She is Conann (2023) is a fantasy romp through barbarism, gore and spitty lesbian snogs. It reminds me of a sort of queer love child of Holy Motors (2012)and Highlander (1986). Surreal! Time Jumps! Episodic! Grotesque characters on a journey towards the inevitable! It is shot primarily in black and white, with flashes of technicolour in moments of emotional intimacy, at the flash of a gunshot, or bloodied frenzy. Director Bertrand Mandico immerses the audience in a stunningly designed series of worlds, shunning CGI for old-school, low-fi prop making, eerie prosthetics and lusciously dressed sound stages – hefty budget lines for latex, fake blood and foil. The moment horns emerge out of Conann’s nipples, piercing the skin and erupting like seedlings made me shudder and somehow my mouth wet. We meet Conann at different ages of her life, each played by a different actor and each world has a different aesthetic feel, with different (sexy) costume languages to match. The script is haunting (and very quotable), poetic and disgusting in equal measure. Moments in the film have stuck in me, heavy, violent, confronting.
All things considered, you seem ripe
We meet Conann at 15 – a slim, doe-eyed, beautiful, white girl who seems to have no agency in anything that happens to her. She’s captured by barbarians, and held in an (unlocked) cage… When Rainer (Elina Löwensohn) tells her to, she opens her cage door and simply walks out and poisons everyone. I find the early iterations of Conann hard to feel empathy for or with, she’s a blushing young girl and her actions unfold before her, guided by the hands of Rainer or others around her. She is a victim of external forces! Blindly enacting brutal violence as she goes! We don’t see her scheming, desiring, thinking or transgressing. There’s an interesting passivity to the context of her shoving a sword down another woman’s throat, it dripping with guts and bile as she pulls it out. What agency can and does she have to fall or not fall into violence when that is all she has known? Another example of a pretty, femme, white woman refusing responsibility for her own story?
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
Over iterations she evolves from beautiful vessel to agent of her own death. Each time she evolves, she violently kills the younger version of herself – and there’s something irresistible about this – it feels easy to recognise the impulse to slay the version of you that was not strong enough, brave enough, good enough. Younger Conann doesn’t fight hard – why would you, when standing in front of an older, sexier, harder, well-dressed version of yourself? Yes, let me become her. But underneath the new costume and despite the new actor, there is still a strong sense of fatalism and self-obsession that follows the character, her worlds feel small and the camera rarely lets us zoom out. She’s stuck in these sound stages where others enter as fodder for her to kill – like putting mice in a snake tank.
You’re disgusting!
The film’s POV is often Rainer’s – in a pivotal shift, we’re told Conann has many years of bliss in the Bronx with her lover, but we don’t see that. We rejoin Conann’s story only when Rainer reappears. Rainer acts as guide, and narrator, a Faustian hellhound at the heels of Conann and audience. To see the film as Rainer’s story paints an emotive journey – he’s with us, portrayed by the same actor – from start to finish, and we’re offered flashes of genuine vulnerability, for example his disappointment that Conann can’t see his photographs as art, longing for her recognition and approval. We meet Rainer’s half sister – a ghoulish figure with a mic – an unexpected hint towards a past, a childhood. Conann is marketed as a queer film and Rainer is in many ways trans coded – uses he/him pronouns and is played by a female actor with a noticeably femme voice; in one moment he is thrilled to grow breasts, marking his transition to barbarian. He is also ostracised, derided and insulted consistently, his desire for closeness is rejected and he makes sneaky moves to steal Conann from the beautiful cis girlfriend – he is the evil demon that brings hell wherever he goes, his vulgar, inhuman face of a dog frequently fills the frame. His moments of vulnerability and pain – seen often only by the audience – bring him no empathy or kinship in his world. Only in death he discovers he has a heart, something the audience could feel long before he discovered its presence. It’s hard to watch. At times it feels like that often troped and relentless media portrayal of gender queer people as othered, unloved and unrecognised by those closest to them. But the film does give him a lot of time and space, we sit with him a lot, and there’s depth to his brilliant characterisation by Löwensohn – there’s a case to be made this is his film.
Blessed are the necrophiliacs never betrayed by their love
Another queer element of the film is the plentiful lesbian snogging – and the love between Conann & Sanja. They sign away their all their memories so they can be together outside of hell’s grasp (relationship goals?). The snogs – sometimes between Conann and her older/younger self – are often in the same grotesque language as puking blood, disembodied limbs – in one there’s a close-up of two tongues sloppy and sliding over each other. In the film, love is swiftly followed by betrayal, intimacy with cruelty (usually some variant of brutal murder of the lover). In the world of Conann, things are bad and get worse. In the queer canon, this is a well-trodden path – lesbians having a terrible time, someone watches the woman she loves die horribly. Here we get to see traumas march Conann towards ever more gruesome acts of violence, seemingly immune to the emotional impact of it all, she redirects that grief into making sure that everyone else feels a hell of a lot worse than she should. There’s something (not just the hair) that reminds me of the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror. If inside you there are two wolves, one is Conann and one is San Junipero, choose (at your peril) which to feed.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
Perhaps the time has come to disobey your mother, Conann
The film is rich in fluids – projectile vomiting huge quantities of blood, saliva dripping from cannibal mouths, teeth crunching down on ribs and flesh, milky gloop lacquering bodies, clots and guts sticking to freshly used swords. Even in black and white, Mandico lets us into the visceral pleasure/pain of cruelty. In many moments of violence, Conann has no regrets, few thoughts, a total disconnect from victim and context that allows us into the world of someone acting – on impulse? On desire? Or maybe just acting, just doing because she can, unrestricted by self control. Maybe that’s what got my heart rate up – what a fucking thrill it must be to just do. This ‘freedom’ is contrasted with the bookends of the film – Conann in hell, forced to eternally re-remember, re-find herself, re-play her story before forgetting and starting all over again. We see the horror and pain of re-meeting the worst parts of yourself, the grief of possibility as your actions are laid bare in front of you, unchanged, unflinching.
“A 14 berry coulis”
She is Conann is a rich, unpleasant, thrilling watch – it asks us to look at the parts of us we hope aren’t there and wouldn’t put on show. But a few days later, the images that still linger with me come from the very end of the film where the work speaks to something quite unexpected. The eldest Conann gathers a group of artists and tells them that she’s going to leave them her huge fortune – they’ll be set for life! They’ll be free to make the most radical art ever! They’ll finally have power and resource! But they have to eat her first. We watch them eat every last toe and pubic hair. The camerawork is sickening, the jewels stuffed into her eyeballs glisten, but it starkly brought me back to the real world conversations happening across the arts – who should artists or festivals accept or seek funding from (Baillie Gifford?) If you were offered power and resource to enact the change you make work about – would you take it, no matter where it came from? What makes a “consumable barbarian?”
LRG
Weird Weekend present She Is Conann on Friday 31st May, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
In the midst of dry ice, spotlights and close-ups, I love to see a moment of cheap DIY glam. Out of the sparkles appears Conann, with soulful tired eyes, grey-blonde hair with a slick of grease running through it, draped in the finest of garments, an emergency blanket.
It’s a 99p camp moment that literally saves you, warms you, soothes you and makes you glow. Something so affordable and life-saving that unfurls out of a drug baggy in a geometric tiled pattern. An airy ‘quilted’ blanket that glistens. God, I love emergency blankets. It’s a cheap wearable disco ball that prevents you from dying. It’s easy, bargain basement, eternal life vibes. But it’s also so gaybar disco ball, eyes-wide-open HD, and genius lighting design. I knew I loved these little lifesavers, but I really love to see them in a glamorous, big-ish budget film.
Soon after, we meet Rainer in a halloween costume mask. You could probably find a similar mask at any local costume shop, but here it is framed with a wig, and once again sparkles. And from within this scary halloween dog mask comes a sultry French accent…now that’s what I call camp.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
I love that I could recreate these looks at home. I could be ‘on set’ just messing about with cheap fun finds from local shops. I could be there; it’s comforting, it’s attainable. It gives school play but with a full grown-up cast and way better lighting and acting. It’s polished camp. But not overly polished. If it was polished much more I wouldn’t like it. It sits in the right place on the scale from DIY to pro. I always want a bit of both and here I’ve got it.
The film also sits in a good place between gross and beautiful. Another place I always want to be in. It’s challenging at times, there are scenes of gore and blood. BUT, it’s not trying to fully immerse you in the reality of that violence, viewers are given space to dip in and out. You know it’s dress-up. There’s room to put your own context on it and be self-reflective, at least I think so.
I get the idea of grease, filth and dirty-water-wet in the set and costume design. But, I know some real nice sleek hair gel has gone into it, some fabulous loose powder, and some meticulously made handicrafts. Albeit, with some real human-made spit.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
And then we have the sticky itchy SFX make up, which I personally hate the feeling of…ew. And, even though the make-up does not convince me that there is ‘real blood,’ I feel the realness of that gloopy fake blood and latex and scar-fluid on my face. It’s a really tactile icky instant response. And can you believe that people choose to put this stuff on their face for ‘fun’ or ‘art’? I am one those people. But the itchy sticky textures are paired with soft Super-8-ish haze and glittery water droplets. It adds to the horror, and the camp. It’s a lot, in the best way.
