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The pretty but pensive Gorgeous is joined by Prof (brainy), Kung Fu (violent), Fantasy (a daydreamer), Sweet (homely), Melody (musical) and the ever-eating Mac (short for ‘stomach’) on a summer trip to her aunt’s creaky old house in the countryside. The result plays like a head-on collision between The Evil Dead (1981) and Yellow Submarine (1968) – a fevered flight of horror-fantasy like no other. “A movie” is right, for few films have as much fun simply being a movie as House does.
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I had a hard time getting into it but when it finally kicks in...it really kicks in. Seven girls on their summer trip pay a visit to a possessed house which plans to eat them in extremely bizzare and surreal ways. Hollywood Insider is a media network thatfocuses on substance and meaningful entertainment/culture, so as to utilize media as a tool to unite and better our world, by combining entertainment, education and philanthropy, while being against gossip and scandal. There is, however, something underpinning all the madness, a quietly melancholic undercurrent that ultimately elevates the film.
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Obayashi was a director of TV commercials before this full-length feature and in many ways it shows. There is a glossy glow to everything and an obsessive attention to detail that allows even his greatest missteps to seem somehow intentional and (usually) technically sound. The editing is equally exuberant, whether it’s the rapid-fire cutting as Kung Fu leaps into action, or the endlessly inventive scene transitions, which lead the film to unfold with the eerie grace of a haunted pop-up book. The oft-repeated origin story for House tells of a Japanese studio, the legendary Toho company, eager to replicate the runaway success of Steven Spielberg’s recently released Jaws (1975). Indeed, “something like Jaws” seems to have been the entirety of Toho’s brief to Obayashi, then best-known as a director of TV commercials. Obayashi’s darkly comic fable tells the story of seven schoolgirls, each of them named for their defining attribute, à la Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
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8 Best Japanese Found-Footage Horror Movies, Ranked By IMDb - Screen Rant
8 Best Japanese Found-Footage Horror Movies, Ranked By IMDb.
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The aunt disappears after entering the broken refrigerator, and the girls are attacked or possessed by a series of items in the house, such as Gorgeous becoming possessed after using her aunt's mirror and Sweet disappearing after being attacked by mattresses. The girls try to escape the house, but after Gorgeous is able to leave through a door, the rest of the girls find themselves locked in. The girls try to find the aunt to unlock the door but discover Mac's severed hand in a jar. Melody begins to play the piano to keep the girls' spirits up and they hear Gorgeous singing upstairs. As Prof and Kung Fu go to investigate, Melody's fingers are bitten off by the piano, and it ultimately eats her whole.
House was filmed on one of Toho’s largest sets, where Obayashi shot the film without a storyboard over a period of about two months. House’s twisted fairytale quality is further heightened by its storybook aesthetic and playful visual approach. Obayashi’s background in advertising shines through here, his compositions often possessing a boldly graphic pop-art quality. Utilising techniques as diverse as stop-motion, hand-drawn animation, picture-in-picture and liberal use of nascent chroma key effects, House’s visual flare is dizzying. But “something like Jaws” would be the director’s first foray into feature films and, hoping to capture the imagination of the youth market, he enlisted his young daughter Chigumi when developing the concept that would become House. The Evil Dead meets Yellow Submarine in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, an eye-poppingly hyper-real old-dark-house movie that resembles a haunted pop-up book.
Kung Fu's legs manage to escape and damage the painting of Blanche on the wall, which in turn kills Blanche physically. Prof tries to read the diary, but a jar with teeth pulls her into the blood, where she dissolves. Gorgeous appears as her aunt in the reflection in the blood and then cradles Fantasy. Japanese live-action streaming series have struggled to match the global impact of South Korean rivals such as “Squid Game” and “Crash Landing on You.” However, the recent Japan-based shows “Tokyo Vice” and “Shogun” have become popular with international streaming audiences. Both are made by multinational production teams that reject the nearly exclusive domestic focus of the usual drama series backed by consortiums of media companies that have little interest in the overseas market.
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Podcast: The Golden Age of Horror – Eps 1
Quite the contrary, there are outlandish visuals and moments in the film that will make the audience wonder how the heck that even happened, like a man turning into a pile of bananas. The visual wonder of ‘Hausu’ will keep audiences glued to the screen while causing them to never expect what will happen next. Upstairs in the house, Kung Fu and Prof find Gorgeous wearing a bridal gown, who then reveals her aunt's diary to them. Kung Fu follows Gorgeous as she leaves the room, only to find Sweet's body trapped in a grandfather clock, which starts bleeding profusely. Panic-driven, the remaining girls barricade the upper part of the house while Prof, Fantasy and Kung Fu read the aunt's diary. When Fantasy goes to retrieve the watermelon from the well, she finds Mac's disembodied head, which flies in the air and bites Fantasy's buttocks before she escapes.
Casting
During its opening titles, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (Hausu, 1977) introduces itself on screen as “a movie”, briskly knocking down the fourth wall before the action has even begun. This slyly knowing gesture at the film’s outset serves as a statement of intent, with everything in House reinforcing a sense of hyper-cinematic unreality, from its painted skies and candy-coloured palette to its hyperactive editing and every-trick-in-the-book visual effects. A schoolgirl travels with six of her classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky, remote country home, where supernatural events occur almost immediately. They come face to face with evil spirits, bloodthirsty pianos, and a demonic housecat. The reading is interrupted by the giant-sized head of Gorgeous, who reveals that her aunt died many years ago while waiting for her fiancé to return from World War II.
The film, with its vibrant colors and confusing editing, doesn’t look like our reality. The film, not looking like our version of reality, takes the viewers on an immersive journey into the unknown. After the blockbuster success of Jaws, the Toho studio wanted to produce a Japanese competitor in that market.
On this, Obayashi said, “adults only think about things they understand … everything stays on that boring human level” while “children can come up with things that can’t be explained”. By having his daughter’s insights on the film, Obayashi was able to come up with some of his most surreal scenes, like a haunted piano and a mirror’s reflection attacking the viewer. Now, if all this sounds like style over substance to you, that wouldn’t be an entirely unfair assessment. After all, House is ostensibly a horror film and, although often a little creepy, it’s never truly scary; it’s much too excitable to establish any considerable dread or tension. But as with many other ‘midnight movies’ of the period, the style itself proves substantive, offering viewers a spooky, funny and often downright trippy ghost-train ride. There’s also some subplot involving a professor, a bucket, bananas, and a poltergeist but I’ll leave that to you, dear reader, to decipher.
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