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Despite the protestations of the old guard, though, the movie was a hit, and in the ensuing decades, Obayashi’s esteem has only grown. 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. 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. We also have KunFuu who, in one scene, battles a battalion of lumber (yes, lumber). 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.
Film Review: Hausu (House) (
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The film, not looking like our version of reality, takes the viewers on an immersive journey into the unknown. 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.
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‘Hausu’ makes you feel like you’re tripping at a Halloween party in the best way possible. Equally absurd and nightmarish, House might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. Never before available on home video in the United States, it’s one of the most exciting cult discoveries in years. Equally absurd and nightmarish, HOUSE might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet.
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‘Hausu’ is the funnest haunted house movie ever made thanks to its trippy visuals and playful nature. It plays homage to the typical haunted house story while turning its tropes and visual style on its head. With its bright colors, hybrid of different visual effects, and rapid editing, ‘Hausu’ is a film that one can’t look away from. It will keep you glued to the screen and wondering both what will happen next and how we even got here in the first place.
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. 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.
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After the project was green-lit, it was put on hold for two years as no one at Toho wanted to direct it. However, Obayashi kept promoting the film until the studio allowed him to direct it himself. 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. 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. The film, with its vibrant colors and confusing editing, doesn’t look like our reality.
In the heart of a violet forest, an old house awaits young girls.
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. 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.
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Youth is on display, sweetly scored and dead center in the frame, briefly warped by ghoulish imaginings. ‘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. 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.
” one of the girls coos early in the film at footage of an atomic detonation—his intentions in doing so aren’t initially clear. Are the girls simply callous, or is 32 years of distance from unprecedented horror enough to justify their lighthearted attitudes? It isn’t until the final two survivors find and read Auntie’s diary that they recognize not only the tremendous loss and betrayal that the war left in its wake, but how the shadow of that loss has deformed into the specters and nightmares that now assail them. Their only hope as they float upon an ocean of blood, out of options and no exit in sight, is that Mr. Togo might finally arrive at the house just in time to save them. The piano swallows Melody whole, and her remaining disembodied fingers plunk out a final few bars of the leitmotif before hitting a sour note and being crushed under the piano lid. Between the leitmotif’s obliteration of Gorgeous’ personality and its consumption of Melody, it becomes clear that this “beautiful song” belongs neither to us nor the girls; it’s not ours to find comfort in, but instead a painful relic of an era whose youth saw their dreams and futures leveled by the atom bomb.
Gorgeous appears as her aunt in the reflection in the blood and then cradles Fantasy. Toho Studios approached Obayashi with the suggestion to make a film like Jaws. Influenced by ideas from his daughter Chigumi, he developed ideas for a script by Chiho Katsura.
If Obayashi’s “younger generation” is as musically inclined as he claims, the message must be as unequivocal to them as it is to us, especially when communicated through melodies crafted by their own cohort. This lilting music-box melody is the prime transformative catalyst not only for Gorgeous, but for actress Kimiko Ikegami. Without the benefit of seeing the visual effects that accompany her possession, Ikegami has only the leitmotif to inform her new thousand-yard stare, the flat affect that crawls into her voice, her slow shuffle down the stairs and to the telephone. Much like the house (and House) itself, the leitmotif’s externally inviting character has been subsumed by its new association with a haunted, heartbroken past—for us, for the actresses, and for Gorgeous, whose dreams of eternal love are destroyed by her new stepmother and the vision in the mirror. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House was released in Japan in 1977 to a highly polarized reaction. To the lifelong devotee of classical Japanese cinema, it was indeed sacrilegious, a mutant child born of American genre bombast, anime-style hyperkinesis, and manic psychedelia.
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