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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, music and pop culture books with an emphasis on supporting Canadian writers. A Spectacular Optical book lives in that place between entertainment and rigorous scholarship, but all are unmistakably driven by personal passion. We work with a number of designers to ensure that each book is an object of beauty with significant illustration to support the text aesthetically.

Through our film development and production arm, we support the creation of short, feature-length and episodic media. And through our distribution arm we produce film restorations and handle theatrical, digital and physical media distribution for a curated selection of titles, with an emphasis on music/counterculture, landscape/design and experimental genre works.

Additionally, Spectacular Optical presents film events throughout the year and offers an eclectic mix of articles, essays and interviews on our website.

 

Staff

  • Kier-La Janisse

    Owner | Creative Director

    Kier-La Janisse is the founder 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.

  • Chandra Mayor

    Print Editor

    Chandra Mayor is the author of three critically-acclaimed books of fiction and poetry; she is the recipient of several literary awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction, among others. She has worked for a number of magazines and journals in various capacities, including as an editor, copy editor, and production manager. Her literary work has been widely anthologized and taught in universities across Canada and the US. She has taught all genres of creative writing in various contexts, from universities and colleges to workshops for exploited youth, people with schizophrenia, and others. Her professional residencies include the Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg. She has performed her work on CBC Radio and at festivals and venues across Canada, including the VIA Rail Poetry Train, Harbourfront, Venus Envy, etc. Mayor is also an accomplished textile and visual artist, and an experienced community organizer.