Tag: Edinburgh

House of Psychotic Women UK Tour

Matchbox Cine is bringing renowned author, programmer and film-maker Kier-La Janisse to the UK for a series of events to mark the 10th anniversary, expanded edition of her seminal book House of Psychotic Women (FAB Press). Starting at Matchbox Cine’s Weird Weekend festival in Glasgow on 29/10, the tour will stop in Edinburgh, Nottingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Cardiff and London, 31/10 to 05/11.

Matchbox Cine has partnered with the UK’s major genre festivals and exhibitors to co-present each stop, including Dead by Dawn, Mayhem Film Festival, Grimmfest, Abertoir and The Final Girls. At each stop, Kier-La Janisse will introduce a film featured in her book, sign books and take part in a Q&A or In-Conversation hosted by a special guest. Guest hosts include Anna Bogutskaya (The Final Girls), Christina Newland (She Found It at the Movies,) and Alice Lowe (Prevenge).

10 years ago, Kier-La Janisse published HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN, subtitled an “autobiographical topography of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films”. A ground-breaking mix of keen critical analysis and clear-eyed, thoroughly compelling memoir, Janisse’s influential tome inspired a generation of critics, programmers and film-makers. The book has also played no small role in canonising a range of obscure, fringe and forgotten genre titles, many now considered essential. 

Titles screened at the various stops will include new restorations of Claude D’Anna’s Tromple l’oeil (1975), Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Identikit AKA The Driver’s Seat (1974, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol, based on Muriel Spark’s novel) and Polish vampire curio I Like Bats (1986); rare outings for Don Siegel’s Clint Eastwood starrer The Beguiled (1971), David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) and Robert Wise’s Shirley Jackson adaptation The Haunting (1963); Alice Lowe’s Prevenge (with the director in attendance); and Andrzej Żuławski’s remarkable study in eldritch hysteria, Possession (1981).

The entire tour will feature descriptive subtitles/SDH and live captions, to ensure the events are accessible to as many people as possible.

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.

Full details of the tour and ticket links at makeitweird.co.uk

The programme 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

Subtitled screenings Jan-Feb 2020

We’ve produced brand-new SDH/captions for D/deaf audiences for a couple of upcoming screenings in Scotland.

Friday 31/01 Sing and fight! Queer film night (Glasgow)
Sunday 02/02 Leithers Sunday Matinee

Very different events, but both a pleasure to work on. One is a showcase of the absurd, political and queer musical films of John Greyson, the other a new restoration of a 1988 documentary on Leith and its changing socio-economic landscape.

Sing and Fight! is an event showcasing the absurd, political and queer musical films of John Greyson. Produced by Edinburgh Artists’ Moving Image Festival, in collaboration with HIV Scotland and Pollyanna queer cabaret, it takes place at Glasgow’s The Deep End. Alongside rarely shown musical short films from the 1980s, the event centres on clips from Zero Patience (John Greyson, 1993). Greyson’s film uses the unlikely form of song and dance to tell the story of the unfairly stigmatised, supposed ‘patient zero’ of the AIDS epidemic in North America.

Leithers (Alistair Scott, 1988) documents the people who lived and worked in Leith during the ’80s and examines the changing socio-economic landscape of Leith at that time. The film screening will be introduced by film-maker Alistair Scott, Associate Professor of Film & TV at Edinburgh Napier University. The screening will also be accompanied by a short compilation of archive footage of Leith from the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive and will be followed by a short panel discussion about Leith’s past, present and future.

Thanks to Edinburgh Artists’ Moving Image Festival – EAMIF and LeithLate for the opportunity to work on these, and more importantly for making them accessible to D/deaf audiences!

If you are interested in commissioning subtitles for a screening, event, festival or release, or would simply like to know how it works, get in touch: info@matchboxcineclub.com.

Long Shot (1978) + Q&A

Long Shot

Matchbox Cineclub’s July screening and the debut of our monthly residency at CCA is a very rare, 35mm outing for Long Shot (Maurice Hatton, 1978), followed by a Q&A discussion of the state of Scottish filmmaking with some special invited guests. The screening takes place at 7pm on Thursday 21st July. Matchbox’s residency continues on the third Thursday of every month at CCA.

Filmed and set at Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1977, Long Shot is a deadpan satire about the trials and tribulations of British independent filmmaking, with terrific cameos from Wim Wenders, Susannah York, Stephen Frears, Alan Bennett and John Boorman. A budding Scottish film producer (Charles Gormley) tries to get his ambitious Aberdeen-set western financed, and while he attracts some major stars and directors to the film he finds that with their support come more and more script changes.

Reviewing Long Shot in 1980, Janet Maslin said, “Maurice Hatton’s Long Shot begins as an in-joke and evolves into a film that’s fresh, cheerful and very appealing.”

This screening is by arrangement with Mithras Films. Matchbox are screening the long out-of-circulation Long Shot from a 35mm print straight from the BFI Archives.

Tickets are £4 + £1 booking fee from CCA’s box office, online, in person or by phone, 0141 352 4900.