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As the video essayist is keen to note, Ôbayashi Sr., a Hiroshima survivor, had plenty of his own childhood trauma to draw upon. And the ultimate impression is of a father-daughter duo working through the things that scare them on-screen (be it cannibalistic pianos to losing your friends to an unfathomable catastrophe). Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that looks at the making of the Japanese 1977 horror movie House. The unpredictable quality of the film adds to the horror since the audience never truly knows what to expect. There is not one moment in the film that will make the audience roll their eyes and say “of course, I saw that coming a mile away”.
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It is as if the film takes what we expect from a regular haunted house movie and gives us the exact opposite, a funhouse mirror look at the tropes we have become accustomed to. The visual wonder of ‘Hausu’ comes from how the film avoids realism in favor of outlandish imagery and surrealism. The visual approach in the film is more based on a childish playfulness than a desire to look realistic. Obayashi does every trick in the books for the visual effects of the film, from animation mixed with live action to rapid-paced editing to whatever this is. While this visual style may seem disorienting at first, it soon immerses the audience in a viewing experience like no other. In a world where every horror film is trying to be more realistic than the last, ‘Hausu’ is a refreshing change of pace, favoring a child-like whimsy to the boring reality that we live in.
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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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Like many a good ghost story, House reflects the ways in which past events can reverberate into the present and, on some level, this is a story about seven happy-go-lucky teenagers being starkly confronted with the wartime trauma their parents’ generation endured. While House is inarguably a work of dense visual and technical complexity, its narrative may well be deceptive in its simplicity. After being widely released in North America in 2009 and 2010, it was met with more favorable response and has since gained a cult following. Another Japanese series made with a similar outward-looking approach will drop April 24 on Disney+. House (Hausu) is a 1977 Japanese surrealist horror comedy Toku film directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi.
Hausu’s creepy old woman is Auntie (Yōko Minamida), who is just having a great time in the film. Instead of being old and shrewd, Auntie revels in the spooky, eating eyeballs and dancing with skeletons. Auntie, like the film itself, has a playful energy unlike the trope of the “creepy old woman”. Auntie acts as a parody of the “creepy old woman” trope by putting the trope on its head, acting differently than the creepy old women that came before her yet still being spooky.
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"People are getting more and more interested in Japanese culture," says Executive Director Kazumi Teune. "Our mission is to share the Japanese culture in Philadelphia. People are embracing shogun culture, anime, samurai, sake and it's all here. Throughout the year we have programs that celebrate the Japanese culture." We are a cultural charity, a National Lottery funding distributor, and the UK’s lead organisation for film and the moving image. Gorgeous tells Ryoko that her friends will wake up soon and that they will be hungry.
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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To add to the absurdity, characters are named after singular traits which define them throughout the film such as Melody who plays the piano, Fanta the daydreamer, and Mac the glutton. Following this, she shrugs and sighs, musing, “It must have been my imagination.” She continues on as if nothing ever happened and the scene is never referenced again. The film is chockfull of scenes like this and it will either captivate or infuriate the viewer to no end. Like a cat which materializes one day on Oshare’s window sill, spews blood in another scene, and plays the piano in reverse.
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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.
Despite Auntie’s hermetic lifestyle and tragic wartime backstory (her fighter-pilot fiancé never returned to marry her), she is far from the Miss Havisham type. The girls find both her and the titular house perfectly charming upon their arrival. But with spooky happenings around the house and the visiting party starting to shrink in numbers, both home and homeowner reveal their sinister true natures. Not to be confused with the American haunted house movie called House, or that other House who's a snarky doctor. The visual style of ‘Hausu’ can’t be explained with rational thinking since children can come up with things that can’t be explained like an adult can. This unexplainable style with little to no logic also adds to the horror of the film.
There’s a central musical theme that reoccurs through the film which is fantastic, but some directorial choices are ineffective (it is only Obayashi’s debut after all). The art design is meticulous as is the sound, but the acting is horrid most of the time. The story of Hausu was a radio hit following relentless promotion by writer/director Obayashi which persuaded Toho studio to adapt it into a feature film. It is often cited as a precursor to Evil Dead 2, but given that it was released in 1977 and the fact that it was almost never made makes this eclectic horror romp rather impressive and more than just a little influential to horror cinema in general. The surreal comedy-horror bit is often trumped by absurdist melodrama with an incomprehensible plot encompassing demonic possession, ESP, telekinesis, and cannibalism.
‘Hausu’ makes you feel like you’re tripping at a Halloween party in the best way possible. Moreover, it was perhaps Chigumi’s input that began moving the project further and further away from Toho’s initial brief, imbuing the emerging story with a certain dream logic. At times House almost feels like a children’s film, its opening scenes featuring broad slapstick, a cheesy pop song and endless girlish giggling. ‘Hausu’ isn’t one of those movies that is “so bad that it’s good” because its look is fully intentional, it doesn’t look this way due to a lack of budget like other cult classics such as ‘Troll 2’. It instead looks like a children’s Halloween themed pop-up book because of the film’s inspiration. While making the film, Obayashi regularly talked to his pre-teen daughter about what scary ideas she thought should be in the movie.
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