House Of Psychotic Women: Expanded Edition by Kier-La Janisse

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - 'the eccentric' - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play. 

Named after the U.S. retitling of Carlos Aured's The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN is an examination of these characters through a daringly personal autobiographical lens, Anecdotes and memoires interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and an examination of female madness, both onscreen and off. 

This sharply-designed book with a 48-page full-colour section is packed with rare stills, posters, press books and artwork hat combine with family photos and artefacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. 

Hardback
Publication: 4 Oct 2022, FAB Press
ISBN: 9781913051211
Extent: 488 pages, 600 illustrations