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A
far weirder than average haunted house movie from Japan.
Yes, I (and probably you) am sick to death of haunted house flicks, but
this one is different. A heavily
stylized film dealing with issues of sexuality and femininity, I don't know
that it's all that good, but again, it's definitely different.
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HOUSE'S
director Nobuhiko Obayashi is quite a cult figure in his native Japan.
This 1977 film was his first, and he's gone on to make at least a
dozen more, including cult classics like SUMMER WITH GHOSTS (1989) and DRIFTING
CLASSROOM (1991), most of them dealing, as this film does, with the
complexities of adolescence. So
highly regarded is Obayashi that he's widely referred to by a nickname, Obi,
and has much of his work classified as "Ominichi," the name of the resort
town where "Obi" grew up, and where HOUSE and many other of his films were
shot.
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Oshare,
a teenage girl, is unable to come to terms with the untimely death of her
mother and her father's new mistress. Together
with several school friends, Oshare decides to visit the secluded country house
of a distant aunt.
Upon arriving, the girls find Oshare's aunt, a seemingly kind, wheelchair
bound, sterile old woman eagerly awaiting their arrival. The dark and creepy old house, for its part, reveals
immediately that it has hallucinogenic powers: as soon as the girls set foot
inside, they're assailed by visions of falling chandelier pieces.
More strange things happen...they find that a grand piano plays by
itself and one of the girls hallucinates a severed head in a well nearby.
By the time they figure out something's up, it's too late.
One of the girls, playing the piano, gets her hands chopped off (which
in turn continue to play!) and ends up, in one of the film's most outrageous
scenes, literally devoured by the instrument.
All
Oshare's friends get devoured in one way or another by the house, which seems
to have taken on its owner's pent-up sexuality (or something) and is all too
eager to consume these nubile virgins.
A
horny house?
I definitely haven't heard that
one before!
In
the end, only Oshare is left alive. In
refusing to surrender to the house's spell, she ends up becoming part of it,
happily luring her father's hated mistress into the fold.
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To
call this film bizarre would be an understatement.
Obayashi's ultra-stylized approach takes some getting used to; the
whole thing is deliberately artificial and decked out with stylistic quirks
(irises, superimpositions, etc.) that serve no apparent purpose.
The tone is pretty much set by the opening credits, with the title
"HOUSE" imprinting itself in lurid, cartoony style, and the O becoming a
toothy mouth.
Accentuating
the film's feminine themes, the opening scenes are filmed and edited in
histrionic, brightly lit romance movie stylization, complete with a sentimental
theme that plays over and over...and, for that matter, continues even when the
horror movie business kicks in. Once
this happens, Obayashi utilizes "creative" intercutting (between one girl
playing the piano and another staring into a mysteriously crumbing mirror), a
musical number (involving the ancient aunt, a skeleton and a cat!) and much
hallucinogenic animation. As the
horror intensifies, the film descends increasingly into outright psychadelia
until by the outrageous climax it seems closer to a late-60's drug movie
(such as THE TRIP or PSYCH-OUT) than a horror flick...much less a haunted house
movie, surely the most traditional of all horror subgenres, not here, though!
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HOUSE
(HAUSU)
Toho
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi
Producer: Nobuhiko Obayashi
Screenplay: Nobuhiko Obayashi, Chiho Katsura
Cinematography:
Yoshitaka Sakamoto
Editor: Nobuo Ogawa
Cast: Kimiko Ikegami, Kumiko Ohba, Yoko Minamida, Miki Jinbo, Mitsutoshi
Ishigami, Aei Kobayashi, Ai Matsubara, Masayo Miyako
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