The set has this sense of huge vast space with lakes and clouds… I wanna be on set. I want to explore. It feels staged and planned and theatrical, but it does not feel contained. But, at the same time, the familiar references of the emergency blanket or party shop make it feel so nearby. It’s fantastical but feels ‘real’. I don’t mean real as in the story seems realistic, I mean that it feels so camp that it could be happening in my local gaybar… it’s quite Bonjour (RIP).
It’s camp enough that I don’t feel overwhelmed by the horror n gore; that feels especially important right now. I don’t want realism, I rarely want realism actually. I want a place to explore that is manageable, controllable and fits into a separate filing cabinet in my brain to the unorganised, ever-growing section of ‘real horrors’. When we witness Conann’s violent culling of everyone everywhere… I can hear the foley of someone stabbing a big bit of fruit or something else silly and squishy.
There’s a lot of moments where the third wall is broken and actors look directly into the camera. I like them, it’s fun. These are nice little reminders that this feeling I’m getting of being involved in the film was intentional. I already knew the third wall was broken, but these moments are a cheeky nod to it.
And towards the end when we get all the artists walking through into the film. It’s really real. We’re in it. It’s immersive in a similar way to a video game at times. It feels a bit ‘choose your own path’. Which character am I? Damn, and when all the artists are scrounging at the remains of a rotting corpse…honestly…if you know, you know.
Watching She Is Conann makes me want to make films again. I’m inspired by how a film can be so fun and so gay while also prompting self-reflection. I’d like to watch it again on the big screen, in the company of friends, with a big glass of wine.
Nat Lall
Weird Weekend present She Is Conann on Friday 31st May, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Nat Lall is a Glasgow-based film curator, known for their work with the Scottish Queer International Film Festival. Nat is also a filmmaker and DJ. Notable films include Pink Excavation (2018) and their musical alias is DJ FLUFFIE.
Where exactly does the Conann project come from? Is it a film, a play, or a hybrid piece of work?
I used theatre’s soil to make it grow. I had been circling the subject for a while. When I say the subject, it’s mostly the succubi, the demonic pacts – I had amassed a lot of notes about them, trying to give them shape. At the same time, Philippe Quesne, who was directing the Théâtre des Amandiers, suggested that I put on a show linked to cinema. And it came about like that, by spontaneously answering him, “If I do a project for the theatre, it will be a female-led Conan the Barbarian!” He was amused, and invited me to come and work at the theatre to start developing the project, to build the story. In my mind, this show was to be the genesis of She Is Conann. It included projections, a double director, trying to edit the film – it was a “preparatory show”. The Conann antechamber.
But the show didn’t happen?
No, it was due for production in 2020, in the midst of COVID restrictions, after which Philippe Quesne left the theatre. I still went through with the show, as we had imagined it, and I “filmed” it at the Amandiers. It’s a film that already has its title, La Deviante, which I will show later. There are also two other short films, excrescences of She Is Conann – We Barbarians, a virtual reality film about the damnation of actresses, and Rainer, a Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley.
We Barbarians (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
So She Is Connan isn’t a documentation from Les Amandiers?
No, indeed, it’s a film imagined for the cinema, nourished by the reflection of the preparatory show. I wrote the script in parallel with the experience at Les Amandiers, and shot it in Luxembourg in an old steel factory that was being dismantled. A really inspiring place, where metal was made (fittingly, for Conann), a huge territory (crossing it takes over an hour), with a capacity to accommodate incredible scenery. Each plot presented an imaginary of the film. I could contain all the sets I needed to make – here, my vision of 1998 New York, there, the outrageously large temple, elsewhere, the battlefields with a surreal checkerboard or the small lake of another world. The sunken bunker was also present – the field of possibilities was infinite. At the Amandiers, we had built fake mountains. I had them brought to Luxembourg to complete the picture.
Christa Théret as Conann in She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
Nevertheless, do you think She Is Conann still keeps, at least in its very first part, a trace of this theatre experience?
The Hell part, indeed, has kept a theatricality, with the chrome lodge – a representation of the underworld inherited from the opera and the studio. And the character played by Françoise Brion, a dead woman who arrives in this other world, condemned to recover her memory and relive the atrocities she committed. That is her damnation, to remember the barbarian she was – the cruellest show there is, that of the mirror of the soul. The dead woman is confronted with her doppelgänger, the barbarian queen, on her throne. And if the introduction evokes the theatre, it mainly refers to a forgotten part of French cinema, where the Faustian pact, the devilishness were represented in an omnipresent way, whether with René Clair’s Beauty and the Devil, Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du Soir or, of course, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. I wanted to revisit a neglected yet captivating genre.
The film has something operatic about it.
At the very beginning, I wrote songs for the play, something along the lines of a rock or pop opera, similar to what I had done with Apocalypse After. For the film, I asked Pierre Desprats, the music composer on all my films, to forget everything we’d previously done. This time, I was looking for percussion-based sounds, a drier general tone, with bold deliberate choices to differentiate the eras. I gave him references ranging from the introductory music of Bergman’s Persona, to Bernard Hermann’s scores for Hitchcock, Nino Rota’s ethnic collages for Satyricon, Wu Tang Clan-type rap for the Bronx, Plastikman for the warlike coldness, or more classically Purcell revisited by Michael Nyman in his minimalist period, up to the Paul Anka-style song that Barbara Carlotti interprets. For Pierre, it was a rather destabilising mess. But this choice gives a singular and intense result.
Theatrical poster for Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982), illustration by Renato Casaro
It’s clear you didn’t start from John Milius’ film.
No, not at all (laughs). Conan, in Milius’s version, is an emblem of virility, of testosterone. I went to the antipodes of that. I summoned a small part of Robert E Howard’s stories, a writer close to Lovecraft, who created Conan in 1932 before his premature death. In his work, Conan was a slender character, who climbed and slithered, which is far from the image associated with the character in the film. But I didn’t adapt the books, I re-read them, kept the original trauma of the killed mother and the idea of the barbarian slave’s revenge. Through my research, I was able to go back to the original Conann, the one from Celtic mythology, written with “NN”, the spelling I kept for the film. He is a conqueror who spent time with fantastic creatures called Fomorians, described as demons, or rather cynocephalic demigods, with dog or hyena heads. Now, I already had a demon with a dog’s head in my notes, so the connection troubled me a lot. It validated me in making this adventurous choice of a total reappropriation, of a multiple, polymorphic Conann crossing times. The re-inscription of the “NN” spelling to this iconic name is also part of the idea of femininity and multiples.
What did you hope to achieve, in completely unexpectedly revising this figure?
The desire to take stock of barbarism, culminating in what I believe to be the height of barbarism – old age killing its own youth.
Christa Théret as Conann in She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
Is the film shot on film?
Yes, it’s 35mm. We use half the frame, a thrifty scope, the one used in Italian westerns. And there are no special effects post-film-processing – everything is created during the shoot, on the spot, with the lights, the constructions and some transparencies. This is my shortest shoot – five weeks – so I had to think of the cut in an even more concise way than I usually do. I chose to shoot almost everything with a crane. I put a dolly track in one place and that conditioned everything we were going to shoot during the night. Because everything was done entirely at night, it was impossible to create darkness in this huge space, which in parts was open to the wind and rain. It was very tiring, with all the physical ordeals that this can pose, for the actresses and technicians, a total investment, without a net. I understand now that I could never have made She Is Conann like that if it had been my first feature film.
Because of the insecurity of the staging process and the virtuosity that it required?
In the sense that the only solutions to solve the problems were radical, and that I had to assume them with all the risks that this entails for each sequence – synthesise the staging as accurately as possible and make editing choices during the shoot, by betting on the tempo of the actresses’ performances. For example, when the 35-year-old Conann, played by Sandra Parfait, walks through the streets of the Bronx with Rainer (Elina Löwensohn). This scene took up four pages of dialogue in the script. I decided to do it in one shot – a walk back-and-forth through the humid streets. I knew that the actresses knew their lines, we had worked for a long time on the characters at the theatre, we knew each other well, we could take the most extensive sequences head-on, while doing very few takes.
Was this your first time using the crane? What did you discover in this process that made you want to come back to it again? It’s not just a system of elegance, you’re creating a floating effect.
I used it at the end of the shooting of After Blue, in the studio for the World of the Dead, with a decentering lens that breaks the balance between blur and sharpness. Here, I extended this principle over the length of the film with the same type of optics. Sometimes, I took the camera on the shoulder or on a dolly, but 80% of the film was shot sitting on the crane. As I like to impose on myself constraints that define style, it became a game, that of making the shooting time cohabit with the narrative ambition of the film. With this set-up, we think of the movements in the space by making the most of the heavy daily installation. I was perched on the crane and almost in telepathy with the grip and the crew. The most difficult thing was my vertigo, I never took my eye off the viewfinder, I clung to the camera to see only the film and forget the void. Perhaps the crane gives the vision that the dead have on the world. A fluid, floating vision, without ever being able to touch the ground. This formal approach makes sense for She Is Conann, in the way it accompanies the characters, always in perpetual mutation, moving from one world to another. We cross six stages, six ages, six periods, the film summons the history of cinema but also the great History. I had to make each chapter stand out while keeping a global coherence. This style, the staging, the use of black and white created unity in the rupture.
Claire Duburcq as Conann in She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
How do you manage to present an entirely feminised version of this figure, when working from a mythological figure, widely popularised in heroic fantasy literature and in cinema?
