Join us for a discussion on women in horror films with producer, writer and founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies Kier-la Janisse and filmmaker Alice Lowe, whose debut feature film Prevenge was made in Cardiff and features in Janisse’s new edition of the book The House of Psychotic Women.
+
Prevenge
Wales | 2016 | 88’ | 15 | Alice Lowe | Alice Lowe, Jo Hartley, Kayvan Novak, Mike Wosniak, Kate Dickie
Widow Ruth is seven months pregnant when, believing herself to be guided by her unborn baby, she embarks on a homicidal rampage, dispatching anyone who stands in her way. An unexpectedly touching comedy of the blackest kind, filmed in Cardiff on a small budget whilst Lowe herself was pregnant is a modern classic.
Renowned writer, curator and director Kier-La Janisse is joining Matchbox Cine for a UK tour in support of a 10th anniversary expanded edition of her seminal book, House of Psychotic Women, subtitled an ‘autobiographical topography of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films’. Janisse’s ground-breaking mix of keen critical analysis and clear-eyed, thoroughly compelling memoir inspired a generation of critics, programmers and film-makers. The influential tome has also played no small role in canonising a range of obscure, fringe and forgotten genre titles, many now considered essential.
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, programmer, producer and founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She is the author of House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012), A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007), and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021), Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She was a producer on David Gregory’s Tales of the Uncanny (2020) and wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021) for Severin Films, where she is a producer and editor of supplemental features. She is currently at work on several books including a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter. For more see kierlajanisse.com
A pitch black, wryly British comedy from the mind of Alice Lowe, Prevenge follows Ruth, a pregnant woman on a killing spree. It’s her misanthropic unborn baby dictating Ruth’s actions, holding society responsible for the absence of a father. The child speaks to Ruth from the womb, coaching her to lure and ultimately kill her unsuspecting victims. Struggling with her conscience, loneliness, and a strange strain of prepartum madness, Ruth must ultimately choose between redemption and destruction at the moment of motherhood.
The House of Psychotic Women UK Tour is presented by Matchbox Cine as part of In Dreams Are Monsters: A Season of Horror Films, a UK-wide film season supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network. indreamsaremonsters.co.uk
