Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse (born October 3, 1972) is a Canadian film writer, programmer, producer, and founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. Her best-known work as a writer is House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012) which many critics consider an important milestone in both confessional film writing and the study of female madness onscreen. Video Watchdog’s Tim Lucas referred to it as one of the 10 “most vital” horror film books of all time, and Ian MacAllister-McDonald of the LA Review of Books called it “the next step in genre theory, as well as the most frightening and heart-rending memoir I’ve read in years.” Her debut feature as a filmmaker, the three-hour documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, premiered at SXSW 2021 where it won the Midnighters Audience Award.

Film and event programming

In 1999, Janisse mounted the first CineMuerte Film Festival in Vancouver, an independent horror film festival that ran until 2005, first at microcinema The Blinding Light!! and moving to the Pacific Cinematheque after its first year. Special guests of the festival included Jean Rollin, Jörg Buttgereit, Udo Kier, Buddy Giovinazzo, John Saxon, Richard Blackburn, Jack Taylor, Jeff Lieberman, Jim Van Bebber, Edwin Neal and more. The festival and Janisse’s struggles to run it independently were the subject of Ashley Fester’s documentary feature Celluloid Horror (2005).

She was Head Programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema from 2003-2007, an original programmer for Fantastic Fest (2005-2007, returning to oversee short film programming 2012-2014), and a co-founder of its MONDO collectible merchandising branch. As part of her Alamo programming she founded Music Mondays, a weekly series of music documentaries that garnered her an award from The Austin Chronicle. In 2003, inspired by her friend Toren Atkinson’s birthday cartoon marathons, she founded the Saturday Morning All-You-Can-Eat-Cereal Cartoon Party, a program of vintage cartoons, commercials, PSAs and Station IDs intended to replicate the Saturday morning experience in a theatrical environment. The program was originated in Vancouver and she brought the program to the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas where it was a staple for many years, in addition to screening regularly in many cities worldwide.

In 2003, she founded the Bloodshots 48-Hour Filmmaking Challenge, an annual independent filmmaking contest in Vancouver that ran until 2012.

In 2006, she mounted the Big Smash! Music-on-Film festival in Vancouver, named after the album by Wreckless Eric. She continued to use the Big Smash! moniker to mount independent screenings over the years, including an outdoor screening of black metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us on screen made of snow in the middle of Winnipeg winter and an immersive event based on The Flaming Lips’ quadrophonic album Zaireeka for which Winnipeg filmmakers were commissioned to create original works to play on four screens simultaneously.

In 2008, she founded and coordinated Gimme Some Truth: The Winnipeg Documentary Project for the Winnipeg Film Group. Visiting filmmakers included Les Blank, Steve James, Allan King, Kirby Dick, Zacharias Kunuk and Nettie Wild, among others. It has continued as an annual event mounted by the Winnipeg Film Group.

From 2008-2011, she founded and ran Plastic Paper: Winnipeg’s Festival of Animated, Illustrated and Puppet Film, a five day festival of independent animation arts, including screenings, installations and expanded cinema performances. Special guests included Ralph Bakshi, Bill Plympton, Heather Henson and more.

She co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine in Montreal with fellow programmer David Bertrand in 2010. The microcinema ran from 2010-2012 and is documented in Donna DeVille’s 2014 PhD thesis The Microcinema Movement and Montreal (PDF) (PhD). Concordia University. 2014., as well as Incite Journal of Experimental Cinema, Vol. 4: The Exhibition Guide.

From 2011-2013, she oversaw programming for Pop Montreal’s film section, Film Pop, which included screenings, talks, workshops, exhibits and installations, including site-specific screenings of The Omen in a church, and Jerzy Skolimowsky’s Deep End with the audience in a pool.

In 2016, she was the Festival Director of Monster Fest in Melbourne, Australia.

An avowed film locations aficionado, in 2018 Janisse organized the first Horror Express, a chartered bus tour through horror film locations in Toronto and beyond, co-hosted by Chris Alexander, and followed this up in 2019 with a similar tour through Montreal horror film locations, co-hosted by Michael Gingold, in conjunction with the Fantasia International Film Festival.

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

In 2010, Janisse founded The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, an international organization that offers undergraduate-level history, theory and production-based masterclasses with branches in London, New York and Los Angeles. Miskatonic is a largely volunteer-run endeavor through which established horror writers, directors, scholars and programmers/curators celebrate horror history and culture. Instructors have included Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Daniel Bird, Dennis Paoli, Stuart Gordon, Douglas E. Winter, Grady Hendrix, Jack Ketchum, Jack Sargeant, Jasper Sharp, John Skipp, Karen Arthur, Kim Newman, Maitland McDonagh, Mark Jancovich, Mitch Horowitz, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Thrower and many more.

Classes Janisse has personally taught at Miskatonic include: Murder Season: Crime-Solving Plants and Other Vegetal Horrors (2019); Travel Terror: Airline Anxiety in the Golden Age of Hijacking (2017); Tele-Terrors: The Real and Imagined Horrors Inside the Made-for-Television Movie (with Amanda Reyes and Jennifer Wallis, 2017); School of Shock: Pain and Pleasure in the Classroom Safety Film (2012) and more.