She is a woman who is desperately trying to formulate an identity that she can imprint upon the world, but has failed to do so for reasons not explained. She is off to Italy to form a dangerous liaison with someone, anyone, who is willing to give her the time of day. terrifying.” Lise (Elizabeth Taylor) is described with these words by a passerby who saw her leaving a hotel on the day of a terrorist attack. Some force that all women feel latent in themselves, stifled - a potential for catastrophe. “It was as though something came out of her. The well runs deep on horror movies of this type, and those included in the box set are a great primer on what the topic of female neurosis in horror can entail. These four features are now streaming on Shudder along with numerous other films that are covered in the book, such as Ms. Included in Severin’s newest box set are four films selected by Janisse, including Identikit, I Like Bats, Footprints, and The Other Side of the Underneath. It is a storytelling technique as old as Eve communicating with the snake and letting the devil inside, and will remain relevant as long as there are women available to listen to the voices inside our heads. The films covered in this book, and in Severin’s box set, reveal the monster not as something that can be defeated, but something that must be lived with. In the newest edition of Psychotic Women, released alongside a box set of films from Severin, Janisse adds a hundred new features in her analysis, like Unsane (2018), Queen of Earth (2015), and Raw (2016), adding to her ongoing portrait of female neurosis in horror. There have been numerous films released in the wake of Psychotic Women that fit into the broader scope of the text on living with trauma and the effect it can have on the mind. Today, we can see the effect her book has had on modern horror film criticism and production. 45 (1981), and The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) brought into sharper focus entire avenues of great work waiting to be discovered. Her prioritization of films like Possession (1981), Ms.

Her objective to tie the scenarios of these films together with memoir created a portrait of the horror film viewer that was distinct, personal, and female, through a lifelong interaction with the genre. Janisse’s book was exhaustive in research and composition, mapping neurosis among female characters as a global pattern in horror and exploitation pictures. This was particularly true of women who found solidarity through these provocative, damaged characters and the nature of their experiences. When Kier-la Janisse’s exploitation deep-dive House of Psychotic Women was released in 2012, it almost immediately became a canonical text among horror film obsessives.

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