‘Wouldn’t it make sense that a crazy person would find relief in onscreen histrionics?‘
Kier-La Janisse is a big name in horror movie circles. She runs the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, a volunteer run endeavour that celebrates horror history and culture, she has made numerous documentaries about the genre, most notably Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, a visual history of the folk horror subgenre, but she is perhaps best known for her lauded treatise on female madness in the horror genre, House of Psychotic Women. Part rumination on the depiction of women in horror films and part confessional autobiography, House of Psychotic Women is rightly seen as a key text in the dissection of the horror genre…
Janisse interweaves her upbringing in Winnipeg (go Jets!) spent in and out of care homes, foster care and the home of her adoptive parents, with her first experience of watching horror films. The sheer breadth and number of horror films covered here is dizzying and I often found myself having to stop to make a note of a particular film mentioned that I hadn’t seen, or in some cases hadn’t even heard of (and I consider myself to be a true horror nerd). The writer’s candid style is both confrontational and starkly sincere, with the more intimate moments feeling more like a diary than a horror history book.
Janisse then goes on to describe in often graphic detail her various dysfunctional relationships with both men and women, but her dry humour and matter-of-fact delivery ensure that things never get too grim. Indeed, when the Canadian polymath writes about cinema and the escape that it provides those passages are often joyous and triumphant – a real love letter to the genre that Janisse clearly adores.
Unlike Carol Clover’s seminal horror text Men, Women, and Chainsaws, for example, this is a book that is accessible to everyone – not just horror hounds but anyone who has a love for cinema and an interest in the human condition.