The ever prolific and preeminent Kier-La Janisse is fast becoming a force to be reckoned with in genre. From film, to books and now TV, she is using her encyclopedic knowledge and understanding of cinema to bring a refreshingly progressive view to works that may have only been viewed and dissected by male perspectives. Kier-La is someone I was aware of since she was working as head programmer at the Alamo Drafthouse (2003-2007) and Fantastic Fest (2005-2007), but it was her autobiographical tome on genre cinema, House of Psychotic Women that made me seek out her work going forward. While the book as expected, examines female focused genre films, it does so against the story of Kier-La’s own tumultuous childhood. It’s a book that’s as personal as it is insightful and that’s not an easy feat to accomplish. Since then, she’s taken residence at Severin Films producing the kinds of box sets that give the Criterion treatment to exploitation deep cuts that probably wouldn’t have garnered a second glance from most.
Not only did she curate a box set to pair with House, but she would next tackle folk horror in a way that only she could. All The Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium Of Folk Horror encapsulated not only 20 films in the sub genre, but it also contained the stunningly comprehensive 3 and a half hour documentary Woodlands Dark And Days Bewitched, that worked to not only allow Kier-La to delve to the recesses of this sub genre in its exploration, but as a standalone release it worked to drive interest in these films contained in this set. That doc definitely accomplished its mission because here we are a few years later and Severin is releasing All The Haunts Be Ours Vol. 2 that has 24 films over 13 discs, with more original content this time around, including 2 films created just for this release. Kier-La was kind enough to chat with me on Zoom about not only All the Haunts, but a few of her other projects including her upcoming Shudder series and her new doc!
First off congrats on your TV show that was just announced The Haunted Season, how did that come about? I feel like Christmas is a super fertile ground for folk horror, so it had to be right up your alley given your work on the box set.
Well, it’s kind of connected to All The Haunts Be Ours in a way. The TV series, The Haunted Season, is inspired greatly by the BBC A Ghost Story for Christmas series, which started in the 70s and was resurrected by Mark Gatiss in more recent years, and he’s been doing new episodes every year for the last, 10 years or something. But the thing is in the UK, Christmas was always the time of year that was more associated with ghost stories more than Halloween. So when I first learned about this tradition, which would have been like 15 years ago or something now, I was obsessed with it. I watched all the A Ghost Story for Christmas episodes and I started inviting people over on Christmas Eve to read ghost stories.
Back in like 2012, I was working at Fangoria Magazine with Sam Zimmerman, who now runs Shudder and we had an idea, wouldn’t it be great if we had our own A Ghost Story for Christmas, like in North America? So we were trying to get something going on the Fangoria website, where we would get a short film made and it would premiere on Christmas Eve and, you know, it would be like an original Fangoria production. The publisher of Fangoria at the time, which is like two or three publishers ago, would not approve it, so it never happened. But the filmmaker that we both had wanted to make the first film was Sean Hogan, but then this idea never went anywhere.
And then in 2015, I did a book called Yuletide Terror, which was about Christmas horror on film and television and I crowdfunded an original short film that we included on a DVD in that book – directed by Sean Hogan. That film was called We always find ourselves in the Sea and fast forward last year when we at Severin commissioned Sean to make another sort of Ghost Story for Christmas type film called – To Fire You Come at Last, which if you’ve seen the Folk Horror Vol. 2 box set, it’s the very first film on the box set. But when Sean was making that film, I said to David Gregory, who owns Severin, “if we’re happy with how the film turns out, I could pitch Shudder on the idea of A Ghost Story for Christmas series and we can kick start it with this episode.” And so David was like, if you want to pitch it, go ahead.
I pitched it to Sam Zimmerman, who of course, was the same person that I’d been talking to about it all those years ago. It’s a very microbudget series, so it’s not like a big TV show that I’ve gotten now or anything. It’s a really small humble endeavor. But the idea is to bring some winter’s tales. I’ve actually been avoiding using the word Christmas when I pitch it to people, because I don’t want it to be limited to that belief system, you know? I want it to be open to people who are celebrating different holidays. So it’s starting this year with Sean’s film, and we have a five year contract. So for the next five years, there will be another original short film that plays for the holiday programming every year on Shudder. After the five years, we’ll see how it did and if we want to renew it.
As someone who truly appreciates cinema there’s always that one film that opens your eyes and you realize that every film is made with a certain care, love and you realize there are no bad films. What was that film or films for you?