The 25-year-old Conann, played by Christa Théret, is non-gendered, completely they. I thought it was important to shake up the genres, to offer actors/actresses the possibility of playing a character originally anchored in virility. My desire was to take root in the original myth to better transcend it. The crossing of eras accompanies the very idea of ageing and the inner journey of this multiple character. To talk about this viral barbarism, I only saw a “monstrous” film, sharp, “ambitious” and yet always focused on intimate moments. I wanted to explore new areas of cinema and storytelling, culminating in old age killing youth.
Conann is then played by actresses of different ages, with very distinct personalities and characters. They embody the stages of a life in a brilliant way.
I don’t see constancy in being an individual, but distinct periods, changes as one gets older, the tragedy of which is self-betrayal. This is the driving force of the film – how one can betray one’s convictions, one’s ideals, one’s desires, how one hardens as one ages.
The other driving force of the film is more romantic – it is impossible love.
Conann’s first betrayal will be to transform her desire for revenge into love for her natural enemy. She betrays her desire for revenge. Revenge, this old rusty cinema mechanism, we must lay to rest. It is a narrative given, never contested, when it is actually a form of barbarism. Besides, I believe that this reassessment of revenge is found in all my films, be it in The Wild Boys or in After Blue. Conann, therefore, takes an unexpected route in the genre – she doesn’t take revenge, she betrays herself, after which she becomes a monster by diverting her convictions, by transforming herself into a frighteningly manipulative being, who becomes darker over time, even going viral.
Conann is “the barbarian”, but which barbarism(s) is the film about?
Cruelty, killing one’s ideals. Opportunism. Cynical capitalism and corruption. The last Connan, in “a refinement” of barbarism, perverts artists.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
They will ingest her.
She becomes a parasite. We think we are devouring her, but it is she who devours us.
The segment on “old Europe” is very impressive. The dialectics between horror and fascination in spite of everything is captured in one dialogue: “Europe is beautiful, it has style,” “Don’t talk nonsense, will you?”
There’s a symbolic imagery and a very head-on speech in that moment. I represent Europe with a French can-can dancer on a battlefield. There’s also the presence of the “masked capitalists”, taking a blood bath and the 45-year old Conann, who, whilst serving them soup, will end up slaughtering them. Their blood will feed the pool, because a new generation is coming and must soak its power. This is the first time I’m confronted with such a directly political form, condensed within a scene that synthesises a vision with no detours.
It is a film that travels through metamorphoses and worlds but in which there is no off-screen.
Yes, in the same way that we never see the sky. We are stuck with Conann and her compartmentalised memory. The camera surrounds the characters like a dragon, most often through a bird’s-eye view, a very oppressive way of dealing with space, with the night as an escape route.
French Theatrical poster for Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955), by Andre Bertrand
Who is Rainer, the dog-faced character played by Elina Löwensohn, the common thread in each episode?
To explain, I have to mention an important reference for the film – Max Ophuls’s Lola Montès. Lola Montès tells her story in a circus that has become her hell, reliving her whole life from her trapeze, before the big jump. This is the structure I used to build my story. Rainer is the equivalent of Peter Ustinov’s Mr Loyal in Ophuls’ film. His character is at the same time the most touching, the spurned lover, but also the one who pulls the strings of the decline, the most cruel. My Rainer is a little different. He is a demon who photographs death and bodies, half-Helmut Newton, half-Gerda Taro. But the first reference, engraved in his leather, is Fassbinder and his black romanticism. Rainer sniffs around corners to corrupt the characters, he speaks like a Shakespearean hero, his sentences echo like ironic oracles. He is a aspect of the devil, the arm of death, but most of all he is the one who humanises himself as Conann dehumanises herself. This crossing and this impossible love constitute a counterpoint to barbarism.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
For Rainer, L’Atelier 69 made a prosthesis of a peeled dog’s head. And why the dog’s head, anyway?
Because in all mythologies, the dog is the one who makes you pass into the other world. The prosthesis had to be able to reproduce all of Elina’s expressiveness, she wore it like a second skin. We had to change it every two days (the prostheses get damaged quickly and can’t be glued again after 48 hours). Elina would eat alone in front of a mirror, in her corner, because we couldn’t remove this second skin. Because of the fitting time, she arrived and left after everyone else. Many people in the team discovered Elina’s face at the end of the shoot. For five weeks, they only saw her with her dog face. She had become Rainer. She fully inhabited the character, in her body, her voice and her expressions, it was extremely unsettling. Today, I sometimes dream of Rainer, my empathy “for the Devil”.
Should we also see in Rainer a reference to the first Daft Punk music videos, those directed by Spike Jonze?
That’s funny I didn’t think of that, even though it’s a music video I liked a lot in the late ’90s. But I do have a memory of a slightly thick, cartoonish dog face. It’s more the first version of Planet of the Apes that remains my reference, in terms of prosthesis and turmoil over human and animal cross-breeding. I’m utterly convinced that in the future, humans will be drawn to the animal identity, they will become hybrids of dogs, cats, reptiles, using surgery and genes. But it’s funny that you mention that music video. When I summoned the ’90s aesthetics for the Bronx part, I thought of a film that has influenced many music videos, as it happens – Coppola’s Rumble Fish. As well as One from the Heart, for the lyricism of the staging within a studio. And then a cult film in the US, sadly never released in France, Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, produced by Lynch and with Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan and Peter Fonda. A vampire film set in New York, made the same year as Ferrara’s The Addiction – another reference for this sequence.
Re-creating New York in Luxembourg?
It’s make or break. I worked with all the more care on the exteriors, interiors and dialogues for this sequence, to make it as real as I could.
When that sequence appears, it gives the film a new rhythm, which will continue to grow until the great final scene – looser, more open. This seems to me to be a new possible direction for your cinema, a breath that creates a space inside the saturation, the accumulation. Is it also a way for you to clarify the message, in a film that is more openly political? Is it a skilful and gentle way of addressing a generation that is less familiar with references but that is directly concerned by this message?
Exactly. The references are there, sometimes in spite of myself – I made them a construction material but not a quotation. There’s also the universal heroic figure. I wanted to be able to play with a kind of ancient superhero and make them cross time. Actually, this idea is rather Marvel-like, but created in the style of an artisan, iconoclastic auteur. It is, above all, a way of saying that we must not leave epic imaginary in the hands of the big studios. The film makes its way through my obsessions, through fantasy, through myth, to eventually arrive at our era and address a contemporary generation head-on. Each segment pushes a new cinematographic process to the limit. The same goes for the narrative, a crescendo, up to the ultimate closed hearing.
Would you agree that it’s an angrier film, or a disillusioned one, or rather a film in response to an era that is disillusioned?
I have a little difficulty using the term disillusioned, which for me implies a form of nonchalance, even cynicism, and that is precisely what I do not want. It’s not a disillusionment either, because I remain optimistic. An anger, yes. I believe that, here, it is present. Against authoritarianism, the thirst for power, the illusion of happiness, this world in which we are trying to lock ourselves. The ambient cynicism, the opportunistic speeches and the violence, which lead to totalitarianism. I am absolutely non-violent. But I use my imagination as a disruptive weapon when I feel that the walls are closing in. I try to offer a counterpoint, to a certain kind of cinema that denounces differently. “What cannot be avoided, one must embrace or bite it”, as Rainer would say.
The last part is terrible, from that point of view – “ingest or die!”
It’s a poison. You think you can make it your own, take your share of the loot without taking the poison, but the opportunism reveals the system in which you are immersed. I am aware that the film differs from my previous features and that it extracts itself from the unbridled dreamlike or imaginary obsession in which they were embedded. But if I used islands, planets…it was already to question us. After Blue tried to imagine a world after the polluted world. The Wild Boys condemned violent boys to become women and change their perception, in the deepest sense. The closed world allowed us to go to the end of the questioning. But reality was already there. She Is Conann is not a closed world in an ocean, but a succession of hatchings in troubled waters.
Interview by Philippe Azoury (Paris, April 25, 2023), published here by kind permission of UFO Distribution
English translation thanks to Meli Gueneau
Weird Weekend present She Is Conann, alongside We Barbarians, on Friday 31st May, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Adam Torel is the founder and one-man-band leader of Third Window Films, established in 2005 with the express intention of broadening the canon / taste / market for Asian cinema in the UK, beyond the J-Horror boom of the late ’90s and early noughts.When we were trying to source a screening licence for Sogo Ishii’s The Crazy Family for WWI, back in 2018, Adam was one of the first trees we shook for a lead. Now, the film is finally getting a UK disc release, part of Third Window’s Director’s Company series, and we jumped at the chance to screen it again, in a brand-new restoration, for its 40th anniversary. We spoke to Adam about the origins of Third Window and the work behind a release like The Crazy Family.
We started discussing last month’s screening, Kim’s Video, and how regional institutions, like the Florida video store where Adam cut his teeth, are comparatively unsung and undervalued.Adam had seen Kim’s Video while sitting on a film festival jury.
[WW] One of the through-lines for our monthly series is curation and the people who build collections and shape other people’s collections – arbiters of taste, I suppose, would be one way of saying it. Really, it’s about way-finders, as opposed to gatekeepers, and curating the canon in that sense.
[Adam] When I worked at the video shop, I was like that. I was really into independent films, and I lived in a small town in Florida. There was nothing there, but there was this amazing video shop that I ended up working at. I was always into film, but it was there I got into, you know, hardcore, like, super-rare films. And that video shop, the owners just basically bought every single VHS that was ever released, whether they liked it or not. They just thought, “We need to buy everything and keep it in the shop,” you know, to keep these films alive. And they never threw anything away. So, as films would lose their licenses or they would become out of print, copies still existed in this shop.
The owner of the shop made his money through real-estate, but his passion was cinema, this tiny shop in Florida that nobody ever really came to, but you’d have, like, 50,000 films. They’d been buying VHS since the format started, so there were all these films that you could never find anywhere, ever. And this was obviously before the internet as well, so if you wanted to find out about something, you would go to the shop, and these two – this owner and this manager – they basically had an encyclopedic memory in their brain. You’d come in, or a customer would come in, “Yeah, I remember this movie when I was, like, 15 and, like, this cat died,” and they’d just, boom, they’d know exactly what it was, who directed it, who the cameraman was. It was an unbelievable experience. Actually, I wasn’t old enough to work there, but I managed to convince them to let me work there when I was 16. And I worked there for four years, just watching movies in the shop, day and night, and then taking stuff home and watching it till the morning. I couldn’t sleep very well at the time, so I’d be watching all day and night.
I got into Asian cinema because it was the films that you couldn’t see, even though they had everything. I was always trying to find the films that were just impossible to find. At the time, [Asian films were] really hard to see overseas, so I was, like, “All right, I’m going to get into Asian films and do all these trades with Video Search of Miami and all these places.” They’d send you a catalogue of handwritten titles, in the post, and you’d get it, and you wouldn’t even know what any of them was, because it’s not like you could look on the internet and say, “What’s this Centipede Horror?” You’re just like, “Oh, Centipede Horror, that sounds all right.” And then you would either trade them with what you had or you’d post the money in the post, and then, months later, this VHS would arrive. And I would just do that and then copy them and bring them in the store myself to rent out to people.
So, obviously it was a bit dodgy in that respect, but, you know, that was the only way that you could see these films. And also, this was in the ’90s, and Tartan Films in England were becoming this big thing for Asian films. So, me being in America and buying a lot of those Tartan DVDs and VHS from the UK, I’m English, so I thought, “I’m going to go back to England and see if I can get a job at Tartan Films.” And I went back, and I got a job interning there at first, and then became an employee, and that, I guess, started the concept of me working within the world of distribution, not just, like, being interested in it.
[WW] So, what was the step to you setting up Third Window?
[Adam] When I got into Tartan Films, I guess it was around the time that everyone fell in love with them. They were releasing all these bangers every month, and it was a sort of golden age for them. Not just Asian cinema, but for all sorts of films. And then, as the DVD market started to peak, and as J-Horror started to fizzle out, I was there telling them, “Stop just putting all these shit, long-haired ghost films. If you’re gonna buy J-Horror, or, like, genre films, there are all these films from Asia.” But, you know, the thing about a company like that is your image, as a consumer, is, “Wow, they’re this amazing company and everybody must love cinema a lot.” When you end up working there, nobody knows anything about cinema, except for the interns, you know, or, like, the really low people. So, you get a bit disillusioned, and you’re like, “Well, there are all these great films, but they’re just a business,” you know? “They’re just thinking about what to make money with.” So, I started saying, “All right, I’m going to get these films that I think are good for you.” Actually, I initially went to the boss, Hamish McAlpine, with titles, saying, “Look, I’ll buy these films for you and you can release them, because it will make the company better and you won’t have any risk on the money for them.” I went and bought these films, and then, when I told him that, he fired me immediately. In my mind, it was a good thing. But he was, like, “You’re a traitor to the company, and you’ve gone behind my back.”
When I started Third Window Films, my whole point was being a company that anybody could just mail and I’d reply back to them. Because any company or any person that owns a relatively large company, even if they’re distributing minor cult films, he has no connection at all to the consumers. So, he doesn’t care, he’s just living in Soho with, like, a Lamborghini and asking people from the office to sit outside for his car so he doesn’t get a ticket. That’s basically the way that he ran things. And I was really sort of against that. But I thought, you know, “Wouldn’t it be great if I pay for them, and therefore there’s no risk on you?” But, for him, it’s all about money, it’s he that decides everything, and if you go against him, you’re… So, he immediately fired me, the moment I said that, and then I thought, “Well, I better just start it myself.”
[WW] And you make a point of being more collaborative, more kind of collegial, of having good relationships with other people in the industry.
[Adam] It’s really important for me. I mean, I don’t have the name brand or the money or the status to do what I want, like Hamish McAlpine, so I need to be on good terms with everybody. There’s loads of times when I work for, like, months for free, just to help out, even other distributors, where even it could be a loss to my own releases. For example, with films like Crazy Family, the rights are so complicated that I need to basically work as a sales agent on behalf of the Japanese, for free. So, no commission. But what I do is, in order to clear the rights, I need to go to the producers or the rights-holders and go with, like, this much money from all these distributors. Then I can go to them and say, “Look, I have $30,000,” or something like that, “we can do a deal like that.” I work as a producer as well and you always have to think of how everybody would think of an outcome.
So, what I do is, including films like Crazy Family, or any of these other titles that I do, I find distributors overseas, like Error 4444, who are also handling Crazy Family, which I’ve also sold to France and Germany and all these other countries, and then take all their money, together with mine, and go to the rights-holders. But at the same time, that loses sales for me. Even if the region codes may be different, I can still get some sales to America, but now I won’t be able to. And it’s not like I’m getting the film for free myself in exchange, nor am I getting a commission for their sale. And in order, also, to make their release easier, I need to make loads of bonus pictures, subtitling, do all these things for free and then give it to them to make their release easier. It causes a lot of time and stress, and I get nothing out of it. But if I don’t do these things, the films don’t get released at all because the Japanese, like, with Crazy Family and Mermaid Legend, all these films haven’t been released in 40 years because it’s too hard to work with the Japanese rights-holders, especially if the rights are a mess, and also in terms of restorations as well. You can’t just say, “Well, I’ll pay you for the license fee,” then use that to make the restoration. The companies are going to say, “No, you have to pay us the money for restoring and pay us a license fee on top of it,” which is impossible. So, that’s why I do all these things and get all this money from here and there. Like financing a film, like producing a film, it’s imperative to do these things, just for the sake of these films.
[WW] We have a very limited experience of the same process, with some non-English language films. The energy, psychic energy, expense – it can be a wild amount of investment and time.
[Adam] Working with Japanese is not easy at the best of times. Luckily, I do speak Japanese and I live here, so that does move things forward. But there is a reason why Japanese films just don’t get released overseas. I’ve lived here for long enough, I understand how they work, but that also means that I need to switch my mind to…a Japanese mode when I deal with them. But then also, like, the Western mode when I deal with the Westerners and the Western companies and back and forth. And especially for contracts as well, I need to make the contracts in certain ways, and I have to translate it to Japanese. With these, like, ’80s films, especially the Director’s Company, because it’s from a company that went bankrupt, it’s especially complicated. I’ve been working on these for a long time and, in the end, because I’m selling it to all these other distributors in order to get the ball rolling, not only will I lose out on the financial aspect of it, but there’s nothing exclusive about it. When I did Door recently, which was a huge amount of work, and then I sold it to an American company called Terror Vision, and everybody’s like, “Wow, Terror Vision rescued this film Door.”
I’ve only recently started to realise that I should put my logo on the front of the data before I send it [to partners], so that at least, when they put their release out, it says “Third Window Films” on the front. I guess I’m not very good at promoting myself or my company, even, which is just me anyway. But I do realise, for example, there are many film producers that you look on IMDb and they’ve got these lovely profile photos of themselves, and you actually look into it and they’ve done nothing whatsoever. There are other people that do all the hard work and don’t get the credit. But do you really want to put the energy into promoting yourself, or is it the promoting the product? It depends on the person, I guess.
[WW] How do you gauge success, for yourself and for Third Window?
[Adam] Just the sales units. I mean, I also work as a sales agent, for titles like Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River and all that, where I take the film from the beginning and I bring it to festivals, I create a buzz, I do PR, and then I sell it, the rights only, as a job, so I get a commission for that. And in that case, if I sell the remake rights, which I’ve done for a few films, I get money, so that’s fine for me. It helps me buying, like, these tiny, obscure films, but, otherwise, yeah, I guess it’s sales. But it gets hard, because sales just aren’t that good. I would have never done this in the past, but maybe I need to release a film like One Percenter or something, like, a genre film, because maybe that will sell more to people that haven’t heard of Third Window Films, and that might get them into watching the films, which are completely different films anyway. But I’m just trying to try different things, because it’s a lot harder nowadays. I see companies like Radiance, who are doing massive amounts of sales, but they’re a lot more structured, and they’re also not handling just Asian films. When you’re dealing with niche Asian, or especially Japanese-only films, it’s just too niche, I guess, even if you do try to release, like, an action film like One Percenter every so often. It’s tough. I never wanted to distribute a film that has already been distributed, or has a chance of being distributed. You know, my mindset was always, like, if somebody’s going to distribute this film, then there’s no reason for me to distribute the film.
[WW] How do you practically approach something like The Crazy Family, then, that’s arguably even more niche than the earlier Ishii films?
[Adam] Yeah, more obviously genre films have been distributed. I mean, Crazy Thunder Road was a real pain because the music rights had never cleared for overseas use and we had to clear them, but I think Burst City is quite well-known enough that releasing Crazy Thunder Road off that, because it’s a better version of Burst City, made it a little more accessible, ’cause it’s a sort of rock-and roll-punk film. But Crazy Family, even though it’s not really been seen, it’s a film that everybody sort of knows of, like Typhoon Club. Everybody thinks it’s amazing, but it’s just not available. But I’d always wanted to release Crazy Family because it’s my favourite of his, or one of them. I mean, he’s got so many great films that are so different. Years ago, I was looking out for the rights and I ended up at Toho because WField and Toho owned the rights, and neither can move without the other. And Toho were just impossible to work with. If you asked to do a one-off screening, even if it’s a ten-seat cinema, it’s, like, $1,500 minimum. But they don’t care, because they own Godzilla and they’re making so much money.
When I came to Japan, I started learning a little more about the culture here, and also working with Korea before and working with Hong Kong, the reason why they do these things is because even big companies like Toho or Toei, the international divisions are so small. We’re talking a couple of people. Toho, a little more, but Toei’s, like, two people. It’s not worth it for them to draw up a contract and do all this stuff for one screening, unless it’s $1,500. So, those companies, they all have a rule where it’s just, “We’re just not going to sell it.” A film festival can’t play it, or we’re not going to sell the rights to it, unless it’s… For Toho, they won’t sell any film for under $10,000. Any film. Doesn’t matter if it’s, like, a film that no-one’s ever heard of, that’s never been released. They just don’t care. It’s a mix of them not caring and also that they’re just too busy. Japan, it’s all based on the domestic market, because all the money is made domestically. It’s like India, the reason why Indian films aren’t released properly overseas is because everyone who works in the Indian film industry works on the domestic side of it. So, conversely, the reason why Korea is such a big thing and Korean films are such a big thing is because they have had K-pop and everything to expand around the globe and therefore each company has a massive section for International. And they all speak English really well and know exactly what the international market is like, so they know what prices they can sell it at and how to deal with distributors, and all these things which the Japanese just don’t know. For example, Kadokawa is a massive company, they’ve been around for 100 years, they have all these films, and they have one person who handles international film festivals, she doesn’t fucking understand a word of English. Her job is working with international film festivals, she can’t fucking speak English! It’s unbelievable, when you think about it, but, like, that’s just Japan.
Before I came here, when I was working as a festival or buyer or anything, I was like, “What are you asking me, $2,000 for a fucking film screening?!” Even if we had an 800-seat cinema, it’s not going to make the money back for us. Like, it’s crazy. And then I came here, and I realised, like, “Ah, that’s the reason why.” I still think they’re ruining Japanese film culture because, by not doing the deals, no films are being released, and then when you have a new film that you want to go overseas, people are going to be so far away from Japanese film culture that they’re not going to be interested in buying your new film. Also, working as a producer here and distributor also here as well, I realised it’s just such a small amount of money, compared to the amount of money we’re going to make in Japan, that, like, is it even worth it? You have to put so much energy in for such a small return. I mean, you have to really think of the big picture, so that’s why, I guess, you have all these issues with so many of these films, especially the older ones, because there are less and less people alive who are even connected or remember them.
So, a friend of mine, a few years ago, found all these negatives for Director’s Company, including Door and Typhoon Club and Crazy Family, all these films. Obviously, I loved Crazy Family, but him finding the negatives started the process, this rights clearance issue and these re-scanning of films. And because I started releasing all these Director’s Company films – first of all with Door and Typhoon Club and Guard from Underground – I thought, “Well, Ishii Sogo was part of the Director’s Company,” and Crazy Family was his only film for them, except for Half Human, which is a short film, “that needs to be a part of this series, because it’s a seminal film of the Director’s Company.” The thing about Ishii Sogo, he’s a director. There are some directors who also understand the other aspects of the industry, like Tsukamoto Shinya, who understand about distribution, understand about rights, ownership. But Ishii Sogo, he goes to anybody, “I’m just desperate to make this film.” Like, “Just make it happen.” And he goes on to the next project. So, he doesn’t understand about the rights to the film, who owns it. So, his films just get lost, in that respect. And he’s always onto the next film, so he doesn’t really, I guess, care so much about finding out about what happened to the last ones. I wanted to release some of his other films, like Angel Dust and Labyrinth of Dreams, but that would be just more hectic. Considering I’m already focused on the Director’s Company series at the moment, I might as well just put all my attention on The Crazy Family. There are more obscure titles from the Director’s Company that become a little more sellable, once people are buying into that label, that sub-label, and therefore, it keeps it going a little more. It was only around for ten years, and most of the films from the company aren’t very good and so it’ll probably fade out by the end of year, I’d imagine, and I’ll have to move on to the next thing.
Theatrical poster for The Crazy Family (illustration by Teruhiko Yumura)
[WW] And so, you always have your eye on the next thing, you must have stuff percolating. Or do you have to kind of keep your entire focus on the current thing?
[Adam] I need to plan at least a little bit ahead, but a lot of the time things just fall out of the sky. This Director’s Company series was just a situation where I ran into somebody, they had these negatives and, okay, let’s move on with that. But I don’t even know what I’m going to release next year. I know what I’m releasing this year, in terms of other titles, but next year I have nothing. So, I need to hope that new films get made, or things fall into place.
[WW] When you have the film and you know you’re going to release it, I understand that you do the subtitles yourself. Does that mean translation or preparing the materials, or both of those things?
[Adam] For the feature subtitles, usually I don’t, because they’re usually ready. You know, I think most Japanese films, even if they’re old, they usually have feature subtitles because they’ve played at a film festival in the past. There have been some films where I’ve just re-subtitled the film myself. Like Door and Door II, I just did them myself, because in those cases, I was also working with the sale agent for them, so I needed to have subtitles to show them to film festivals. So, in those cases, I will do the subtitles, but it’s mostly for the bonus features.
Obviously, I need to save as many costs as I can, so usually I do all the subtitling for the bonus features, like audio commentaries, making-of’s, interviews – anything like that, I’ll do that. For the translations, usually [I work] with a few different people. I have a Japanese friend that speaks English, who lives in England, to do some work, to read through, and then I’ll read through and I’ll send it out to a few people, and we’ll just fix it up, in that respect.
For the extras, first of all, when I came into the industry 20 years ago, and it was like you could sell a DVD with burned-in subtitles and, like, no extras and, like, you’d sell it for 20 quid and it would totally be fine. Now, everybody wants fucking all these extras and, like, stupid packaging and all that. And as somebody not from that generation… I don’t even have a television, I don’t care about 4K or anything like that. For me, it was just more important that I was seeing the film, and nowadays, that just doesn’t work. But, then again, nobody watches the extras, but you’ve got to have them on there.
Sometimes, I try to find people on YouTube that have made, like, good video essays and just ask them, “Do you want to do one for me?” I think the problem is sometimes you end up just going back to the same old people. But then, I think, as a consumer, every time you look and it’s another commentary by this person or it’s another one by that person, it gets a bit stale. The design, as well, for posters, you don’t really want to ask the same designer every time, but you find somebody who’s easy to go with and it just becomes a sort of go-to. It’s just, I guess, ease of a rhythm, I guess, than trying to find out new people and hoping that they turn out well or not. Because you could go and make the effort to find these people that sound like they could do a good job, and then you get the product, you’re like, “What the fuck is this?”
The Crazy Family (逆噴射家族, Sogo Ishii, 1984)
[WW] How do you feel about piracy? Are there degrees of it that you’re comfortable with?
[Adam] Yeah, I mean, it’s a double-edged sword, because I understand why somebody would want to help enrich others with a film that is not available anywhere, and therefore they put it on the internet. Of course, at the same time I’d be like, “Well, I’m just not going to release that film now,” because it’s available too easily on the internet. But then again, I might think, “Well, the moment I release my copy, it’s immediately going to be put on the internet anyway.” Which is a reason why a lot of Japanese companies don’t want to sell the films for small amount, because they sell somebody the rights for, like, $3,000, and then the person who puts it out makes it available to be pirated when it’s a film that has never been pirated before and therefore it’s going to kill their sales.
When I bought a film recently from another company, I put it out, and then it got put on the internet, and they were, like, “Now we’ve lost the US sale for it,” because now it’s just too easily available everywhere, and what can I do? But I understand that that makes them think, “Well, we’re just not going to want to sell it for anything less than an amount that makes it worth it being now available to anybody online.” So, it’s complicated. But I think people who are going to download it are going to download it whether or not there’s a copy to buy anywhere.
I think there’s so many people nowadays that they’re just used to it. It’s unbelievable sometimes. I’ll post up something on the Third Window Films’ Facebook, and the moment I put it up, they’re like, “Can somebody send me a download link?” I’m like, “What the fuck?” But that’s just the mindset of people now, especially people that are from an era that films are so readily available, internet is so fast that that’s how they think. Maybe they don’t think it’s a bad thing and you can’t tell somebody with that mindset, “No, you should be paying for this.” And the world has changed with Netflix, because somebody could pay £10 a month and have access to thousands of films. And it’s like, “Why should I rent this one film digitally for, like, £3? I can pay £10, £5 a month and get MUBI with 1,000 films,” or, “£5 is close to zero, I’ll just download it”, you know? There’s no gap any more, in that respect. And, in that case, what am I to say? That’s just the world we live in. That’s why we have to make these collectors editions, because it has to be worth something that people want to have in their home, that they’ll pay the amount for. Otherwise, if it was just a disc with no bonus features on it, people will just download it anyway.
One of the reasons I moved to Japan – I enjoy living in Japan so much – is that I was getting a bit tired of distribution in the UK, because of piracy and such. Japan has no piracy, no piracy whatsoever, because the police cracked down on it, big-time. The whole market is completely different. Video-on-demand is really not a big thing here, despite the fact we have such great internet. It’s like going back in time, you know? The UK market, it’s all day-and-date, you release it in cinemas and you’re on digital, and it’s all the same day. Back in the days of distribution, before Netflix, you always had the holdbacks, and you’d have a VHS rental. Before sell-through, you’d have a copy just for rental shops. The world has changed so much, and with that, film distribution. But Japan is like an outlier because most films only get a theatrical release here and don’t get a video release or VOD release. Recently, VOD has become a little more, but there’s no sell-through on a lot of titles, a lot of it’s just rental. You still have video rental shops as, like, a normal thing. And people still go to the cinema, and there’s still a hold-back of, like, six months or so between the theatrical and the video.
The cinema experience is quite different here because a film can only be seen in the cinemas, and therefore, you know, you have to go to the cinema to watch it. And it also allows for the film industry and for independent cinemas to continue going, where you can see so many independent films in cinemas. I think one of the reasons I stopped theatrical distribution in the UK was cinemas would take a film of mine, not put any of the posters up, not promote it at all, and then, like, give it a fucking 11am slot, and then nobody would come on the first day and they would just cancel it. And, it’s like, well, what about word of mouth, you know? There are so many films, if it wasn’t for word of mouth, the film would have died. And in Japan, you can have a film made for, like, $5,000 by a student get a three-week run. Boom. No problem. Every day. And that allows for word of mouth and for things like One Cut of the Dead to become huge successes. And the cinema will do so much effort to promote your film. That really made me fall in love with distribution again, because they’re keeping it like the old style.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Weird Weekend present The Crazy Family on Friday 26th April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Third Window’s restoration of The Crazy Family is released on Blu-ray on 17th June, 2024, as part of their Director’s Company series, details here.
NB skip the italicised synopsis to avoid spoilers.
The Kobayashi family fulfils a long-standing ambition by moving into a two-storey, three-bedroom suburban house. While his son Masaki studies hard for university entrance exams, his daughter Erika rehearses for a possible record company audition, and his wife Saeko busies herself running the household, breadwinner Katsuhiko submits to a gruelling daily round of commuting, work and exercise. The apparent idyll is disrupted when Katsuhiko’s elderly father Yasukuni arrives for a visit and outstays his welcome. Katsuhiko privately begins to worry about a return of “the sickness” to the family. Goaded by the women’s complaints, Yasukuni is preparing to leave when Katsuhiko has the idea of digging a cellar for him under the living-room. He attacks the floor with saws and axes, assuring his horrified family that the cellar will also serve as a fall-out shelter. Soon armed with power tools and increasingly obsessed, Katsuhiko works day and night on the excavation, forgetting his office job and oblivious to the effect on the others in the house. Masaki becomes a zombie recluse, immersed in esoteric revision; neglect drives Saeko into frenzies of frustration; Erika throws tantrums in her room. Katsuhiko presses on until he strikes a nest of white ants and diverts all his energies to the task of exterminating them. He tries to go back to his job, but the thought of white ants haunts him and he is soon back in the living-room cavity – where he ruptures a water main. Hysteria grips the house and Erika attempts suicide. During the night, Katsuhiko barricades the doors and windows to keep everyone in and tries to trick the family into a group suicide. When this fails, Katsuhiko goes on a would-be murderous rampage and the family turn on each other. Next morning, Saeko prepares breakfast as usual. Katsuhiko is ominously silent until another idea strikes him: they must demolish the house so that they can make a fresh start. Everyone but Erika enthusiastically pitches in, and they leave the house as it collapses. Some time later, all five members of the Kobayashi family are living happily in the wide open space between two motorway flyovers…
“Kramer vs. Kramer,Ordinary People and The Family Game are all admirable films dealing with family problems. They are serious films, much praised by critics, and some people regard them as masterpieces. But some of us think differently. We consider them timid films, more or less like the TV family dramas made for middle-aged audiences, and the critics like them more than we do. And so Sogo Ishii and I decided to make a more radical film on the same subject. We wanted a film about the family that would be filled with fun and poison… There are four things that traditionally frighten the Japanese: earthquakes, thunder, fire and fathers. This list is as valid now as it ever was”.
Co-writer Yoshinori Kobayashi’s comments explain clearly enough where Gyakufunsha Kazoku is coming from (although the joke of bracketing Morita’s subversive Family Game with the two American films may be less apparent here than it is in Japan), but nothing could fully prepare any audience for the way it moves or the final direction it takes. Sogo Ishii’s film is a live-action comic strip, each sequence shattered into component images like panels on a page and edited to rock rhythms. The stylistic attack is matched, blow for blow, by the ruthlessness and cruelty of the humour: satire, slapstick, pain and black comedy are primary elements, but the film goes beyond them all into an area harder and more vicious than anything seen on screen since the early days of Monty Python. Its triumph is that it is (a) consistently funny, and (b) sustained as a narrative, rather than collapsing into a series of sketches. And the bizarre, ‘visionary’ ending (reached by way of a ‘special visual effects’ sequence created by the brilliant avant-garde structuralist film-maker Takashi Ito) is at once a serenely logical extension of the premises of the storyline and a twist that retrospectively gives a science-fiction gloss to the whole proceedings.
The Crazy Family (逆噴射家族, Sogo Ishii, 1984)
At the risk of hammering the jokes into the ground, it should be pointed out that the film’s humour springs from two central paradoxes. First, the proposition that the family’s hard-working, selfless, long suffering breadwinner is actually a seething mass of paranoia, haunted by the ‘imperial’ past (in the person of his senile father) and unshakeably convinced that there is a deep rooted ‘sickness’ in his family that only his love can cure. Second, the proposition that a family would destroy its own house in the name of saving it from attack by white ants (which represent Japan’s version of dry rot and are not, as might be imagined, monsters dreamed up by the scriptwriters). A Japanese audience is alerted to these paradoxes by the title, which translates literally as “The Back-Jet Family”. The reference is to an incident that occurred at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in the early 1980s. A pilot named Katagiri was about to land a JAL airliner at the end of a short, internal flight. At the crucial moment, he fired the plane’s back jet, causing the aircraft to crash and killing many of the passengers. Pressure of work was blamed for Katagiri-san’s crack-up.
These paradoxes clear the way for the film to tackle its prime targets: the masochism of male students who willingly submit to cramming for exams; the vacuousness of the ‘interests’ that teenage girls are encouraged to pursue; the stereotype of suburban wives as barely repressed Mata Haris; the matching stereotype of suburban husbands as timorous creatures brought out in hot sweats by any sexual proposition; and the general notion of the Japanese nuclear family as an ad-fed unit that literally has no space to accommodate its grandparents, no matter how large its impeccably crafted house. Every one of these is gleefully pushed to an extreme, and the ‘saving grace’ of irony is completely absent. The film also represents a major step forward for Sogo Ishii, whose previous features - Crazy Thunder Road (1980) and Bakuretsu Toshi (Burst City, 1982) – were anarchic fantasies about neo-fascists, bike gangs, urban breakdown and mass sodomy conspicuously lacking in aesthetic judgment and control. Ishii (now approaching his twenty-ninth birthday) has this time gathered a team of outstanding collaborators – including the cinematographer Masaki Tamura, who also shot Fire Festival – and come up with a film that not only means business but also delivers. He has also had the wit to rescue Hitoshi Ueki from the oblivion of Japanese TV by casting him as the appalling grandfather, a role that deliberately evokes his ’60s heyday in the Irresponsible film series.
Tony Rayns
Tony Rayns’ new book Just Like Starting Over: A Personal View of the Reinvention of Korean Cinema will be published in 2024.
This article was originally published in Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan 1, 1986. Re-published here by very kind permission of Sight and Sound.
The complete archive of Sight and Sound magazine (dating back to 1932) and the Monthly Film Bulletin (1932-1991) is available in digital form for your desktop.Access is included for S&S print subscribers or can be purchased for £35, here.
Weird Weekend present The Crazy Family on Friday 26th April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Watch ICO’s three-part conversation with Tony Rayns
One of the ironies of living in an age of plenty is that it becomes impossible not to feel as if the walls are closing in. The commodity that seems to be in shortest supply during Japan’s period of high prosperity is space and it’s the lack of it, both physically and mentally, that begins to drive people quietly out of their minds until they themselves become the metaphorical termites they so feared quite literally undermining the foundations of their own home. It’s a desire for clearly-defined individual space that sees the Kobayashis longing to escape the cramped conditions of the post-war danchi housing estates, but achieving their dream of becoming homeowners only seems to compound their anxiety. After all, what are they supposed to want now?
Posters for The Crazy Family (1984), A Sandcastle Model Family Home (1989) and The Family Game (1983)
The cinema of the 1980s is filled with “crazy families” and a sense of impending doom that the salaryman dream is about to implode. The danchi had been a byword for post-war aspiration, but all the respectable salaryman wants is to get off them and become master of his own domain, as the owner of a home in the suburbs. One of the chief reasons the Kobayashis wanted to move seems to have been a mutual desire for privacy in which the children could have their own rooms leaving the parents space to restore their intimacy as a couple. Of course, this desire is immediately frustrated by the arrival of the grandfather, which forces the parents to sleep apart and provokes a crisis in their new utopia as it becomes clear that once again there is simply not enough space for everyone.
A Sandcastle Model Family Home (砂の上のロビンソン, Junichi Suzuki, 1989)
The Kidos, a similarly ordinary middle-class family, experience something similar in A Sandcastle Model Family Home (砂の上のロビンソン, Junichi Suzuki, 1989), in which the parents spend their evenings sitting in a cupboard watching TV with headphones on to avoid waking their children who all sleep together in the main room of their tiny danchi apartment. When they win a mansion in the suburbs in a competition to find the ideal family for an ideal home, they think all their dreams have come true, but the changing nature of aspiration in the high pressure Bubble society quickly undermines their familial bonds. All they have to do is live in the house for a year for it to become their legal property, but during that time they must agree to have their entire lives on show and allow the general public – including, at one point, a party of elderly people determined to hold a funeral there – into what is quite literally a show home. Not only do they experience constant harassment from unsuccessful applicants to the competition, but also fierce, class-based resentment from those around them and, most particularly, the father’s colleagues, who demote him to demonstrating their revolutionary blender at a supermarket until the act of performing family life eventually destroys the familial unit completely.
The Family Game (家族ゲーム, Yoshimitsu Morita, 1983)
Yoshimitsu Morita’s TheFamily Game (家族ゲーム, 1983) similarly hinted at the hollow performativity of contemporary family, though the Numatas are among the small number who show no desire to leave their danchi home, even if the father is forever ordering people to his car so they can “talk without whispers”. Like Mr Kobayashi and Mr Kido, Mr Numata is a hardworking salaryman, largely absent from the domestic space, though on the rare occasions he is present simply orders everyone around, at one point telling one of his sons that they have no need to think for themselves because it’s his job to think for them. He also tells his wife it’s her job to manage the domestic space, over which he accepts no responsibility, largely leaving her to parent alone but forever blaming her when his sons don’t live up to his expectations. A traditional housewife in a very conventional family, she is lonely and unfulfilled, quietly regretting having had children so young and reflecting that her life would be easier if her kids were just nicer. The children, meanwhile, are forced into the roles of good son and bad, with the youngest rebelling against social expectation by slacking off at school until the incredibly strange tutor his parents employ begins to take a paternal role and teach him to think for himself only to see him accept conventionality on achieving their shared goal of getting him into the better local high school.
Mr Numata’s obsession with getting into the right schools is indicative of a society ruled by status and hierarchy with the father, of course, sitting at the top. Mr Kobayashi and Mr Kido are evidently less comfortable in that position or with the constraints of the salaryman existence, while Mr Kobayashi’s conviction that his family suffer from the “disease of modern life” also hints at his own anxiety about the negative effects of consumerism. He worries about his daughter’s immaturity and precociousness and his son’s obsessive studying to get into a prestigious university, reflecting that the space he thought would save them has only driven them further apart, while putting distance between himself and the corruption of the city has in fact compounded the family’s madness. The solution that he finds amounts to a deconstruction of the family unit, in which the world they inhabit becomes open and borderless, perhaps devoid of privacy but equally of constraint.
These Bubble-era families are all in their way “crazy”, struggling to redefine themselves in age of excess and increasing individualisation which leaves them dissatisfied with their allotted roles and the diminishing returns of conventional success. The persistent claustrophobia of life lived under oppressive social structures and the breakneck pace of a nation shooting straight past the economic miracle can’t help but drive them out of their minds, resulting only in a kind of unseeing mindlessness or an unstoppable desire to burn it all down and seek freedom in the now abundant space of civilisation’s ashes.
Hayley Scanlon
Weird Weekend present The Crazy Family on Friday 26th April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Hayley Scanlon is a Japanese and East Asian Cinema specialist, writing at Windows on Worlds. Follow Hayley on X, here.
Quentin Tarantino interviewed in Video Archives (MTV, 1993)
In 1993, Quentin Tarantino marked the VHS release of his debut Reservoir Dogs with a trip to Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. Already the most famous ex-video store employee – at least, famous for being so – QT made the appearance at his former workplace to honour his full circle moment. “People who work in video stores,” he told MTV cameras, “you’re in a grand tradition. This is the new film school, so keep it up!” 1
By all accounts, the employees of the Kim’s Video mini-empire were the ne plus ultra of that species (and many of them were or did become film-makers of note2). Video store clerks everywhere may have been the architects of your evening’s entertainment – and many a night was made or laid waste by a selection from an employee picks section – but rarely, alas, did Blockbuster FOH staff curate the store’s inventory itself. That’s a claim Kim’s clerks could make, since the shop’s stock was shaped and informed by them from its inception, the nascent Kim’s an extension of film student Matt Morello’s own collection.
Kim’s other claim to fame was the consummate surliness of its staff, reported in the New York Times’ piece on the 2004 closure of its Avenue A location. To some observers, the employees were “haughty” and “hostile”, the store’s heyday a “reign of terror”. The obituary continued:
“It was like an S-and-M relationship,” said Michael Robinson, a 14-year East Village resident, about the interaction between customers and some Kim’s clerks. Recalling a disparaging remark a clerk made about a mindless comedy Mr. Robinson intended to rent, he added: “You had to go all alpha male on them to get them not to bother you. But I do miss having it here now.”
Kim’s Video signage
Whether they had to be assholes just to get hired, or if working there brought out in each of them their inner asshole is an open question. Another is, was it strictly necessary? Depending on your perspective, Kim’s either encouraged high standards of cine-literacy or discouraged (disdained?) curiosity – scourges of ignorance or punishers of naivety. And because the gold they jealously guarded was coveted by wave after wave of fresh-faced enthusiasts, they thrived / got away with it. Another Kim’s customer recalled, “Even when people were officially boycotting the place because of the mean service, they would go back just to browse.”
Nick Zedd, film-maker and one-time Kim’s employee, concluded, “Bogus snobbery is a sign of genuine insignificance and Kim’s clerks epitomized this form of neurosis.” But he also offered the following context:
“During its heyday, all Kim’s employees were paid in cash, below minimum wage. This resulted in inventory shrinkage as a form of revenge. One employee absconded with an entire collection of VHS tapes which he now hordes [sic] in his own ‘video grotto’3 on the Upper West Side.”
Where enthusiastic collecting and a deficit of personality meet, there’s a tendency towards gatekeeping. Gatekeeping itself can be a form of (self)preservation, a way of looking after a fiefdom that you’ve either established or bought your way into – drawing up the bridge against those who, you can only assume, would destroy it. Or, in other words, normalise and mainstream it, thus ruining your retreat from the world, spoiling the safe place you’ve found away from the anxiety of existence and the pain of being alive.
Promotional image advertising the return of Kim’s Video to New York
There is also, in fairness, a nobility and a utility in caring for something that society, mainstream culture, or people at large have either rejected or consistently undervalued. The sense of self (and self worth) that such a pursuit offers can be difficult to give up, even in part. Anyone who can be persuaded to defer to your authority is not a threat, while any challenges must be ruthlessly dissuaded. So, when Kim’s clerks defended the store, with extreme prejudice, against the intrusion of amateurs and gadabouts, they were curating the clientele as much as the collection.
There seems to be an essential tension between collecting and hoarding, championing and gatekeeping4. But what happens when the thing you protect is no longer under threat, either because it’s seemingly been saved or even finally destroyed5? Video stores, some valiant exceptions aside, are largely a thing of the past but the energy they focussed had to go somewhere. The gatekeeping tendency certainly endures and, for this writer, reached its apotheosis in a recent episode of The Video Archives Podcast, hosted by Tarantino and his erstwhile collaborator/fellow ex-clerk Roger Avary.
Those compelled by the kinds of parallel worlds conjured by Tarantino with his movie-movie universe – or, in general, alternative histories, fake movies, greatest movies never made, expanded universes of lore, etc, etc – would have been drawn to this very special episode which promised to pay tribute to the reportedly recently departed Rick Dalton. QT and pals would expound at length on the life and career of the star, animated by Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (2019) but otherwise fully imaginary.
