Kier-La Janisse
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“Is the Real Horror the ‘Old Ways’ Or the Civilization That We Built?: Kier-La Janisse on Her SXSW Doc, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched
What began as a BTS feature for a home video release of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, a 1971 cult favorite about Satanic possession in a 17th century English village, premiered this week at the South by Southwest film festival as a three-hour opus on the allure and dread of folk-horror. “I started working on a half-hour bonus feature for Severin [Films] and it just kept getting really big,” says Kier-La Janisse, whose directorial debut Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched adds yet another hyphen to her endeavors as a film historian-memorist (The House of Psychotic Women), editor, curator and educator (she […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 19, 2021 -
Something Sinister
As the industry and media have increasingly placed a spotlight on the filmic achievements of female directors, the recent rush of celebrated genre films masterminded by women — Julia Ducournau’s Raw, Alice Lowe’s Prevenge, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, among them — has been cited as a welcome phenomenon, but it’s not an altogether new one. A network of female-driven genre film festivals that celebrate the activities and influence of women in the genre cinema community have been running for, in some cases, decades. Filmmaker and programmer Briony Kidd says, drily, “The idea that it might […]
by Sean Malin on Jun 16, 2017
