We were extremely honoured to welcome the legendary writer, programmer, producer, director, Kier-La Janisse to Glasgow at Weird Weekend III, for our dedicated House of Psychotic Women strand and a very special In Conversation with The Final Girls’ Anna Bogutskaya. That conversation was recorded for posterity (albeit via the live captioners’ Zoom link), and formed the final episode of Anna’s podcast mini-series dedicated to Kier-La’s pioneering book and its influence. Listen via the link below (or wherever you get your podcasts), or read our transcript here.
HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN 06 • Kier-La Janisse in Conversation – The Final Girls: A Horror Film Podcast
[Anna] Welcome to the Final Girls podcast. I’m Anna Bogutskaya, and as ever, I’m your podcast host. In this mini-series, we’re exploring and celebrating the House of Psychotic Women, the seminal book by Kier-La Janisse.
[Woman] What do you think? Go ahead, be honest, just tell me. You think I’m insane?
[Woman 2] You know, these women wrestling in an arena of mud.
[Woman 3] No… I disgust you. I sicken you. You hate me. But it’s difficult! Don’t you understand me? It’s difficult! I didn’t want it to happen but it’s happened, and now…
[Anna] Over this mini-series, we have been interrogating the House of Psychotic Women – a book of film criticism, a memoir, and a topography of female neuroses on screen. I’ve been talking to film-makers whose films have a psychotic woman at the heart of them about a film featured in the book that’s inspired their own in some way. I’ve spoken to Prano Bailey-Bond, Alice Lowe, Deborah Haywood, Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes. And now, it’s time to talk to the author herself, Kier-La Janisse. Now, this episode is taken from a live recording of a conversation we had at Matchbox Cine’s Weird Weekend, so the quality of the audio is not the greatest, but the conversation itself was, in my opinion, outstanding. It was a real honour to speak to Kier-La about her programming, her writing and the legacy of the book. So, I hope you forgive the audio and focus on the words. If you enjoyed this episode or this series, do let me know. It means a lot. And you can find me on Twitter at @annabdemented or support the podcast over on Patreon, where we publish regular bonus episodes. You can also leave us a review at Apple or Spotify podcasts. We’ll be back early next year with a new full season, so a little review of the podcast really does help while we’re on hiatus. And with all of that said, please join me in the House of Psychotic Women.
[Anna] Hi, everyone. I’m Anna. I’m a programmer and a film writer myself, which I’m genuinely only able to say that I am because of the woman that I’m about to host on stage. So, before I introduce her and ask you to clap once more but harder… Kier-La Janisse is a multi-hyphenate of the film world. A film programmer, a festival director, film-maker in her own right, The author of House of Psychotic Women, the editor of many other books, a former cinema owner, festival director of many a festival. I haven’t even begun to cover the amount of projects and the work that she’s done that has influenced and inspired a whole generation of film-makers, writers, critics, programmers, myself very much included. So, please put your hands together for Kier-La Janisse.
[Kier-La] I’m laughing at one of the captions ’cause it said I’m “from the film wealth.” Yes. I wish I was from the film wealth!
[Anna] We all wish we were from the film wealth. But, um… You know, I wanted to hype you up and really begin this conversation because there’s so many things that we could be talking about, so I’m going to try to ask you about some of the key pieces of work and bodies of work and projects that you’ve done. The very first one, and I wasn’t joking, I didn’t know what a film programmer was until I saw your work. So, I wanted to ask you, what drew you to becoming a film programmer? What was your entry point into that world?
[Kier-La] It was kind of an accident. I think, like, back when I started doing it, most people didn’t know what a film programmer was, including me. So, I had a little fanzine that I used to make. I worked in video store for many years and I made, like, a horror fanzine, and I would mail-order movies and I would… ike, I mail-ordered movies from European Trash Cinema, Video Search of Miami… There was even some British companies that I would get stuff from. Dave Gregory, who I work for at Severin now, used to have a company called Exploited, that had VHS tapes, and so, I would buy stuff from them, too. And so, I would get all this stuff and I would, like, review these things in my fanzine. But in Canada, we have obligatory ratings, sort of like you guys have obligatory ratings here, right? And so, we weren’t allowed to… Even though I worked in a video store, we weren’t allowed to just put these movies on the shelf, even if they had officially been released, like, by a company somewhere. They had to have a Canadian distributor, that distributor had to pay for the rating, and all the ratings were different in each province. And so, it just ended up becoming really obstructive for, you know, like, small shops like ours to be able to have obscure movies on our shelves. And, you know, we just did it illegally anyway, but… But that was sort of how I started, was that I would review these films in the fanzine and people, you know, customers would be like, “But how can we see the movies? How can we see the movies? “We’re not going to see these movies that you’re reviewing.”
And so, there was, like, this little micro-cinema in town. This was… I lived in Vancouver at the time, so this was, like, 1999. And I went to this micro-cinema and I asked them… I gave them a list of films and said, “If you ever want to play horror films, like, here’s a list of films you could play.” And I could probably get people to come out to it, because I have a horror fanzine.” And the guy’s like, “Oh, yeah, thanks a lot. Okay, see you later, crazy person.” And then, like, a few months later, he called me and was like, “Okay, I’m doing the calendar for June, and what dates were you thinking of for your horror festival?” And I was like, “I don’t have a horror festival.” And he was like, “Oh, I thought you had a horror film festival or something and you wanted to, like, rent the theatre.” And I was like, “Oh, well, how much is it to rent the theatre?” and he was like, “$200.” Which was, like, $200 a night, but even then, that was cheap. That’s ridiculously cheap now, but even then, it was cheap. And I had just gotten my student loan. And so, I just was like, “I’m going to use my student loan and put on a horror film festival.” And so, that’s, like, how I started doing it. And so, the first year I did it was totally… I would say 70% of the movies were illegal, were shown illegally. And then there was, like, some contacts I made. Once I decided I wanted to do a film festival…I found I had some mutual friends with, like, Mitch Davis, who was the programmer at the Fantasia Film Festival. So, I got introduced to him, and it was really kind of through him that I got the first handful of, like, legit film bookings, you know?
Like, where I got in touch with Jörg Buttgereit and I played his films. I think the first year, I may have played, like, Nekromantik and Der Todesking or something, and I played those legally. And Singapore Sling was another film I played legally, but I also played tons of things illegally, like Possession and Gerald Kargl’s film, Angst. And I’m trying to think if I played Der Fan the first year. I did at some point. And, um… God, I played, like, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, and Deep Red and Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue, and, like, all these, like, classic films that had just not been released in Canada, you know? And so, the first year was, like, crazy. It was gangbusters. It went amazingly. And it was also great because I had no idea that there were that many people interested in horror in Vancouver, because you always think, like, you’re the only one. And so, that was the first time that I saw all these people just come out of the woodwork and, like, come to this festival. And so, then I just kept doing it because I was like, “Oh, there’s an audience here for it,” you know? So, it was, like, totally by accident.
[Anna] And you kept going and kept curating and programming for festivals, running your own festival, and then, you know, after that finished, setting up another festival, and all these budgets. What about the programming itself, and the festival environment in particular, keeps you coming back and…and keep setting up new ones, possibly building on that?
