House of Psychotic Women by Kier-La Janisse
In 2012, a book debuted that would go on to canonical status and usher in a new way of writing about film. Kier-La Janisse's HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN explored hundreds of films through a daringly personal lens. In this pioneering work, anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and an examination of female madness, both onscreen and off. 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. This sharply-designed book, including a 48-page full-colour section, is packed with 680 rare stills, posters, pressbooks and artwork throughout, that combine with family photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog called it 'groundbreaking', no-wave icon Lydia Lunch called it 'a masterpiece', and Molly Ringwald said she 'devoured this compelling, surprising, and moving book'. To mark its 10th anniversary, Kier-La Janisse and FAB Press have reteamed to produce an expanded edition the book, featuring new writing on 100 more films - many of which were inspired in part by the book itself - and hundreds of new images. This first pressing of the Expanded Edition has been issued as a large format hardcover.
Janisse, Kier-La: - 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 (2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012) and co-edited and published the anthology books KID POWER!(2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and among her current writing projects are an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr. and a monograph about Monte Hellman's Cockfighter. She was a producer on Mike Malloy's Eurocrime: the Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the '70s and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is due out from Severin Films in 2021.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781913051211 |
| ISBN 10 | 1913051218 |
| Title | House of Psychotic Women |
| Author | Kier-La Janisse |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | FAB Press |
| Year published | 2022-10-04 |
| Number of pages | 448 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |