Published in 2023 (first published 2012)
360 pages
10 hours and 23 minutes
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.
What is this book about?
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.