[Kier-La] Well, I think, like, you know, throughout the year, when I’d be looking at films, any time I saw a film that, like, moved me or resonated with me or whatever, I just be like, “Oh, I would love to show this to people.” You know, there’s, like, this instinct to share it with people, you know? And that was something that I think I always had, you know? Like, according to my neighbour who lived across the street from us when I was a kid. I went back to visit as an adult, and… you know, and she asked me when I was up to. I said, “Oh, I’m running this horror film festival,” and she’s like, “You were always organising things in the neighbourhood.” And I was like, “What do you mean? Like what?” She’s like, “You organised a circus, you had all the kids playing different roles in the circus and stuff.” And she’s like, “You made a haunted house” and all these things, and I was like, “Really?” I barely even remember doing these things. But I realised that that was just an obvious thing, that if I was excited about something, it wasn’t enough for me to just be excited alone about it. Like, I always wanted to, like, get other people excited about it.
And so, yeah, so, I think the fanzine was like that, too, because, I mean, there’s no reason I had to be spending so much time writing reviews of movies except for some weird compulsion to share the films with people, and the festival was an outgrowth of that. And, you know, I had a friend named Sam McKinlay, who was kind of, like, my best friend that I hung out with when I lived in Vancouver. And the two of us would watch movies, like, non-stop, you know? Like, I would just be at his house – he lived across the alley from me, you know – and we would just, like, watch movies non-stop. We both were, like, obsessive mail-ordering people, him much more than me. And so, we were just constantly getting all kinds of obscure films. And then it came down to, like, trying to track them down to see if we could show them at the festival.
So, I think it’s just, like, partially… There’s definitely, like, a compulsive aspect to it, because a lot of times I would ask myself, “Why are you doing this?” Especially because it cost all my money that I made at the video store. You know, like, I was so poor I couldn’t buy socks or anything like that because I was spending all my money shifting 35mm prints across the world. Because back then, it was not DCP or anything. Everything was on film, so… Yeah, there was no Blu-ray, there was nothing exhibition quality other than 35mm or sometimes, like, a DigiBeta or some tape or something like that. But it always involved shipping by a courier and having insurance and all these things. And so, it was, like, quite a bit of money, you know, for putting on these things. And then, plus I started having guests. So, I started, like, inviting people to the festival, which I would also have to pay for. And I didn’t have that many sponsors or anything.
So, I often would ask myself, like, “Why am I doing this?” “Why do I feel the need to spend all my money and all my time “putting on this festival for other people “when I could just sit at home and watch movies myself, you know?” And I came to the conclusion it was, like, a mental illness, you know? It was, like, a sickness that I had, yeah. Which I think, like, after all these years, I have finally gotten to the other side of it, where I stop myself from putting on events. I’m just… I think about it, the wheels start going, and then I’m just like, “Nope, somebody else can do it.”
[Anna] I’m very familiar with that particular compulsion. “Nope, put it in a box. Not for me to organise.” And where was this writing at this time? So, you know, you were doing all this organising, setting up festivals, bringing guests over, bringing 35mm prints over, but where’s…? Were you still writing reviews for the fanzine? Were you thinking about the book already? When did that start cooking?
[Kier-La] I was writing my fanzine from about 1997 until about 2002-3 or something like that. And it was, like, quarterly, you know? I don’t know how regular it was. I think, ultimately, there were, like, twelve issues of it. So, I wrote a lot of stuff for those. That was also the beginning of my kind of, like, editing the work because I could get other people to try to write stuff for the fanzine, too, so that it wasn’t just me. And the more the festival kind of took over my life, and then I got a job at the Alamo Drafthouse as a programmer in 2003. And so, then I was, like, fully working full-time as a programmer. And so, the fanzine kind of had to end because I just didn’t have time. But I started… The first book I did was this little book called A Violent Professional, which was about an Italian actor named Luciano Rossi. And it’s just, like, this little fluff-piece that’s very inspired by reading Teen Beat magazine and stuff as a kid. It’s all… Like, I rate all the movies by how much screen-time he has and how good his hair is. So, it’s totally ridiculous. But it was beautifully designed by a guy named Rob Jones, who, at the time, wasn’t very well-known, but went on to be, like, the White Stripes’ main designer and stuff like that. So, the layout of the book is incredible. So, I did that book while I was working at…at the Alamo, and it came out in 2005.
And House of Psychotic Women, I had kind of started working on it in little spurts, still when I lived in Vancouver, so it was definitely before 2003, when I moved away. And so, it came out in 2012, and I was sort… So, it was ten years, you know, that I had been writing little bits here and there on it, you know, and then it was really, like, the last two years of that, that it became much more intensive writing. And I often rewrote the stuff that I had written earlier. But I would say, yeah, 2000 to 2003, I started working on it. It just took me that long partially because I had a full-time job that was very hectic. But also, I kept being very uncertain about the structure, you know? For anybody who has read the book, it’s, you know, it’s, like, memoir mixed with film analysis, and it’s kind of transitioning between these things through the book. And I just didn’t know, really, how to do it, and… Like, I wasn’t sure if I should have, like, a chapter that was about my life and then an essay about a film, and that, you know, if it should be much more divided that way. And then I decided, somehow, that I just wanted to, like, meld it all. And I wanted the analysis of the films to kind of stand in as my self-analysis of, like, whatever the situation in my life was that I had just talked about related to that film. So, instead of analysing my life or analysing my mother, I would analyse the mother in the film, and that would kind of be…help me to understand my mother better, you know, like, things like that. So, going over the structure and trying out lots of different types of structures, you know, like I had all these little documents, that I started writing a different way and then I was like, “Forget it,” but I think I still even have some of those old documents somewhere. Yeah, so, it was just… A lot of it took so long ’cause I had to figure that out.
[Anna] Yeah, and this is one of the things that continues shifting in the book. When I first picked it up and I read it, when I remember it, I remember only focusing on the film history stuff, and the film analysis, and taking notes of all the different films that I’d never seen or heard of before. And when I re-read it, the memoir stuff was the stuff that really stood out to me. Maybe because I was a different person as well, reading it. And I’m wondering how much of yourself… Did you ever kind of battle with yourself of much of yourself to put in there alongside all the film analysis and film history and the knowledge that you poured into the book?
[Kier-La] Yeah. I mean, I knew that the book had to have pretty much everything. Like, it had to be…pretty open. I mean, there’s lots of stuff that’s not in it from my life that’s happy, which is unfortunate because… like, I only talk about traumatic incidents because I’m talking about these films, right? And so, unfortunately, it’s definitely led to situations where people think my childhood was much worse than it was, and they think I have had no joy in my childhood at all. But I was like, my stepdad, who many readers of the book think is a total monster, was my favourite parent. It’s, like, he was the most violent parent, but he was also my favourite parent. He’s the one I got along with the best in other ways, you know? Like, he was, like, a horror fan. I spent most quality time with him. You know, but unfortunately, I don’t write about a lot of those things because I’m focusing on, like, traumatic stories. And so, if I had the book to do over again, I might try to insert more of that. But, uh… I’m trying to remember what the question was. Oh, how much of myself to put in. Yeah, I knew that it kind of had to have most things in it because… I kept thinking of, like, if I was going to use my personal anecdotes and my personal life to talk about these films, I couldn’t just say, like, “Oh, yeah, I relate to these films because, you know, “I had similar things in my life, or I associate that with a memory that I had.” I couldn’t just, like, then not say what the memory is, you know, because it’s, like, you’re writing an essay and you have a thesis, you have to support your thesis with, like, support materials and stuff, you know? And so, I felt like being honest in that way was required or else… I had no argument, the book fell apart, you know, like, if people didn’t understand why I had those associations with those movies, you know, like, I had to sort of go in detail about certain things. So, I knew it was going to be really personal, but I also didn’t think anyone would read it. So, I thought because, you know, my publisher’s not that big of a publisher, and it was also, like, a weird book, you know, like, there was no other book like that at the time, and definitely not from my publisher, he wasn’t quite sure how to market it. And so, I thought that maybe 500 people at most would ever read that book, you know? So, there’s also things where I’m just, like, flippant about certain films that I wish I hadn’t been that flippant about if I knew more people were going to read it, you know? But I think also there’s a freedom in that. Like, if you think nobody’s going to read it, You’re just like, “Whatever I think in this moment, that’s what’s going there,” you know?