I would say it was probably when I was a teenager and I started watching a lot of Italian horror, this is before DVD or anything like that. But it would be dubbed versions of movies, like Demons a Phenomena, and many of my friends would be like, “this is crap, this is so stupid”. I would be like, no, there’s something here. There’s something going on with this film that is unlike anything in any of these other American films. It was kind of like being a horror fan at a time where people didn’t get the mentality of a foreign or international horror film. They just thought they were all bad and all stupid and the dubbing obviously didn’t help.
So I found myself on the outs, championing these movies and being like, no, there is some magic that’s happening here and I couldn’t quite articulate what it was, but I would try. I had a fanzine that I started in my 20s and I started trying to write about some of these films and that was really how things started. But I would say that even in my fanzine, because I’d been very influenced by things like Deep Red magazine that I could be very irreverent, at times. So, I actually regret that like a lot of times in my fanzine, I wasn’t respectful towards people’s films, like I would sometimes make fun of people’s films or bad effects or whatever, in a way that I don’t anymore.
I feel like part of that also came from when I started being more of a journalist in film and going to festivals and covering things and interviewing people who make the films and seeing their faces, as they experienced the audience reception to their film, good or bad. It really became apparent to me that nobody tries to make a bad movie. Everybody is trying to make a good movie and trying to bring the dream that’s in their head onto the screen and hopefully connect with the audience.
I think that approach is what really sold me on the Black Emanuelle set. When I listened to the Severin Films Podcast and I heard your approach to those films that have been ignored or scoffed at for decades and it really intrigued me in a set that became a bit of an obsession. (Laughs)
When it came to the Black Emanuelle set, I didn’t have to look for a way to write about those films. To me, what I always liked about the Black Emanuelle films was that she’s jet setting around the world. So she’s a woman traveling to all these places and she’s got a cool job, she’s a photojournalist and she’s fighting crime, and in many of the films fighting crimes against women. So those kinds of things look at her in the context of the girl reporter trope, which was something that was just automatic to me, that she fits into that history and no one ever writes about it.
I’ve read lots of books about the depiction of journalism on film and Black Emanuelle has never been mentioned in any of these books even though she’s only the second female journalist to have her own film franchise. Torchy Blane, who I write about in the Emanuelle book, who’s like in the thirties and then you have Black Emanuelle, 40 years later and she’s a woman of color. She was probably the first woman of color in Western films or films intended for a Western audience, to lead her own film franchise. So there were a couple of really big deals about the Black Emanuelle series for me. So I really just kind of honed in on those things. Of course there’s all kinds of problems with the series and there’s a lot of inconsistencies in moral messaging and stuff like this, but it has these things about it that really spoke to me that I really enjoyed.
And then the more I talked to other women who were into exploitation films, I found that a lot of other women shared my opinions about the series, you know, they were big fans.That was really the impetus behind the big book that kind of came with the series, because it’s like I would say predominantly women that wrote for that book, and I also got a lot of women commentators on the box set, because to me it was like this this particular fan base for the series had not really been explored that much. The series had always been looked at through the eyes of men who liked kind of T&A movies, and I knew that for a lot of women, they were watching the same movies, but they’re getting a totally different thing out of it.
So, I thought that would be interesting to tap into and give that a little bit more visibility. I think that’s a big reason why it had some of the crossover appeal that it did. I think people were way more interested in that box set than they would have been normally, because we contextualized it that way.
That’s one thing I always like about how you tackle these box sets is that fresh perspective. Now for the curation and creation – how long does a project like this gestate for and how does a film pass the vibe check for inclusion?
Well, both box sets, Black Emanuelle and All The Haunts Be Ours Vol. 2 were three year long projects with some overlaps and by the time Emanuelle came out, I was already knee deep in All The Haunts Be Ours Vol. 2. If you’re just doing a movie release that’s like one or two disks, obviously you can turn that around a lot quicker. But when you’re doing a box set, every film is at the mercy of every other film.
So one film may have signed instantly, right? So at the very beginning of that three years, I got Blood Tea and Red String, I think was one of the first films I went after. So the poor director of Blood Tea – Christiane Cegavske, has been waiting patiently for like three years for this release to come out because she’s like, I signed my contract and I delivered my film like three years ago, where is it? Because some of the other films took longer to get them signed, that affects not only the timeline for the box set, but also what extras you’re going to make, because the extras take quite a bit of time, but you can’t start on the extras until you have the film signed.
