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About

Named after the sinister institution in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Spectacular Optical is a small-press publisher of collectible film and pop culture books with an emphasis on supporting Canadian film writers and filmmakers.

In addition to our print books, throughout the year Spectacular Optical presents film events and brings you articles, essays and interviews with established and emerging genre filmmakers, artists, curators and exhibitors on our website.

Through our film production arm, we support the creation of genre-related short, feature-length and episodic media.

Staff

  • Kier-La Janisse

    Owner | Creative Director

    Kier-La Janisse is the owner and creative director of Spectacular Optical Media. She is a film writer, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films 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 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.