House Of Psychotic Women (paperback)

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Unlike her male counterpart, the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films rare places where her destructive emotions get to play. House of Psychotic Women is an examination of these characters through a daringly autobiographical lens. Anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a personal history and a celebration of female madness, onscreen and off.

“"God, this woman can write, with a voice and intellect that's so new. This is the truth in the most deadly unique way I've ever read." -- Ralph Bakshi, director Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, The Lords of the Rings, etc.”

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.

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 U.S.-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, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and an examination of female madness, both onscreen and off.This sharply-designed book with a 32-page full-colour section is packed with rare stills, posters, pressbooks and artwork 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. - comprehensive appendix- 1000 rare photos, many in color

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