[Anna] That’s the best part, is thinking you’re writing for no-one in particular. [Indistinct] And you mentioned that this book needed to have everything, but you make a clear choice, even in the subtitle of the book, that you’re going through horror films and exploitation films. But a lot of the films that you write about don’t necessarily fit in either of those genres. So, how did you know when enough films were… How did you know that you had covered as many as you possibly could?
[Kier-La] I think I… I think there’s 200 in the first edition, and I think I was kind of just, like, I wanted 200 movies, you know, and I wanted…in the new edition, I wanted 100 more movies, you know? And so, then, it all came down to my mood, what those movies were. Like, what did I feel like watching that day? And so, there are certain movies that should be in it that aren’t there just because I never felt like watching them the whole time I was writing the book. So, like, Mulholland Drive is not in it. Mulholland Drive is in it, like, mentioned in other reviews. Like, I’ll name-drop it, but I’m just like, “Nobody needs to hear what I think of Mulholland Drive.” There’s, like, whole books about Mulholland Drive, you know? Same with, like, Rosemary’s Baby and stuff. Rosemary’s Baby is, like, mentioned in the context of other write-ups, but it doesn’t have its own section. And so, it’s very subjective and it’s very disorganised in a way. But I kind of left it that way because in a lot of my other writing, I do try to be more consistent. I do try to have a balance and make sure things fit together and whatever. But with House of Psychotic Woman, because it was always so subjective kind of, like, right from the outset, I just let it be what it was. I let it document my moods, you know? Because I also reviewed everything alphabetically, for the most part. So… You can’t really tell because of the first and second edition, because they’re not marcated in any way, unfortunately, which I forgot to do. I was going to put, like, an asterisk or something, like, if it was a new one added for the new edition, and I forgot. And, um… But it’s kind of, like, if you go alphabetically in the appendix, most of those movies I did watch in that order, so you can actually see drastic mood swings… from one day to the next, of, like, how open or closed I am to what a movie is telling me, you know? And so, I kind of just left it like that, so…
[Anna] And tell me about kind of the original release ten years ago. You know, you mentioned that you felt nobody would ever read it, but what was the reaction ten years ago when it came out?
[Kier-La] So, the reaction was… definitely positive. There were… I got hate mail and stuff, like anybody would. Yeah, I had, like a kind of guy stranger threatening to kill me and stuff.
[Anna] Because Mulholland Drive wasn’t included?
[Kier-La] He didn’t like how I treated my husband in the book.
[Anna] Okay, yeah, that’s the… that’s the victim of that story.
[Kier-La] And, um… And so… Yeah, so, I mean, there were things like this where I would occasionally get somebody… bothering me about stuff in it. But for the most part, the responses were overwhelmingly positive. But it was not kind of, like… I don’t know how… It’s weird because I got definitely reviewed, like, in the horror press, you know, so, like, the whole… I knew people at Fangoria and Rue Morgue and all this stuff, so, you know, of course a lot of the genre press covered it. But it didn’t get any really, like, mainstream press at all. Like, not, like, culture press type of stuff. I mean, it was really kind of stuck to the genre, but the way the book really got out was from film programmers. So, it was that… I don’t know whether I first, like, contacted film programmers I knew or if some of them contacted me, probably a bit of both. But they started doing programmes around the book where they would call it the House of Psychotic Women series. And sometimes they’d play, like, almost 30 movies, you know? Like, this one, Offscreen in Brussels, played 27 movies from the book, and they decorated their whole bar themed to the movies. So, they had, like, sculptures they had made, they had a menu, you know, like, all these things. And so, there would be film programmers, like, all over the world that did these House of Psychotic Women things. And then there was, like, in Portugal, this amazing art exhibit. These four artists, like, put together a show of, like, paintings and sound design and, like, all kinds of stuff. They had, like, this building that was going to be torn down and they just, like, transformed the whole thing into, like, a House of Psychotic Women. It was incredible, and, uh… And so, it was really through stuff like that that the book started to get more crossover interest and press and things like that, was through the film programmers. So, that was really interesting. And that’s been my motto for releasing books ever since then, is basically I never go to book stores, I go to film programmers. Because I do movie books. So, it’s easy to, like, tie in screenings and stuff.
[Anna] And exactly when did you first start realising…the impact that it was having, that fact that, you know, even years later, people were finding it, people were… you know, studying it, people were giving it to actresses, to their actors and actresses to read before going into a movie shoot, that it was kind of inspiring this whole legion of people?
[Kier-La] I would say around 2014 or 2015 was when I started having film-makers telling me or actresses telling me that their director had told them to read the book before shooting. And so, there were directors like… The director of The Untamed, you know, for instance, said that he gave it to the whole cast of the movie. And, yeah, it was, like, a bunch of people that said that to me. But I started hearing that from people in about 2014, 2015. You know, and so much of those movies are in the book now that there’s a new edition. But, so, yeah, it was interesting because, more recently, I’ve had people asking me about the influence it had on, like, people’s writing styles, you know? So, like, at first, the influence of it was really about the movies. It wasn’t really about, like, my memoir or anything like that, it was really about just categorising these movies into a subgenre together, and then people being like, “Oh, I really like that subgenre, too,” you know? “I want to make a movie like that kind of movie.” So, it was not really about me, it was really about, like… those kinds of movies, you know, that was what people were drawn to. And then just in the last few years, I would say much more I’ve been hearing from people that they were like, “You know, it was really weird, when you wrote that book “that there weren’t, you know… “people didn’t really write personal film books like that.” But now it’s very common. You know, there’s lots of books like that now. There’s lots of… You know, back when I started writing for Fangoria, you definitely could not write an article that was, like, a personal essay. But now it’s really common in Fangoria, like, on the website and stuff, you’ll see people telling stories of, like, their trauma and stuff, and how a film, a certain film, may have helped them navigate that or whatever. And so, some people have told me that, like, the book actually helped create a pathway where it was okay to, like, have yourself in the narrative, you know?
[Anna] Yeah, the book as a whole, as a piece of writing, is this, you know.. blazed this trail for this format of the autobiography through art or through film in particular. What do you think about that as a style of writing?
[Kier-La] I mean, I… So, when I first started writing it, I didn’t know if there were any other books like that. I assumed there would be. I assumed there would be and that I just didn’t know about them. And as time went on, I hadn’t found other ones, still. But there was a reviewer recently who talked about my book and she talked about James Baldwin writing a film memoir. And she mentioned a few other writers, and I was… and some of the other writers I didn’t know. So, I was just like, “Okay, so, there are other people “who have written books like this.” But often you don’t know, you know, like, if it’s not… You know, like, at some point when I was writing the book, somebody told me they thought Walker Percy’s book, The Moviegoer, was kind of like what I was doing. Which turned out to be very different, you know, but… But, yeah, I always was curious to know if there were other… if this was a style of writing that predated my book, and if… ‘Cause I thought it would be really interesting to look at those earlier examples. And so, I know now that some of them do exist, but I just haven’t read them yet because I just heard about this, like, in the last month, so…
[Anna] I was about to ask if you have read any of them or whether you have read even books or essays that have come out since House of Psychotic Women where you can kind of see, you know, maybe not just your own influence, but kind of this genre of film writing or, “I’m writing about myself, but I’m actually using myself as a conduit to write about films”?
[Kier-La] Yeah, there was… There is a girl in… A writer named Claire Cronin wrote a book called The Blue Light of the Screen…which I was actually quite upset about when it came out, because it had some stuff that was very similar to my book, but, um… And there was a guy from, uh… A friend forwarded me an article of a guy from Nova Scotia in Canada whose name I can’t remember now, and he had also written, like, a memoir that was, like… horror films specifically. So, all of these I’m mentioning are horror films specifically. And then there was somebody… I can’t remember, I think Will Fowler from the BFI forwarded me an academic book. And this was interesting because it was an academic book that was written in the style of my book. And academic, we were talking this morning, you never would have been able to write with your personal stories in an academic context before, so things have changed a lot. Because this was somebody’s book that I guess it was, like, their thesis that got published as a book… and it was that, you know, and it’s, like, in the last year.
[Anna] And it’s interesting that you bring up the academic world. Do you see House of Psychotic Women as a work of scholarship as well? And I wanted to ask you whether… the experience of writing that inspired you in any way to then set up Miskatonic, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies.
[Kier-La] Well, I… So, I started in Miskatonic before House of Psychotic Women came out. I started it in 2010. But in terms of, like, House of Psychotic Women being scholarship, I mean, I do think these things are scholarship, like, all these things. Like, a lot of the other genre film writers I know, they’re not academics, per se. They, you know, maybe went to school and didn’t finish school or didn’t get a degree or maybe didn’t go at all. But they do the same level of rigorous research that an academic does. And in many cases, I find the academics behind them, you know? So, a lot of the independent scholars… I still call them scholars, you know, and… I don’t tend to call myself a scholar, but I also don’t deny it if someone does, you know, because it’s, like, it is scholarship, you know? It is doing original research and stuff. And… So, I know that my publisher definitely didn’t want it to be scholarly. Like, I remember when Iain Banks wrote a quote for the back cover and it said something about, you know, academic analysis, my publisher was like, “Oh, can we get rid of that word ‘academic’? “It’s going to turn people off.” And Ian was like, “No, you cannot get rid of it. It must stay exactly as it is.” So, of course you honour Iain Banks and you keep it how it is, but… my publisher was just afraid of the word “academic.” He thought that people would be like, “Oh, I’m not going to be able to read this thing if it’s academic. I won’t be able to understand it,” you know? And I think also academia has become more accessible, so it isn’t… That term is not as scary as it used to be for people.
And with Miskatonic, I started it in 2010, and it… and it was largely because I knew a lot of horror scholars, both independent researchers and ones that were teaching in schools. And a lot of the ones I knew that were teaching in school were never allowed to teach the horror stuff they knew, and in some cases, they even had to teach stuff they didn’t know anything about. You know, like, where they would be given an assignment, like, “Okay, you’re in charge of Drama 101 this year,” and they’d be, like, “I don’t know anything about drama. I’ve never taught drama.” And they would have to do a crash course in it so they could teach this class. And I’m just like, “Wow, people are spending a lot of money to go to university and be taught by somebody who just, like, “googles ‘drama 101’ is teaching them”? Like, that’s bullshit, you know? But I knew that a lot of these people had core expertise, it was just not being tapped by their universities because it wasn’t taken seriously. You know, they would often propose courses that would be rejected and stuff. So, I’m like, “All right, come do your course here,” you know? So, I just, like… I had at the time when I started, I had my own venue, so I owned a venue so I didn’t have to worry about whether it was successful or not, you know? Once we started doing Miskatonic at other venues, and renting venues, then that became an issue where they were, like, very much wanting the classes to be more popular or whatever. “We need more people” and stuff. But when I first started it, it was not about that at all. It was really about just, like, giving these scholars somewhere to exercise their knowledge and then providing an open door for people to come and… and hear it, you know, for very cheap, accessible price. I think it’s, like, seven bucks, you know, or something to come and take a class.
And so, yeah, so, that’s how… that’s how Miskatonic started, and then it just grew. I think London was the first branch outside of Canada because in the UK, there’s so many genre film scholars. So many, so many. I feel like we could have Miskatonic classes for, like, the next 50 years and still not run out of teachers, you know, which is great. I feel like even, you know, in the fanzine days, the UK was always way ahead of the US. I mean in terms of, like, the quality of the writing and the scholarship that was inherent, like, even in fanzine writing here, so… And so, that just turned out that… that translated into a whole bunch of people who, like, read those fanzines and went to the cinemas and events that these people were putting on. And then those people went to school and became academics. And when we have that many people who want to do Gothic Studies, you better have a Gothic Studies department. So, I think it was eventually, like, the horror people just kind of took over because there were so many of them, you know? And so now there are, like, in the UK, so many, like, conferences and people with different niche specialities and stuff. It’s amazing. And so, that was why I knew Miskatonic London would work, you know? But, yes, that’s how that started.
[Anna] I want to go back to House of Psychotic Women specifically, and talk a little bit about the book and the contents of the films that you cover. One of the things I wanted to ask you was, what attracted you about these kind of characters? How did you even start defining your idea of a “psychotic woman” on-screen?
[Kier-La] Mm-hm. Well, yeah, the definition is hard. I feel like my book does not necessarily give a consistent definition. But it kind of started because at the video store where I worked, the customers would always return movies and say, “Every movie you recommend to me has some crazy woman in it.” And friend Sam said the same thing. He would be like, “Oh, this is a Janisse special.” You know, he’d hand me some movie that had, like… that had some crazy performance like that and he would always call it a Janisse special. And, um… And so, it was just, like, this kind of feedback from people made me think, like, “Oh, that is interesting.” Like, “I do tend to watch a lot of those types of films and I really like those films,” you know? “Why am I drawn to those films?” And… uh, you know… Most people who knew me, I mean, it was transparent to them that they were like, “Whenever you’re having a problem with this, all the movies you’re watching are about that. “Whenever you’re having a problem with this, all the things you’re watching are about that,” you know? So, it’s like, I’m finding, like, having anxiety about getting married, all the movies I’m watching are about women who don’t want to get married. And, like, you know, all these things. Like, everybody I knew noticed that I was definitely exorcising fears about real things that were happening in my life with movies. And so… Yeah, so, I knew I was doing that and I just wanted to go deeper into it, I just wanted to go, you know, “What is that?,” you know? Like, “Is that… Is that healthy? Is that helpful?” Like, “Is it is good, is it bad?” Like, I mean, “What does it mean?,” you know? “Is it, like, escaping or is it actually helping me to confront?,” you know? And, um… And so, those were the kinds of questions that I went into the book with, you know? Especially if it’s, like, if you’re having a mental imbalance of some sort, is it… is it good for you or bad for you to, like, have more of it in your orbit? Like have those kinds of influences around you, like, even more by watching non-stop movies like this?
