Stranger With My Face Horror Film Festival presents
Talk and Clip Show with Kier-La Janisse
SATANIC PANIC: POP-CULTURAL PARANOIA IN THE 1980s
In the 1980s, everywhere you turned there were warnings about a widespread evil conspiracy to indoctrinate the vulnerable through the media they consumed. This percolating cultural hysteria, now known as the “Satanic Panic,” was both illuminated and propagated through almost every pop culture pathway in the 1980s, from heavy metal music to Dungeons & Dragons role playing games, Christian comics, direct-to-VHS scare films, pulp paperbacks, Saturday morning cartoons and TV talk shows.
Relive the era with the book’s co-editor Kier-La Janisse, who will present a talk and clip show based on Spectacular Optical’s new book Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s. The event also doubles as the Hobart launch of the book and a limited number of copies will be available to purchase.
Date: 1 December 2025
Time: 8 – 9.30 pm (doors open at 7.30)
Tickets: $10, BOOK ONLINE or buy at the door
Venue: Pop-Up Theatre No. 5, Macquarie Point
About Kier-La Janisse:
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer and programmer, the founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and Owner/Editor-in-Chief of Spectacular Optical. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival in Vancouver (1999-2005) and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She has written for Filmmaker, Shindig!, Incite: Journal of Experimental Media, Rue Morgue and Fangoria magazines, has contributed to Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011) and Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington Books, 2015) and is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012). She co-edited Kid Power! and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s with Paul Corupe, and is currently writing A Song From the Heart Beats the Devil Every Time, about children’s programming from 1965-1985.
