Event Details
Author and editor Kier-La Janisse visits Shelf Life with copies of her latest books: COCKFIGHT: A FABLE OF FAILURE, her monograph unpacking the “doomed” journey of Monte Hellman’s 1974 film COCKFIGHTER, based on the book by crime writer Charles Willeford; and TRUTH & SOUL: A ROBERT DOWNEY SR. READER, an anthology of essays and ephemera co-edited with Clint Enns about the idiosyncratic career of experimental filmmaker and satirist Robert Downey (rebranded Sr. when his son’s profile eclipsed his own).
Janisse will be reading from the introduction to COCKFIGHT and talking a bit about the ups and downs of Downey’s oeuvre with trailers and clips. There will be time for questions and she will be signing books – including any of her previous books you bring with you!
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films, creative director of Spectacular Optical Media, founder of the Miskatonic institute of Horror Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Truth & Soul: A Robert Downey Sr. Reader (2025), Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023), and is the creator/showrunner of The Haunted Season on Shudder for which she made her first narrative film, The Occupant of the Room (2025). She is currently in development on several book and film projects. For more see kierlajanisse.com | spectacularoptical.com