Video Watchdog’s Tim Lucas referred to it as one of the 10 “most vital” horror film books of all time,[1] and Ian MacAllister-McDonald of the LA Review of Books called it “the next step in genre theory, as well as the most frightening and heart-rending memoir I’ve read in years.”[2] Her debut feature as a filmmaker, the three-hour documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, premiered at SXSW 2021 where it won the Midnighters Audience Award.

Special guests of the festival included Jean Rollin, Jörg Buttgereit, Udo Kier, Buddy Giovinazzo, John Saxon, Richard Blackburn, Jack Taylor, Jeff Lieberman, Jim Van Bebber, Edwin Neal and more.

Visiting filmmakers included Les Blank, Steve James, Allan King, Kirby Dick, Zacharias Kunuk and Nettie Wild, among others.

In 2010,[15] Janisse founded The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, an international organization that offers undergraduate-level history, theory and production-based masterclasses with branches in London, New York and Los Angeles.

(2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017), as well as publishing Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017).

[19] In 2020, she began the podcast A Song From the Heart Beats the Devil Every Time, expanded from a proposed book project about cult kids film and television from 1965-1985.

The book was first released with endorsements from Fritz the Cat director Ralph Bakshi (“God, this woman can write, with a voice and intellect that's so new.”) and The Wasp Factory author Iain Banks (“Fascinating, engaging and lucidly written: an extraordinary blend of deeply researched academic analysis and revealing memoir.”)[20] In his column in Gorezone #32, Tim Lucas called it “A groundbreaking book,” continuing to say that “This is a rare work within the field, one that takes an almost novelistic leap of imagination in determining and recording its subject and collating its parts.

The book was responsible for the re-popularization of many neglected films (most notably, Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, Karen Arthur’s The Mafu Cage, Eckhart Schmidt’s Der Fan and Tony Williams’ Next of Kin), and since its publication, “Psychotic Women” has been referred to as a subgenre unto itself.

In 2017, Janisse and producer Andy Starke of Rook Films pitched a television series based on the book at the Frontieres International Co-Production Market.

[22] From 2005 to 2010, Janisse made a series of unofficial music documentaries, referred to by video artist Hope Peterson as “bibliodocs,” as they featured exclusively pre-existing footage with contextual intertitles or voiceover narration.

In 2010 her bibliodoc Teen Routines: The Self-Made Magic of R. Stevie Moore screened at The Horse Hospital in London, UK[23] and the Antimatter Festival in Victoria, Canada.

This collaboration led to Janisse's first feature as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, which premiered at SXSW 2021 and won the Midnighters Audience Award.

[26] In 2019, Janisse participated in the restoration and re-release of Harry Nilsson’s 1971 animated TV movie The Point, offering the use of her personal 16mm film print and contributing to several of the bonus features for the 2020 MVD Blu-ray release as a producer and editor.