Author Spotlight

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, producer, and acquisitions executive for Severin Films. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022), and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007), and she has edited numerous books, including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015).

2 Results
Anora: Let’s Make a Deal

Drawing from a rich tradition of films that depict the lives of sex workers, Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning triumph takes a complex approach to exploring the fundamentally transactional nature of human relationships.

By Kier-La Janisse

Essays— Apr 29, 2025
Carnival of Souls: “Thinkin’ Like That, Don’t It Give You Nightmares?”

Herk Harvey’s influential, low-budget horror classic Carnival of Souls is an eerie exploration of the mutability of place and the purgatorial state of dreaming.

By Kier-La Janisse

Essays— Jul 12, 2016