As with most female horror fans, people love to ask me what it is I get out of horror. I give them the stock answers: catharsis, empowerment, escapism and so on. Less easy to explain is the fact that I gravitate toward films that devastate and unravel me completely – a good horror film will more often make me cry than make me shudder.

Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women

It is a tradition in the literature of the doppelgänger...that while the doppelgänger serves a distinct psychological purpose, it soon becomes a menace, a constant, invasive reminder of one’s own shortcomings. The protagonist is driven to kill the doppelganger as a means of survival. But as Otto Rank points out, to kill the double is essentially suicide – what he refers to as 'the strange paradox of the suicide who voluntarily seeks death in order to free himself of the intolerable thanatophobia' [...]  The suicidal murder of the double is also underscored by a sense of the liebestod, or love-death, a marriage between the ego and its shadow-self though mutual obliteration.

Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films

house of psychotic women

HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN by KIER-LA JANISSE // SUPERNATURAL (2005-2010) by ERIC KRIPKE

house of psychotic women now has an audiobook narrated by kier-la janisse herself! for any audiobook enjoyers out there

May (2002) Dir. Lucky McKee

Pearl (2022) // Mandy (2018) // Jennifer’s Body (2009)

POV: you just asked me how I’m doing

Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women

house of psychotic women by kier-la janisse

Eva León in Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota, 1974)

In family-melodrama horror there is always one family member...trying to escape the confines of their limited existence, or an outsider coming into the narrative poised to steal them away. Their only social interaction...is with their siblings, but something happens that awakens them to the possibilities of the outside world. They may even make sincere attempts to escape, but as we have learned from a century of such films, the family always comes first, a reconciliation takes place, and the would-be escapee is forced to recognize their inherent nature and the fact that they belong with their family – especially when they are concealing a secret that would render them socially unacceptable to the outside world. They retreat to the familiarity of the only people who accept them for who they are. Again: traumatic bonding.

Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films

Night of the Demons (1988)

«9-23-77, Detroit - The Downtown Grand Circus Park-based Madison played Paul Naschy in BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL under it's HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN title along with the Armando d' Ossorio Blind Dead adventure THE GHOST GALLION under it's US aka HORROR OF THE ZOMBIES (the third of the series). Although the Motor City did not have VENGENCE OF THE ZOMBIES until it's WALK OF THE DEAD re-release, at least it had a few of the legendary Actor's movies on the screens. Sadly, the Madison was closed in Late 1984/Very Early 1985 with "Dead Zone" on the marquee for a long time.»

Identikit (1974) Dir. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi