Morbid Tales
The personal is visceral with Kier-La Janisse.
Kier-La Janisse’s resume will torpedo yours. From her days pounding out the Vancouver-based Cannibal Culture zine, to her key role in creating and programming horror festivals (the focus of the sadly hard-to-find documentary Celluloid Horror), to her founding of Montreal’s Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and her current role as Web Director for Fangoria she’s been a relentless, intelligent advocate for genre film, a one-woman whirlwind.
Her new book is the unique, immediately seminal memoir-topography-compendium House of Psychotic Women, published by FAB Press. It’s divided into two halves: the first, an autobiographical study of female neurosis in horror films. The second is an appendix of the covered films, plus many more.
Buried Dreams
In that first half Janisse circles back again and again to Andrezj Zulawski’s 1981 Possession, obsessed and enraptured by its “hypnotic cinematography” and “deep blue hues.” The film becomes an anchor for much of the analysis, the film that sparked a lifelong passion — her interest is hardly academic, no mere formal fascination. In an early passage that displays her insightful, potent prose, she writes,
There was something terrible in that film, a desperation I recognized in myself, in my ability to communicate effectively, and the frustration that would lead to despair, anger and hysteria. — House of Psychotic Women
Finding that resonant frequency within a film, harmonizing on some deep level with its twisted narrative, is a pattern in the book and a striking argument for subjective film criticism; for those who still believe in the myth of objectivity, that a critic should come to a text with nothing in their heads and leave only a thumbs-up or down, this book provides a sharp corrective. There are no numerical scores, no awful prefab pull quotes.
In fact, Janisse’s idea of a great film is one that will “devastate and unravel me completely — a good horror film will more often make me cry than make me shudder.”
Her earliest memory is of her mother being raped by an intruder. These recollections are unsparing, to herself and others, and relayed with clarity verging on understatement — it’s obvious Janisse refuses to sensationalize the material. It’s tremendously intimate, mixing film criticism with personal memoir in a delicate balancing act that’s quite unlike anything else out there.
We have more patience, or perhaps even empathy, for fictional characters than we do their real-life counterparts. Faced with neurosis in film or literature, we want to investigate rather than avoid. — HOPW
The Grotesque
Her criticism is cogent and often surprising: I find myself digging for positive representation in even the sleaziest pieces of work — a way to legitimize my interest in profoundly disgusting material — but Janisse confronts the complexity of women in horror film and, crucially, relates to it in a way that avoids the problematic generalizations of the “Strong Female Character.”
In fact, from the start she calls herself crazy, a failure, a rage case, a chaotic mess. She compares her “hysterically violent adolescence” to a haunting, in that both show “pattern[s] of reappearance.” She often implicates herself in domestic abuse, with far too much clarity to dismiss. She details how she contracted herpes, how she used to self-harm. She identifies deeply, indescribably with the damaged, dissociated Erika in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.
From there she dives into everything from Altman’s 3 Women and Allen’s Images to Ferrara’s Ms. 45 and Von Trier’s Antichrist. Giallo, Cronenberg, Kim Ki-duk, and a host of obscure nasties all get equally passionate treatment; it’s a welcome approach after my recent immersion in dry film theory, where the films themselves are secondary to the deployment of appropriate terminology. Nothing here feels dispassionate: the films are therapy, really, a way to work through issues via discussion.
Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist (2009), dir. Lars Von Trier
A lot of the movies in the 1970s, they didn't even think they were addressing female neurosis as much as they were, whereas Antichrist and Possession know flat-out that they are characterizing their women as neurotic, and they want to talk about it. A lot of the earlier films, I suspect, it's not that well thought-out. — Janisse to Cheryl Eddy
Woman on the Screen
In a section that dovetails with current discussions across all media — film, television, comics, and video games — she takes on rape-revenge films. Contrary to popular feminist discourse, which is steadfastly against the use of rape as a device in any narrative (especially as a way to provoke or motivate a male protagonist) she calls rape “the single greatest justification for anything else in the film that follows…because, culturally, rape is worse than death.”
It’s taken for granted that horror is cathartic: Janisse goes further, saying that nothing could be more cathartic for a female viewer than confronting and overcoming rape — the terrifying, ever-present threat. She’s not being glib, and takes pains to point out that no one ever truly recovers from being raped — why the revenge narrative is an obvious fantasy. Perhaps it goes without saying, though, that she finds nothing verboten in horror film.