This seemed, in theory, like a fascinating experiment in world building, a playful synthesis of both Tarantino’s fictional work and his new focus on film criticism, the throughline his encyclopedic cinephilia. Listening, though, it’s an oddly alienating experience and it’s not, perhaps, immediately obvious why. It does become clear – what better situation for the hoarding cinephile, whose fiefdom is under threat by vastly increased (and always increasing) access to film knowledge (if not always to films themselves), an explosion of insight and opinion, to hold forth on a world of films that no-one knows anything about, that no-one can know anything about, except you?6
Sean Welsh
Weird Weekend present Kim’s Video with Directors Q&A on Friday 28th March, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
When Video Archives closed, less than two years later, after a brief and ill-advised relocation to Hermosa Beach, Tarantino bought up their inventory (“Probably close to eight thousand tapes and DVDs.”) It now forms the bulk of his home collection, and the basis for The Video Archives Podcast with Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary.↩︎
Esteemed Kim’s alumni include the men Michael M Bilandic, Dylan Kidd, Alex Ross Perry, Todd Phillips, Spencer Riviera, Sean Price Williams, Nick Zedd. ↩︎
A video grotto is like a man cave which excludes customers, rather than simply women and children. ↩︎
In some ways, the tension between collecting and gatekeeping is mirrored in the relationship between exhibition and preservation (a dialectic that goes at least as far back as the days of Henri Langlois and Ernest Lindgren, two heroes of preservation with differing views on exhibition). This conflict is also found in the quandary facing anyone engaged in researching, preserving and restoring films that are considered marginal – the free sharing of those films (and related materials) on torrent sites, private and otherwise, and on more public-facing platforms, in one persuasive sense means more eyes on these films. They deserve a bigger audience, after all, that’s the impetus behind preserving and restoring them in the first place. But since those efforts require manpower, resources and money, there’s a financial imperative that can be undermined if and when the film (and/or related materials) becomes freely available. It’s one of the most (only?) persuasive arguments against piracy, that it undermines livelihoods in the first instance as well as future efforts in the same regard. That argument is unlikely to find purchase with most people when it’s made by Disney or any other major studio. However, when the project is personal, or the organisation niche and underfunded, it holds weight. One problem facing independent (broadly encompassing DIY alongside small to mid-size distributors) efforts in this area is that the economics are not clear to most people, should they even be interested. ↩︎
These brief notes don’t afford adequate space to satisfyingly grapple with the rise of streaming, the attendent death and rebirth of physical media, nor piracy, torrenting, listicle programming, AI and the end of work, etc, etc. ↩︎
You would think, perhaps, that making your own films would be the ultimate scratch of that itch, but then many people peskily insist on the death of the author, that once the film is made its meaning belongs to the viewer, so, no. ↩︎
Yongman Kim, subject of Kim's Video (Ashley Sabin & David Redmon, 2023)
We’re thrilled to announce that Weird Weekend returns in 2024 with monthly screenings leading into the WWIV festival, 25-27th October 2024!
Every month, we’ll be screening the best New Weird Cinema alongside brand-new restorations, while the festival itself will be more focussed than ever before on strange and unseen cinema from around the world. We have a special focus this year on the programmers, curators and archivists who champion, preserve and celebrate these films, expanding the cult canon and exploring new perspectives.
We also have a new venue in the GAMIS Cinema, a brand-new screening space in Glasgow’s Govanhill. The GAMIS Cinema is an emerging venue, aiming to bring cinema to the Southside alongside artists studios, exhibition and community projects. Directly opposite Queen’s Park train station, the GAMIS Cinema will be growing and developing over the course of 2024.
Our monthly screening series, taking place on the final Friday of every month, commences on 29th March with the new documentary Kim’s Video, followed in April by Third Window’s brand-new restoration of The Crazy Family (first screened at the inaugural WW in 2018) and in May by Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann. All screenings are priced on a sliding scale and feature Descriptive Subtitles for the entire programme, optional Audio Description and live captioning for intros and Q&As.
Tickets for the first three monthly screenings are on sale now.
Weird Weekend is funded by Screen Scotland. Screen Scotland drives the development of all aspects of Scotland’s film and TV industry, through funding and strategic support. Screen Scotland is part of Creative Scotland and delivers these services and support with funding from Scottish Government and The National Lottery.
We’re marking this year’s festival dates with a very special online-exclusive outing for Weird Weekend’s UNSEE event, where we invite guest programmers to respond to a unique prompt. This year’s exclusive UNSEE programme streams live on our online cinema, once on 29th October (exclusively in the UK) and then again on 5th November (exclusively in the US), 1am to 1am.*
UNSEE takes place in the hour before the clocks go back, meaning that, as soon as it’s finished, it’s like it never happened. Our guest programmers can share something they couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t otherwise in what for you, the audience, is an hour of your life you actually will get back.
Last year, we invited curator and director Elizabeth Purchell (Ask Any Buddy) to curate a full programme, ELIZABETH PURCHELL: UNSEE, around her UNSEE hour at Weird Weekend at CCA, Glasgow.
This year, we’ve invited VERA DREW, director of The People’s Joker, to create a very special hour of entertainment for you. This hour is curated exclusively for Weird Weekend and VERA DREW:UNSEE will stream once and never again.*
Vera Drew, director of The People’s Joker and 2023 UNSEE guest programmer
AND we’re thrilled to announce we’ll be returning to a monthly screening programme next year, leading into Weird Weekend’s fourth edition in October 2024. We’ll be hosting new programmes on our online cinema on the last weekend of every month, starting in January, as well as hosting related physical events locally and internationally.
Weird Weekend and its related monthly screening series are dedicated to the orphans, outcasts and outliers of cult cinema – strange and compelling films that due to circumstance or sheer personality have fallen through the cracks of the canon. Underpinning our events is a focus on access and inclusion, so as many people as possible can see these wild and incredible films that are otherwise out of circulation. All events at Weird Weekend, including VERA DREW: UNSEE feature optional descriptive subtitles and audio description and are priced on a sliding scale – you decide what to pay based on your means, with reference to our tiered guide.
*UNSEE will stream once in the UK when the clocks go back, in the early hours of Sunday 29th October, then again in the USA, when the clocks go back on 5th November (one stream per timezone: Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific). Each stream, though, is one-and-done and geoblocked to each timezone – e.g. if you’re in New York, you’ll only be able to watch the Vera Drew: Unsee (US Eastern Timezone).
Matchbox Cine | Matchbox Cine is an independent exhibitor of outcasts, orphans and outliers and an award-winning subtitler, specialising in access provision in film exhibition and distribution. Established in 2010, they programme, curate and promote cult film events, including the festivals Weird Weekend, Cage-a-rama and KeanuCon. In parallel, they’ve made access materials (descriptive subtitles and audio description) for over 3,000 films and short films.
Weird Weekend | Weird Weekend is an annual cult film festival based in Glasgow, Scotland, founded, programmed and produced by Matchbox Cine. Past editions have brought to Glasgow exclusive and world and UK premiere screenings, including Tom Schiller’s Nothing Lasts Forever on 35mm, Craig Denney’s The Astrologer, Wil Aaron’s O’r Ddaear Hen and John Paizs’ Crime Wave: The Original Cut. In 2022, we restored and premiered Fredric Hobbs’ “lost” film Troika (1969), commissioned the first English subtitles for Welsh language horrors Gwaed Ar Y Sêr (1975) and O’r Ddaear Hen (1981), premiered a brand-new restoration of Claude d’Anna’s Trompe l’oeil (1975), with our newly translated English subtitles, and toured Kier-La Janisse around the UK to celebrate the 10th anniversary expanded edition of her book, House of Psychotic Women.
Vera Drew | A genuine multi-hyphenate, Vera is an accomplished filmmaker and actor who came up in TV post production. Once known in her alternative comedy circle as an “editor that thinks like a writer,” she expertly edited and contributed visual effects to dozens of iconic comedy televisions shows, including Check It Out With Dr. Steve Brule, The Birthday Boys, Krft Punk’s Political Party (for which she got her first contributing writer credit), season two of I Think You Should Leave, three seasons of Comedy Bang! Bang! on IFC, and On Cinema (she later went onto direct season 12). Having honed her skills at Tim and Eric’s Abso Lutely Productions (a company known for incubating some of the industry’s most unique editors), Vera’s talent as an editor has been recognized by the Television Academy in 2019 when she was nominated for Emmy for her work on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? That same year, she launched Tim and Eric’s streaming TV network (for which she wrote and directed four series and hours of original content) . Prior to that, Vera was a contributor to Highland Park TV and Everything Is Terrible. Most recently, Vera Drew finished her first feature film, The People’s Joker – a Queer coming of age comic book parody that premiered at TIFF in Fall of 2021to critical acclaim and minor controversy. A proud trans woman born and raised in the south suburbs of Chicago, she has been making funny, spooky, and/or queer short films and music videos for most of her life. She is currently writing her next feature film and trying to #FreeThePeoplesJoker.
We were extremely honoured to welcome the legendary writer, programmer, producer, director, Kier-La Janisse to Glasgow at Weird Weekend III, for our dedicatedHouse 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.
The final episode in our mini-series dedicated to the influential book by Kier-la Janisse, House of Psychotic Women, is an interview with the author herself. This is a recording from the conversation we had during Matchbox Cine's Weird Weekend, in Glasgow. → Watch all the films featured in the book HERE.→ Buy the expanded edition of House of Psychotic Women HERE.Produced and presented by Anna Bogutskaya***Music: "Prince of Darkness" by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio***The Final Girls are a UK-based film collective exploring the intersections of horror film and feminism, founded by Anna Bogutskaya and Olivia Howe.→ Find out more about our projects here: thefinalgirls.co.uk→ Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.→ Support us on Patreon.
[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.”
Kier-La Janisse in conversation with Anna Bogutskaya (Photo by Ingrid Mur)
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.”
Kier-La Janisse in conversation with Anna Bogutskaya (Photo by Ingrid Mur)
[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…
Kier-La Janisse in conversation with Anna Bogutskaya (Photo by Ingrid Mur)
[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?
Anna Bogutskaya (Photo by Ingrid Mur)
[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.
Kier-La Janisse (Photo by Ingrid Mur)
[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.
Laure Dechasnel in Trompe l’oeil (Claude d’Anna, 1975)
[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 Bogutskaya (Photo by Ingrid Mur)
[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.
