What… the hell… did I just watch?
(And how can I get more of it?)
So, if you were wondering, this is not related to the American House franchise from the 80’s that features Cliff Clavin from Cheers and an adorable caterpillar puppy. It is much, much weirder than that. Coming from Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1977, House is ostensibly a dark fantasy/horror film about a haunted house. I honestly don’t know how I’m going to write about it, though. It’s not so much that Obayashi avoids traditional horror tropes, as it is that he doesn’t traffic in the grammar of filmmaking at all, at least as I’m familiar with it. This is a film where every element is working to disorient you. There are no horror elements at all in the first 30 minutes, but that doesn’t mean the viewer is afforded a foothold to become comfortable with the characters or the premise. From the start, House features dreamlike transitions between animation, silent film, soap opera and slapstick comedy. The school girls at the center of the film are meant to be such archetypes that they are named things like Kung Fu (the athletic one), Prof (the smart one), and Melody (the one who plays piano.) The sound design is wild, with a score that is omnipresent yet unhinged. One of the biggest scares I had was achieved simply by dropping the background music from the soundtrack. I was so used to hearing it that I suddenly became terrified that something awful was about to happen once it was gone. In fact, the only real scares come from being so unsure about what is going on. On the surface, this is a dark movie (featuring decapitation, dismemberment and cannibalism), but its also very silly, and I found myself giggling far more frequently than recoiling in fear.
House is precisely the type of movie that you look for when you are hoping to spend an evening with some “so bad its good” entertainment. The special effects are laughable, its never dull, and the wtf-ratio is… maybe the highest of any movie I’ve ever seen. But here’s the thing. I don’t think this move is so bad its good. I actually think its so good its good. So good its great, even. No matter how crazy or incomprehensible the action, I never got the impression that Obayashi was over-matched by the movie making process or failed to translate his vision to the screen. This surreal carnival ride of a film was not the product of incompetence, it was a pure execution of the filmmaker’s intent. I can’t pretend to understand the themes of the movie – something about the generational divide in post-war Japan, possibly – but I don’t doubt that there is purpose behind all this madness. I am generally wary of randomness for randomness’ sake, but behind all of the unconventional storytelling in House, the story is actually relatively straightforward. A group of school girls goes to spend some of their summer break with one of their aunts, and the aunt is involved in some sort of supernatural menage a trois with a possessed house and a witch cat. The girls are picked off and eaten (sometimes by the aunt, sometimes by the house), one by one. Not conventional, but not hard to follow. Its the way the story gets told that makes it seem like a psychedelic fever dream.
Look, I’m very happy I watched this movie. It was a real delight. I’m just not sure how widely it will appeal, even to people reading a horror movie review blog. I imagine there are some of you who wouldn’t make it through the first fifteen minutes. That being said, I can’t do anything but encourage you to seek it out. I promise you’ve never seen anything like it before, and we could all stand to expand our cinematic horizons. Plus, Kung Fu is simply one of the coolest characters I’ve encountered in a forever. Long live Kung Fu. Long live this crazy-ass movie.
Comments