And so, when it came to the different types of female characters in the book, um… I mean, really it was… it’s everything from a woman in my skin eating her own flesh to, you know, female necrophiliacs to, uh…you know, women who kill their own children, you know? And then, like, women who, as I mentioned in the intro, aren’t even crazy at all. Women, like, in Gaslight or whatever, which I actually forgot to put in the first edition of the book. It’s only in the second edition, which I thought was hilarious, that I forgot to put Gaslight in. But, um… But, yeah, so, it was… There were really all these different, like, types of women, and all these different levels of, like, how extreme their behaviour was because that’s also how I felt a lot of times. I felt like sometimes I was able to keep things under control fairly well and my nervousness would show up in… just small mannerisms that most people wouldn’t notice, you know? And then it would get more extreme, and eventually get to the point where I can actually relate to the characters in Possession or The Brood, you know? Or The Piano Teacher. You know, like, I mean, it… Like, my behaviour was not consistent, you know? Like, it went all over the place. I mean, like… I remember I had a friend once who said, like, “Can you mail me some speed “so I can keep up with your mood swings?” And it was just because it can really change in, like, five minutes, you know? And it’s always a constant effort to, like, try to not be derailed by my own…moods and, like, behaviour, you know, and reactivity and stuff like that. And so, the women in the film are not really one type because they do kind of follow that. Like, all the different… the many colours of female emotional disturbance, you know? And, so… But, I mean, in terms of like, some of the movies not necessarily being horror or exploitation, what would happen is that sometimes I think… I would order a film or watch a film think it was going to be horror or exploitation because something about it looked dark or creepy or something to me. So, I would watch it and…even if it wasn’t explicitly horror or exploitation, if it moved me in the same way, I would kind of just end up including it, you know? So, I mean, like, something like Trompe L’oeil that we just watched, would you call that a…? I mean, you definitely wouldn’t call it an exploitation film…
[Anna] No, absolutely not.
[Kier-La] ..but would you even call it a horror film? It’s much more like a fantastique film, in the kind of European sense, or, like… In my book, I sort of compared it to the writing of Jean Ray or something like this. You know, it’s this kind of, like, European fantastique tradition, It’s not necessarily horror. And a lot of those movies, I really [indistinct] because I feel like… the horror genre and the horror community, they kind of, like, adopt movies that no-one else cares about. Like, they’re just like, “Okay, no-one loves you, we’ll take you in the horror genre, you’re a horror movie now,” you know?
[They laugh]
[Kier-La] It’s like, “We’ll love you.” And I feel like that happens, where we just have… these associations with certain movies as horror films, because that’s… that’s the audience that has, like, embraced them or whatever, you know?
[Anna] There’s a few films that are really sort of lifted up through the book. And there’s one line where you write, which stuck with me, and it’s really simple, and you just say, “It all started with Possession.” So, I wanted to ask you specifically about Possession. When did you first discover this film and how has your relationship with it changed? Because it is…it’s a fundamental film in all of the 200 films you talk about in House of Psychotic Women, the first edition. It’s still… It’s one of the few that really stand out.
[Kier-La] Yeah. Well, I didn’t watch Possession in the ’80s when it came out. I remember the video box when I was a kid and I never watched it because everybody would tell me it was shit. And so, I didn’t see it until, like, the mid-’90s, where I was able to get the European version by mail-ordering it. And I was just, like… my mind was blown by this movie. Like, I mean, just… I think the very first time I watched it, I was just fixated on that subway scene, right? It was, like, all I could remember was that scene. Everything else kind of faded away, and I was just, like… It seemed… In my memory, that scene was, like, 20 minutes long, you know? I was like, “Oh, my God, this scene is, like, interminable. “It just goes on and on and on. She just doesn’t stop screaming. “This is amazing,” you know? And then I watched it again, and, you know, a lot of the rest of the movie started to fill in for me. I remember, at one point, I timed the subway scene and it was only, like, two minutes or something.
But that is the impression I think a lot of people have from it. You know, it just feels like it’s this never-ending scene that exists in its own world or something. But I think it was like a puzzle to me, you know, like, and so, I just kept watching it and kept watching it. And I still wouldn’t say I understand it completely, you know? I feel this I understand this tiny part of it, but it’s not even the same part that, like, Andrzej Żuławski understands or Daniel Bird, who was, like, the main champion in the English language of Andrzej Żuławski’s films. Like, how I write about Possession is not at all how he would write about Possession. He sees different things in it. There are different things that are important to him about it, you know? Whereas, for me, it was, like, all of the emotion and stuff was really important, and the stuff about identity and… And, yeah, so, it’s just… It was an important movie to me because…it was so emotional, but I also love that…the husband…wants to solve that mystery. You know, he wants to go into the madness with her. And that was really appealing to me, too, that it was like, you can actually just go as crazy as you want and the right person will still try to find you, you know? There was something reassuring about that, you know? Because I felt like… I felt like so many relationships and so many friendships and all these things are stifled by the fact that people hold things in, you know, and they don’t express how they feel. And of course… we’re taught societally, that you can’t just be like, “Waah!,” you know? Like, you can’t just, like, melt down in public or scream or whatever. Like, people just don’t want to have anything to do with you, you know? Um, and…you know.
But I found that movie, like, incredibly romantic, even though I think all the men are assholes in it. But I still liked that… You know, and the more I watch it, the more I think that him trying to solve Anna’s problem was really about him and it’s not really about him understanding her. It’s about his own ego or whatever. But it was, like… But when I first saw it, I saw it as this, like, very romantic thing where you could be as crazy as you wanted and somebody would still love you, you know? And, um… And, so, yeah, there was just all kinds of things that I got out of that film, and it was just… I just think that, you know… I have it in the same chapter, I think, with, like, The Brood, which is think is such a similar movie to Possession. Like, they both came out the same year and they’re both about divorces, like, real divorces. And they’re both…they both have this woman, like, giving birth to weird…a creature, an undescribed creature… like, that are, like, their rage… that kill for them, and stuff like that. I mean, both movies were really weirdly similar, you know?
[Anna] Are there any other films from House of Psychotic Women that have, in a similar sense as Possession or The Brood, that have sort of stayed with you over the years, that you kind of can’t really shed?
[Kier-La] Yeah. I mean, The Piano Teacher is one. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is one. Um… Oh, my God… The Mafu Cage. Um…
[Anna] And I wonder if, uh… You mentioned that the horror genre adopts, sometimes, these orphan movies and, you know, decides to give them another life. Do you ever…? Have you ever felt? Because a lot of these films, and I’m talking both personally here and in general, a lot of these films have been, you know, resurfaced, back on the festival circuit, written about because of the book and because of you and your work. Do you ever feel protective of the films that you’ve helped resurface in this way?
[Kier-La] I mean, I don’t know if I feel as protective any more. I mean, I definitely… Because the thing is, like, a movie like Possession, I’m like actually sick of watching Possession now. Like, I have now hit the wall with Possession, you know? And, so, now I’m like, “Okay, everybody else can write about Possession now. It’s fine.” I still feel slightly protective of them off the page, I think. Just because… it really was… Possession still had champions, you know? Like, it had Daniel Bird and it had Eyeball magazine. Stephen Thrower’s magazine was hugely important to those films, getting an audience, you know? So, it’s, like… In North America, I would say my book…tour, you know, may have had more to do with it. But in the UK, I feel like Eyeball laid that groundwork already for a movie like Possession. But, like, The Mafu Cage I felt more protective of because it was something that I had rented from a store, that I’d gotten in, like, you know, the big VHS box, and it just had this crazy cover… of, like, Carol Kane painted up, you know, behind a cage with, like, a dead woman hanging in her arms and stuff, and I was, “What is this movie?” And so, I rented it, and I just, like, loved it, but, like, no-one else I knew either had ever seen it, ever heard of it, or would even watch it on my recommendation, you know? Like, no-one would watch it, and… And I remember, before House of Psychotic Women came out, it had come out on DVD because I remember watching it again on DVD when I was writing about it. So, somebody did release it. So, out there somewhere it did have a champion that thought, “This movie should get a release.” But, like, nobody bought that DVD. Like, it didn’t do anything, you know?
But when my book came out, and tour, The Mafu Cage was one of the movies that played in a lot of the places that nobody had seen. And people were just like, “Wow,” you know? I remember somebody afterwards, like, came up to me and said they wanted to look into buying the rights to the play it was based on. so they could, like, make a theatrical play of it again or something. Yeah, people just thought it was great. And, you know, so that one, I think I’m a bit more protective of just because I still feel like it doesn’t totally have the full appreciation that it should. And also Karen Arthur, who made it, I think deserves to get a lot more attention because she’s actually made a lot of idiosyncratic and amazing films. There’s one I want to talk about that’s not in my book, but I’ve got to mention it just because it’s so good. It’s this movie called Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story, and it’s made-for-TV movie she made about Theresa Saldana, who was an actress that got stabbed, like, 30 times or something in broad daylight by a crazy fan. And so, Karen Arthur made the movie and she got Theresa Saldana to play herself in the movie. And so, she’s going through this shit where she’s, like, getting… The scene where she gets stabbed in the street is, like, terrifying. It’s, like, one of the most disturbing… Like, it just affected me deeply, you know? And just the fact that she is going through this again and dramatising it for this movie is crazy. So, yeah, it’s on YouTube. You can find it. Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story. But it’s the same woman who made The Mafu Cage.
[Anna] Karen Arthur, yeah. And I wanted to ask you about the choice to revisit the book. What made you… I want to ask two questions. When did you decide to start working on a new edition of House of Psychotic Women? What urged you to do that? And how did you start picking out the 100 extra films to add to this canon that you’d built?
[Kier-La] Well, I started thinking about it, I think, like, two years ago. Like, I think it was, like, right before the pandemic I brought up the idea to the publisher of, like, “What about doing a 10th anniversary?” And it wasn’t because it was, like, “Oh, the book’s ten years old, let’s milk it and make a new edition.” It was more that in the last ten years there really had been so many more movies made that fit this kind of…subgenre, if you want to call it that. But there were also…movies made by people who had been inspired by the book to some extent. And I found that really interesting, and I kind of wanted to… I kind of wanted to give that to those people, in a sense. Like, I wanted to have… You know, if they were inspired by the book in some way, I wanted them to then see their own movie in the book, you know? And… But then, also, there were also, like, a lot more women making these kinds of films in the last ten years. And so, I wanted to recognise that also. So, I felt like there were a bunch of reasons to make a new edition, and not just because it was an anniversary. That was just kind of, like, the excuse for the timing. But I got to say, it was so fun to put together compared to the first one, because when I started contacting people for images and stuff the first time around, I’d be like, “Oh, I wrote about your movie in my book that I’m putting out. “Can I have a picture?,” and they’d be like, “Wait, what is this book? I don’t know. Who’s the publisher? How many copies are going to be printed?” And then this time around, I’d contact people and they’d be like, “Oh, my God, that would be so amazing! Here’s a million pictures!” And even, like, people like Osgood Perkins you know, who made, like, Blackcoat’s Daughter, was like, “Oh, yes, I’m a big fan of the book. I’d love to give you a picture.” And I was just like, “Wow, this is amazing”, because it was like… it was like pulling teeth trying to get pictures the first time and now people wanted to be a part of this project, you know?
Because I feel like now it’s a project… I feel like it’s a project that’s, like, bigger than me. It has its own thing, you know, because there’s, like, people who… who interpret the films… You know, there’s people who have, like, certain types of films they consider Psychotic Woman films more than other types of films. They have their own kind of categorisation. But then also, like, as I mentioned in the preface, too, it’s like…the book is really subjective. It’s my memoir. So, that means it is coming from a really particular perspective. And so, there is actually room for…other perspectives writing about these films and writing from their perspective, you know, and writing about films that kind of, like…what they’re in the mood to watch that day, or things that kind of automatically appeal to them that might be things I didn’t think of or whatever, you know. So, I’m kind of hoping now that it’s got a ten-year edition, that I can kind of retire from doing stuff on it and then, you know, maybe other people can do stuff.
[Anna] And what do you think about, you know, just the sheer number, the fact that you can add 100 new films for the anniversary edition? What do you think it says about the state of genre, that there’s so many more movies that kind of fit…?
[Kier-La] There were more than 100. There was only 100 I had time to write about. I have another… I have a list of 100 more that I didn’t have time to include. But I think that… I mean, it definitely… Part of it is definitely… I think a lot of people think this is, like, a new thing, like, a new phase of genre or something. It’s like, “No, it’s always been like that.” The difference… Like, horror films have always been…really introspective and stuff, you know? So… the difference is that mainstream press and mainstream producers are paying attention to the genre more, and also more, like, indie…producers and directors that wouldn’t normally consider themselves horror people, you know, are seeing… the… all the ways you can manoeuvre within the genre, you know, to be able to talk about things in an interesting way, you know? And so, you get the A24-type movies. You know, everybody calls them elevated movies or whatever, and it’s like, that term was invented by sales agents only to sell things. It doesn’t actually mean anything. And it doesn’t… it doesn’t offend me, though, either, because it’s literally just a sales term. It is a sales term made up for salespeople and the press started using it. And then, unfortunately, people who don’t know that much about horror, think it’s a thing, that it’s a type of horror film. It’s not a type of horror film at all. It’s literally any horror film that a sales agent wants to sell to somebody who doesn’t like horror films.
But these types of movies, I think, have always existed. It’s just that I think there’s more money being put into them now, more producers are willing to let somebody make a really personal genre film, you know? And… You know, like, even, you know, like… I’ve used this example before, but, like, a director, like Joe Swanberg, you know, who you would not consider a horror director but he sort of started doing his, like, indie films on the festival circuit when Ti West started doing his indie films. So, they became friends, kind of knew each other because they’re travelling around the same time. And Joe Swanberg kind of saw the audience reaction to Ti West’s films and was just like, “Wow, I would love to make a film that the audience would respond to in that way,” you know? And so, he started making movies that, unfortunately, got called mumblecore by the press, and everybody hated that term, but, you know, started making these films that were experimenting with horror, but had a lot of characterisation and a lot of dialogue and a lot of just…you know, in an apartment or in a cabin or whatever, like, talking for long periods of time.
And, you know, so, he wanted to make these kind of movies and you ended up having this really weird hybrid type of movie that existed for a little while because of this. Because it wasn’t just him, it was also, like, the Duplass Brothers and other people that made indie films started, like, trying to do these things. And so, I think that happens sometimes, like, where…other directors and press… I think a lot of it is fed by the press, too, you know? Because, like, when I started going to genre film festivals, the press that went to them was genre press, you know, and you could, occasionally, by coaxing with, like, hotel and flights and everything. You could maybe get a Variety reporter there or something, you know? Or if you had a genre-friendly one, Dennis Harvey, who used to write for Variety – I don’t know, maybe he still does – would come to Fantasia and cover Fantasia and stuff like that. So, you could sometimes have these allies in the more mainstream press, but it was hard. It was mostly genre press that was coming.
And then I would say around 2010 or so, that switched where, all of a sudden… And I wonder how much the Fantasia Festival Frontières Market had something to do with that. But it was, like, all of a sudden the mainstream studios, the mainstream press, they just descended upon the genre festivals. All of a sudden, they were watching movies they never would have given the time of day to a year before. Meeting, you know, all kinds of young, up-and-coming film-makers, and totally changed the genre, you know, because it was, like, all of a sudden, the mainstream press was writing about stuff which makes more mainstream producers take notice, you know? And so, then it seems like, yes, there’s, like, more of this stuff being made. But I still honestly feel the horror genre has always made these kinds of movies. I think there’s nothing new about it. It’s just that there’s more people doing it now, I think.
[Anna] And you mentioned it offhandedly earlier that there’s, for this new edition, there’s more female film-makers making horror movies and making more movies that have this type of psychotic protagonist. Do you attribute that to anything in particular?
[Kier-La] I mean, I think that because of…just in the last ten years, women have been given more opportunities to make films, you know? And I would say definitely in the last three… no, last five years, you know, since #MeToo and Time’s Up and all this kind of stuff, there’s, like, incentives for people to, like, hire women directors and create opportunities for women. And my hope is that…we learn some things and that stays, you know? You know, that hopefully we don’t need those incentives forever because, you know, I think in some ways the incentives are good because they make the opportunities, you know? It’s, like, nobody’s going to be able to tell how good a director you are if you never have that opportunity. So, at least it is creating that. And so, you just hope that the result is that this whole wealth of work that’s being created because of these incentives will have an impact when people, like, stop caring about having incentives like that, you know?
But I think that… Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, there’s so many… creative women writers, directors, producers, cinematographers, everything…that I know that get so frustrated, you know, because they’re literally, like, they’ll make a film… Like, somebody like Alice Lowe makes Prevenge, which is a well-received film everywhere, and it takes her forever to get funding to make another movie, whereas, like, some guy can make a music video and then get to direct Star Wars after that or something. That’s an exaggeration, I guess. But, you know, like, with this kind of thing, you know, it’s kind of like… You know, there’s a lot of women I know who’ve made breakout films and stuff like that. The work that they’re being given is in television. You know, they’re directing episode of, like, The Haunting of Hill House or Bly Manor or whatever, or, you know, like, all these horror shows. Which is so great, you know, because there’s a lot of great horror shows being made, but there’s still obviously kind of, like, a limit happening in terms of the opportunities that are being given to women versus men. I mean, thankfully they’re working and they’re getting work, but… But, yeah, I just think, like, in the last ten years, there have been… You know, somebody took a chance and made a movie with a woman director, and it’s like, “If you want to make any kind of film, what kind of film would you make?” And it’s like, “I would like to make a film about a woman who’s really frustrated and wants to kill everybody,” you know? And… So, you get these kinds of films… that fit in my book.
[Indistinct]
[Anna] But I did want to ask you, have you ever considered, now that you’ve also become a film-maker and made Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. It’s an incredible documentary about folk horror, for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Have you ever felt temped about adapting House of Psychotic Women yourself into a film?
[Kier-La] I mean, I did pitch it as a TV series with a producer, Andy Starke, who did a bunch of Ben Wheatley’s films, and so, Ben Wheatley was supposed to executive product it and stuff, but it wasn’t really for me to write. It was more like I would be a producer on it and I would be a consultant for the writer. But I didn’t have, you know, I didn’t have television writing experience or any narrative writing experience at all, you know? So, even though it’s based on a non-fiction book, so many elements would obviously have to be dramatised and fictionalised and stuff. But I just didn’t have any experience in that, so I couldn’t write it myself. So, I was kind of at the mercy of, like, if other people wanted to do it, and…it just kept falling apart, you know? There was, like, a couple of companies that optioned it for a bit and didn’t do anything with it. And so, I think it’s dead now. And, yeah, in terms of, like, me actually directing narrative, I mean, the problem is I have a really bad temper and so, I can’t be with people. Like, I can’t be a director on a set. You’d be reading in the tabloids about my toxic set that I made. You know, firing guns or something crazy that I would do, I don’t know. But it’s like… Like, I feel like my temper would be a really, really bad thing with actors and stuff, you know? And, um… So, I do have some good friends who were like, you know, “Come on, you could do it,” and I was like, “Okay, if there’s, like, one actor.” So, then we started looking at this, like, adapting a book I really wanted to do where it was, like, a woman and a bear. And they were like, “Okay, the bear is really expensive,” you know? The bear is, like, five actors. So, I think that’s not going to happen ’cause somebody else bought the rights to the book and I couldn’t get it anyway.
But, yeah, I was just, like, I don’t know if I could, you know, because that aspect of it is really daunting to me. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched was made pretty much alone in my room, you know? It was, like, I would assign… You know, some of the interviews I did myself, if the people were in the same place as me, but a lot of them I assigned camera-people that lived locally to that person. They would send me the footage, I would be editing at home. You know, there was a lot of free space, for me to take time for things, depending on what my moods were. You know, like, I was never in a… never forced to be in a state where I am in a stressful situation, I have to make a decision right now, all those people are waiting for me to make my decision, you know, whatever. So, it was like I was able to avoid a lot of the stress that people have when making films. So, uh… But, I mean, if someone wanted to make House of Psychotic Women, I think at first I was really resistant to the idea, of just, like, selling it to someone to make because I thought I would hate it. But now I’m just like, well, you know, I tried to do it my way and people didn’t really want to do it, so, if someone wanted to just buy it and make it and I would have to just, like, suffer with their bad music choices and stuff, then, you know, I guess I would just do that.
[Anna] I want to kind of, you know, very lightly touch on all the stuff that you’ve done. All the programming, film-making, writing. Distribution as well. Is there any of the… any of the projects, or the… I kind of hate this word because it’s a very businessy word, but all the verticals of the work that you’ve done so far, is there any one particular thing that you find most satisfying?
