Instructor: Kier-La Janisse
Tuesday Oct. 5 + Tuesday Oct. 12, 6-9pm
Miskatonic director and longtime horror writer/film programmer Kier-La Janisse kicks off the Miskatonic season with this 2-evening course on horror film criticism for teens aged 14+. The course will focus on developing an aptitude for critical interpretation, using Jack Smight’s 1973 Frankenstein: The True Story as a focal point. Examples of various historical schools of writing and interpretation will accompany open discussion in class, as well as individual review assignments. Each participant will be given a movie to take home and review using the tools and insider tips discussed in class, and these reviews will be posted on the Fangoria Magazine website’s Miskatonic Blog!
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, producer, former programmer, and founder of horror school The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and contributed to Recovering 1940s Horror: Traces of a Lost Decade (2014) The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (2015), We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (2017) and Refocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (2023). She co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published (via her imprint Spectacular Optical) the anthology books Kid Power! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror was released by Severin Films in 2021.
