Read by Kier-La Janisse

In 2012, a book debuted that would go on to canonical status and usher in a new way of writing about film. Kier-La Janisse's House of Psychotic Women is an autobiographical exploration of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films that examines hundreds of films through a daringly personal lens. In this pioneering work, anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, and trivia to create a reflective personal history and a consideration of female madness, both onscreen and off. To mark its tenth anniversary, Kier-La Janisse produced an expanded edition the book, featuring new writing on 100 more films-many of which were inspired in part by the book itself. Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart-'the eccentric'-the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play. Contains mature themes

Mode of access: World Wide Web