House of Psychotic Women, KierLa Janisse
House of Psychotic Women, KierLa Janisse
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House of Psychotic Women
An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films

Author: Kier-La Janisse

Narrator: Kier-La Janisse

Unabridged: 10 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/10/2023


Synopsis

House of Psychotic Women is an autobiographical exploration of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films.

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart—'the eccentric'—the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

Named after the US-retitling of Carlos Aured's The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, House of Psychotic Women is an examination of these characters through a daringly personal autobiographical lens. Anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, and trivia to create a reflective personal history and an examination of female madness, both onscreen and off.

Contains mature themes.

About Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, programmer, producer, and founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi and has edited numerous books, including Warped & Faded, Yuletide Terror, and Satanic Panic. She was a producer on the film Tales of the Uncanny and wrote, directed, and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror for Severin Films, where she is a producer and editor of supplemental features.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Alix

la femme hystérique “It all started with Possession. Zulawski’s film, formally speaking, is perfection – its deep blue hues, its labyrinthine locations, the hypnotic cinematography of Bruno Nuytten. But that’s not what drew me to return to it again and again. There was something terrible in that film......more

Goodreads review by Kirk

Kier-La Janisse has written a very singular overview of horror films, her subset being those with a focus on female neurosis, and combined it with a sort of autobiographical account of her life. Aside from some jarring transitions between the personal material and the cinematic analysis, this works......more