So everything kind of drags and drags, so for some of the first people involved in the box set, either as filmmakers or commentators or whatever, they’re just like, is this box set ever coming out?
But in terms of curating the box set, when we were finished the first box set, there were certain films that we’d been trying to get that we did not get. We either couldn’t get the rights holder sign off on time or couldn’t find the right rights holder in time. The two movies I’m thinking of specifically are Who Fears the Devil, AKA The Legend of Hillbilly John, because Kino Lorber had announced that movie at some point and then pulled it because of a rights dispute. So we had to work through that rights dispute and figure out like, where’s the paperwork? Who has the rights and who do we deal with? So it took a bit of a while to navigate that and it didn’t make it into the first box set. The other film was Mike De Leon’s The Rites of May or Itim as it’s called in the Philippines, which we were trying to get for the first box set and Mike De Leon just kind of kept changing his mind, about whether or not he wanted to be in it.
Part of it is, people either don’t want their film in a box set with other people’s movies because they feel like it’s diminishing their movie somehow – “well, the release isn’t my movie. It doesn’t say my movie title on the cover of the box, so my movie’s just like in there somewhere.” So some people don’t like that structure for their movie. But other people just don’t understand how their movie could be called a horror movie, or how it’s connected to these other movies? Sometimes you get directors who take some convincing to sort of let them know how it makes sense that it’s being seen in that context.
But then you get other directors like Carter Lord, who made The Enchanted, who was like, “I’ve never heard of folk horror, but if you think it’s folk horror, great.” That’s a rare response, you tend to get much more of the response where people kind of get their hackles up and they’re like, well, I don’t know horror, that’s like a disreputable genre, I don’t know if I want my film to be looked at that way.
I loved The Enchanted!
There’s even more titles in this one than the last one, it was kind of an opportunity to just branch out geographically. Because there were certain regions of the world that we didn’t get into in the last box set, so there’s more of a Middle East regional focus in this box set. There’s more Asian films, so it just goes a bit further, and brings in more perspectives because not only are we getting films from those regions, but we’re also getting commentators from those regions and directors and producers discussing their films. I mean, doing the interview with the producer and director of Scales, the Saudi Arabian film was fascinating to me, because they’re both women. I was just like, this really goes against the perception that we have in the West about what women are allowed to do in Saudi Arabia, and they said, “oh, there’s probably more women working on films in Saudi Arabia than men.”
So the other than all the great films you’ve curated here, you’ve crafted some more original films for this set. You crafted a documentary, not a four hour documentary, but a documentary and a feature length and a short. So what drove you to actually sort of add those to the wealth of films you’ve already had on the set?
Well, we knew the first box set was built around Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched to a certain extent and we were like, with the second box what are we going to do? Because we don’t have a new movie that can serve the same kind of function. I was like, well, you know, we already had a movie that is a documentary explaining what folk horror is, and debating it and giving all kinds of examples of it. But what if we actually make a folk horror film for this box set? So that was how the discussions of Sean Hogan’s film, To Fire You Come at Last came into it. I was like, let’s make a new film and let’s open the box set with that film.
When we got Sundelbolong, the Suzzanna film, David (Gregory), was just like, “Oh, I really want to make a documentary extra about Suzzanna. Just about that actress and her role in Indonesia, because she’s like a really kind of mythical figure over there.” I was like, amazing. Go for it. So originally it was going to be like an extra on Sundelbolong, but in typical Severin fashion, it grew into its own film. My only regret is that I didn’t put it further up in the box, because it was a brand new film. But the structure (of the set) was kind of determined when I was still thinking it was going to be like a half an hour extra with Sundelbolong, and so geographically, I kind of put that movie where it was, because it made sense with the flow.
But then when David turned up with this amazing feature length documentary, I was kind of like, “oh no, now it feels like it’s kind of buried on the disk”, so I sort of lament the placement of that film because I feel like if if it should be one of the first things. But luckily people watch the films in whatever the order they want, they don’t necessarily watch them in the order I curated them.
We also commissioned a new experimental short from a filmmaker named Rhayne Vermette in Winnipeg, who does all kinds of cool stuff with optical printing. She does everything with analog equipment and lots of overlays and it’s all done handmade through these very intricate processes, which I think a lot of people can’t totally get now because they’re like, “oh, I know how to just do that on the computer.” So maybe people don’t get how impressive it is what she’s doing because it’s very process driven. But we said, if we give you the film, White Reindeer, can you make a film like the types of films you make, using footage from this film? So she made a short film called The Night Side of the Sky, which is like a four minute experimental film, using imagery from White Reindeer, that’s really beautiful.
