Description
House of Psychotic Girls is an autobiographical exploration of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films.
Cinema is filled with neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a lady losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides probably the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart – ‘the eccentric’ – the feminine neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films the ones rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.
Named after the U.S.-retitling of Carlos Aured’s The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, House of Psychotic Girls is an examination of those characters through a daringly personal autobiographical lens. Anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and an examination of female madness, both onscreen and stale.
This sharply-designed book with a 32-page full-colour section is packed with rare stills, posters, pressbooks and artwork that combine with circle of relatives photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the difficult to understand in equal measure.
* comprehensive appendix
* 1000 rare photos, many in color