This sort of nuance often gets lost in online debates, which too often suffer from signal degradation and impulsive, aggressive critiques. Many critics ignore the individual characteristics of a work to argue that its use of a certain device — rape, racism, abuse — perpetuates societal prejudices or damaging norms as part of a larger group: that is, Ms. 45 may be exemplary and even subversive as a rape-revenge piece but cultural attitudes toward rape need to be changed before these texts can be judged on their own merits.
That’s not wrong, of course, and we are at a point where we need to, and perhaps have a chance to, level the playing field for representation in media. Janisse, though, tweaks Anita Sarkeesian’s assertion that problematic media can be enjoyed with full awareness of their questionable elements: for her, the films’ generic heritage is crucial, and their “problematic” aspects are integral to the piece as a whole, not an embarrassing facet to be shamed and compartmentalized. To wit: “exploitation films address the politics and psychology of exploitation more coherently than ‘legit’ films…by their very crassness.”
It’d take a singularly, monumentally myopic reading to say she’s promoting or in any way condoning rape; and how can one dismiss the real cathartic value she’s found in these films?
…it becomes apparent that watching these films, and writing about them, is an act of solidarity in and of itself; a provocative means of dispelling the threat their subject matter poses to us. I also think that my interest in them, and my determination to talk it out, is a vicarious means of revenge for what my mother experienced in front of me all those years ago. Like the little girl in Defenceless, the keeper of the secrets, I want to tell her that she’s not a monster because something monstrous happened to her. — HOPW
Spheres of Madness
The turning point in my reading came about halfway through.
Suddenly I identified more than I’d like to admit — certainly online — with Janisse. She, like me, found an intimate reflection in Marina de Van’s singularly excruciating In My Skin, a clinical, pathological examination of self-harm that bears the distinction of being one of the few films I physically struggled to get through — the sort of film that would’ve made vintage Cronenberg throw his hands up and go back to med school.
Like Cronenberg, though, it explores dissociative identity, crises of the flesh, frissons between mental and physical that the characters pry open like paramedics on a wrecked car. The protagonist Esther’s shock when her boyfriend, incredulous that she can’t feel the massive gash on her thigh, asks “Are you sure it’s your leg” is like a non-verbal take on Ted Pikul’s “I’m feeling a little disconnected from my real life” from eXistenZ.
De Van’s film is obscure and insular, an obviously personal piece of work that makes no concessions to anyone not on its wavelength. Janisse’s own cutting overwhelmed her family; “they were shocked by the violence of it,” and wanted her to stop to appease their own discomfort rather than “knowing the source of the problem.”
The rationale behind self-harm is complex; Janisse says to call the film ‘just’ about cutting is to “oversimplify the motivation that stimulates cutting.” It’s an insidious, deeply rooted practice that gets as thorough an airing-out as any of the films covered in the book.
From there Janisse continues by detailing her first, impulsive suicide attempt; then, the cycles of self-destructive doubt and loathing that stemmed from her sexually-transmitted disease.
…to me writing about my STD was the hardest part — because a lot of relationship trauma people can relate to, no matter how bad it gets. But having a communicable disease, that just gives people fuel for thoughtless criticism. — Janisse to Alan Kelly
The second half of the book is a full-color gallery of lurid poster art and family photos and an extensive, hundred page-plus “Compendium of Female Neurosis” that gives capsule reviews for tons of films, many not covered in the text proper. Janisse’s background in magazine writing shows in her aptitude with short-form criticism; while in the intro she points out that the brevity of articles encourages generalizations, her capsules are clever and always written with an eye to her overall concerns.
While the back half would make a fine book by itself, the first half is the meat. Janisse’s naked emotional connection with these films is so affecting and unconventional, something way beyond being a ‘superfan’ or ‘film nerd.’ I don’t know that anyone has ever explicated the root of their film obsession so clearly — certainly she’s not the first to feel it, but she may be the first to write about it. For her the act of criticism is as essential to knowing herself as it is to knowing the texts. For a specific type of reader this book will be a revelation.
In Janisse’s own words:
When my mother died, I knew I had to finally finish this story, and I knew that it would involve revisiting some unpleasant territory. Because when somebody dies, one thing is certain: like it or not, you have to go back home.
I once told a friend that my life was just a succession of obsessing over the wrong things. “What would your life look like if you ever obsessed over the right thing?” she asked.
It would look like this. Like a book, being finished. — HOPW
