House of Psychotic Women by Kier-la Janisse

I won't be able to do any of that because it's just bam, bam, bam! Normally, when I visit places, I like visiting locations and stuff. I arrive and I'm in each place for like one day, and then I'm on the train the next morning to the next place. Matchbox applied for it to bring me all over the world on tour partnered with all these other regional festivals and stuff like that. They’re sort of rogue programmers that do events all over the UK, so they got special funding from the British Film Institute because they have a horror season that they were accepting kind of grant applications. But the UK one is interesting because it's being arranged by this group called Matchbox Cine. Kier-La Janisse: I've been traveling since July with it. Before we dive into the book, I’d love to hear what are you most looking forward to about the experience. You’re about to go on tour in the UK to discuss this expanded edition of your work. To celebrate the book’s recent rerelease, I spoke with the filmmaker, author, and scholar about how it felt to revisit the text, expand it, and revisit the neurotic women of horror cinema a decade later in a global book tour. Ten years after its groundbreaking debut, Janisse rereleased the title under Fab Press in 2022 – including over 100 film additions and a lush 48-page full-color spread of gorgeous movie posters and film stills. And, as importantly, how viewers can find catharsis and emotional resonance through their journeys with each film. Her seminal book questions why and how horror films have used women’s psychological trauma, pain, and neurosis as the backbone of their stories. The lines between memoir and movie review blur as Janisse explores the impact these texts (often overlooked films) have had on cinema history, hers, and ours – an approach that was then novel and boldly brought films like Possession into the esteem it has today.

Interwoven with deeply personal anecdotes and well-researched film history, Janisse charts horror cinema’s love of using the “crazy” woman archetype and how it altered, spoke to, and enhanced her life. In 2012, Kier-La Janisse’s House of Psychotic Women hit bookshelves – forever altering how critics approached writing about film.

House of Psychotic Women by Kier-la Janisse