We also made a book to go with the box set, that’s 250 pages of original folk horror fiction. It was important this time around, we were like, how can we make this box set different? We just were like, we want to contribute new work, as opposed to just commenting on people’s work, we want to actually contribute to the conversation and create new work. So we created a new book, a new documentary, a new short film, and an experimental short film, for the box.
So what’s your favorite film on the set? What’s the one thing you hope if somebody picks up the set they’ll watch? I know it’s like picking your favorite child.
Oh God, it’s really hard to say. I mean, one of the surprising ones I would say is Io Island, the South Korean film, if people haven’t seen that. There’s lots of like real gems in here in terms of stuff we unearthed that hasn’t, in the case of like the Welsh films, been seen outside of that country.
I think for me, it’s Who Fears the Devil, The Legend of Hillbilly John, the funny thing about that is when I first saw that movie, I hated it. Like when I first saw it years and years ago, I thought it was such a bad movie. I was like, oh my God, these effects are so bad and this is so cheesy. And many of my favorite films, that’s how my relationship with them started, I didn’t just instantly go like, oh my God, this is my favorite movie. I had some problems with the movie and then over time I just keep going back to it, and I keep watching it again and then I realize over time that I’m just like, I love this movie so much.
It has so many flaws, which is obviously what I was responding to when I first saw it, but there’s also so much heart and so much magic. I know that Manly Wade Wellman fans when they first saw that movie did not like it. I don’t think Manly Wade Wellman liked it, because it’s based on his short stories. But over time I’ve just come to really appreciate the unique aspect of the film. Like we don’t have that many Appalachian folk horror films that are really delving into the folk magic of the Hill People. There’s real occult books that he talks about in the original stories and in the movie that are of interest. It’s full of amazing character actors for one thing, but also Hedges Capers who plays John, I think is just perfect.
I just love him in that role and I love all the music in it.
I just watched that on Sunday and I kind of liked it, but I didn’t quite lock in. But then I watched the alternate opening and it was like a totally different movie with that context and I asked myself why wasn’t this included?
Well, the producer of the film, he wasn’t the director, but he for all intents and purposes, he kind of acted like the director, Barney Rosenzweig. It was like really his baby, his project. He wanted us to have the Who Fears the Devil cut. So the original version of the film, and I asked him, do you want us to put this opening and attach it to the film, so that people get the whole thing? Or do you want the alternate opening to be separate, and so he chose for it to be separate.
Finally, I want to ask about your new Doc Killing for Culture doc that was just announced, because I have read that book and I am excited to see your take on the project. How far along are you on that?
I’m just doing research still, so it’s like obviously it’s based on the book or the book is kind of the starting point. But there’s a lot of other research that I’m doing too, because there’s been a lot of scholarship on those topics since that book came out. I also have my own ideas about things that are interesting to me that I want to focus on. So right now actually a lot of what I’m doing is investigating the more technical aspects of what I want to do, because I want to make the technical aspects more deliberate than the first film, like the for the folk horror documentary when I made it, we were again thinking it was going to be an extra.
So we did it kind of the way we do our extras, which is that when we want to interview somebody, we find somebody that’s local to them, like a camera person that’s local to them and get them to go film the person and send us the footage. So the result of that is that the whole movie, every interview looks totally different. Luckily, nobody really commented on it, so that meant that other stuff in the film was interesting enough that they weren’t noticing the technical limitations of it. But for this time, I was like now that I know going in that it’s going to be a feature, I want to treat it more like a feature on the camera side of things.
So I have a DOP, and we are now just working out like what kind of camera, what kind of lenses, what kind of backdrop, like just the actual technical stuff about the interviews, because I can’t shoot any of the interviews until we have determined all that stuff. I can’t just start and go interview somebody in a random location and then find that it doesn’t match with what we’re thinking of for the whole film. So I’m just being a little bit more deliberate on the upfront side of things. When I did the folk horror film, I’d never made a film before, so there was a lot of stuff I did backwards, where I was like, oh, if I planned this more in advance, this wouldn’t have been as hard.
So I’m trying to just do a lot more planning in advance, rather than just rushing into the interviews.