[Kier-La] I think I really… I really love putting the box-sets together for Severin. And I like editing books, like the anthologies that I did. I published a book called Satanic Panic… and one… called Yuletide Terror, about Christmas horror, and one about, um… Well, I didn’t… I published the book that Samm Deighan did of Lost Girls, the Jean Rollin book, which I still did tons of work on, but… I really liked putting together those projects, and I feel like the box-sets I’ve done for Severin Films, it’s really a similar process. You know, you’re sort of, like, picking people and getting them to work on stuff, and, you know, you can pay them money, which is nice. Working with artists and just, like, you know, just making it exactly… picking at it until it’s exactly how you want, you know? And yet feeling like there’s a support system there. Like, I feel like when you do an anthology book, because you’re not writing the whole book, usually I would write one chapter and then everybody else will write a chapter. And so, it takes some of the burden off of… The books don’t drag out as long because it’s like, if everybody has a year to write their essay and then, in a year and a half, you can have a book, you know? And, yeah, and then the same with the Severin box-sets I’ve done. I did the folk horror box set, the House of Psychotic Women one. I did a couple other ones I’m working on that I can’t announce. But, yeah, I find those really satisfying because you’re just kind of, like, putting pieces together, you know? You’re curating and putting pieces together, but it’s very, like, low-stress.
[Anna] How important…? I find this a very programming-specific question because you put so much work into putting together a programme – finding the films, finding the guests, producing a festival or an event. There’s so much invisible work that goes into putting on events and festivals like this, that, when everything goes right, you never see that work. You never really see behind the curtain. You only see when something goes wrong and people start complaining. But was there an interest for you with, perhaps with House of Psychotic Women or the box-sets or books that you edited and published. Was there an impetus to kind of have something tangible, like a physical thing?
[Kier-La] Yes, absolutely. Because, yeah, when you’re programming, it’s very hard to capture…what you did, you know? And I remember applying for a job once, it was, like, 2014. So, I mean, it was, like, less than ten years ago. I was applying for this job in Toronto, and I gave them my CV, and they just were like…”If you’ve done all these things, how come I’ve never heard of you?” But it was like they didn’t believe me that I had done all that stuff, and there was kind of no way to prove that I had done all these things. Like, when you’re programming and coordinating events, all the events I did for the Alamo Drafthouse, it would just be the Alamo Drafthouse that was credited for things. Not the individual people who did all the stuff. I mean, now they finally have a page on Fantastic Fest’s website that lists the staff and their roles, but that only happened in the last few years. So, there was so much unseen labour that happened there. And some of the stuff I did was crazy. Like, I was in charge of some major projects, but there was, like, no way to prove it, you know? And so, then I’d have my CV and people just wouldn’t even believe that I did those things, you know? And so, yes, when it comes to doing books, box-sets and all these things, there is something that is like a relief that there’s, like, a thing you can hold in your hand and be like, “I made that,” you know? Yeah.
[Anna] And kind of as a follow up to that, how important is it for you to… to have your work, especially that kind of… legacy work with the programming stuff or, you know, projects that maybe you’ve established and then other people have taken on, how important is it for you to have that documented for yourself and have that properly credited?
[Kier-La] I mean, it’s important for me to be credited, but not enough that I have actually done it or, like, kept documentation properly. My own archive-keeping for myself is terrible considering I generally have a collector mentality. And so, I will collect all kinds of things related to other people’s careers and I have very little, you know, stuff from my own because I just… I don’t know, I always end up moving and then I throw it out or whatever. But I do get really mad when I’m not credited for something I did. So, I do have to get better about that. I mean, like, it’s, like… One of the things, like… I always tell writers and stuff, for instance, is, like, if you write for magazines and you write whatever, it’s, like, you have to keep… Like, if it’s for an online magazine, like, you need to make your own website and keep all your articles and stuff because any day, they could just stop doing their website and take it down, and then all your writing will be lost, you know? And…yeah.
[Anna] Considering and, you know, thinking of… starting up a conversation here, but I wanted to ask you, with this tour in particular, I know it’s kicking off here, but all of the activity that’s been surrounding the 10th anniversary of the book, the new edition. What have been some of the most surprising or perhaps moving parts of this whole experience, of [indistinct] the book, talking about it again?
[Kier-La] Yeah. I mean… I don’t know, I feel like the whole thing has been really moving to me. The whole thing is… I mean, any time you make any project and people come up and tell you they like it…is… Like, I never know what to say, but I… I feel it a lot, you know? And so, I feel like this 10th anniversary has been a lot of that because I feel like when I was just selling it, going around the first time, people often hadn’t read it yet or whatever, so people are kind of like, “Oh, whatever. I’ll just check out this book, I guess,” you know? But now it’s much more, like, the people interacting with me on this 10th anniversary when a lot of them have read the book already, and so… so, I feel like there’s all this, like, love coming at me that’s really nice. And especially because, you know, when you write something, like, that personal, it is really good to get that back, you know, because you feel like you give a lot of yourself telling a story that way. And so, that’s always… I don’t know, I mean, it was really moving, for instance, at the Fantasia Film Festival, they gave me an award, and that was the first festival I ever went to, you know? Like, when I first started my festival and I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know anybody. Like, most of my film festival friends and stuff like that, I met that year and that festival, you know, the first time I went. And so, then it was kind of, like, this weird thing getting invited. You know, when Mitch Davis asked if he could give me an award at the festival…and he was just like, “Oh, we want to give you this such-and such-award.” And I was just like, “That’s the same award that Ted Kotcheff got,” you know? Like, I was like, “How is that possible?” And, uh… But it was just incredibly moving to me that…this friend, Mitch Davis, had basically been the one to legitimise my career, giving me those first early connections, you know? Like, I would not have had it… It probably would have just been that one year playing illegal VHS tapes, you know, if it hadn’t been for him. So, to be back there after all that time, I guess, you know, it was, like, almost 25 years later, you know, and be celebrated as, like, a professional at the festival where I was just, like, a kid who didn’t know anything, you know, that was great.
[Anna] To wrap up the House of Psychotic Women conversation, do you feel done with that book, with that project, at this point, or can we expect a 20th anniversary edition?
[Kier-La] I definitely feel done with it. I’m so… I’m like, “Stick a fork in it,” you know? I mean, like, I alluded to another possible edition in the preface, mostly because I felt like, you know, you could make another edition that doesn’t have the horror/exploitation requirement. That could just be…any, you know? But I think that requires, like, 600 more movies being in the book, you know? So, is that something I want to do? I don’t know. I mean, I really… I have a lot of interests. I want to do other things, you know? So, yeah. This is the last hurrah, I think, for House of Psychotic Women.
[Anna] Kier-La, thank you. I mean, thank you so much for all of the work that you’ve done, in general, in your whole career. And specifically, thank you for House of Psychotic Women, both personally, and I think not just everyone in this room, but everyone who’s read it over the past ten years and has come to all the screenings. So, thank you again for this conversation.
[Kier-La] Thank you for interviewing me. Thank you guys for being here.
Buy House of Psychotic Women from FAB Press here.
Buy Severin Films’ House of Psychotic Women Rarities Collection blu-ray box set here.
Visit the House of Psychotic Women website here.
Visit Kier-La Janisse’s personal website here.
Visit Kier-La’s own small press publisher, Spectacular Optical, here.