writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell has been preoccupied by the strange connections between place and culture: curious about the graves of writers, determined to find the locations of iconic films, intrigued by the landscapes that inspired novels.
From obscure British television to European cinema, the poems of playwrights to the psychogeography of Weird Fiction, Local Haunts brings together a collection of essays, photographs, travelogues, and journalism that explores the connections between art and the landscapes that inspire it. With particular focus on several key figures that emphasised place in their work – including W.G. Sebald, Alan Garner, Agnès Varda, M.R. James, and Marguerite Duras – Scovell examines culture that is haunted by locales, rural and urban.
Taken from a range of print and digital publications, including work published by Sight & Sound, Literary Hub, Caught By The River, and Little White Lies, as well as Scovell's Celluloid Wicker Man site that brought many ideas surrounding Folk Horror and the Urban Wyrd to prominence in the early 2010s, Local Haunts brings together a decade of work treading the ghostways and the corpse roads of film, literature, and art.
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