Horror Fest V Day Two: House

I don't know what to say about Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 film House; it's a deliberately artificial movie, in which almost every shot contains a clearly phony backdrop, model, matte painting, process shot, special effect, or forced perspective set. That's not factoring in the cartoonish music, sound-effects, line delivery, or disjointed editing and camera angles, or the truly strange construction of scene transitions. The film is, to be conservative in describing it, like a Terry Gilliam animation fused with a haunted house film by way of an overdose of LSD.

That being said, to make things clear, House (Hausu) does have a plot: seven schoolgirls (named like Prof, Mac, Kung Fu, Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweetie, and Melody) are planning on going on vacation to the beach with one of their professors. However, Gorgeous' film composer father returns from Italy with a new bride-to-be and she takes it... badly. When the beach trip falls apart, the girls agree to go with Gorgeous to her Aunt's house, accompanied by her aunt's cat Blanche. When they arrive at the house, things start going awry quickly, and girls start disappearing? What is Auntie hiding? Does that piano really want to eat Melody? And why do Blanche's eyes sparkle and cause bad things to happen?

It would be easy to write House off as merely a "cultural misunderstanding," but it seems clear that the film wasn't exactly greeted with open arms in 1977, when it was released in Japan. That it never made it to the U.S. on home video until this year has helped give the bizarreness some mystique, but what you've heard about House is hardly exaggeration: the film is madness delivered with a straight face, making it all the more disarming to watch. I know I'll be watching the film again, and then again after that, until I can begin to process everything going on. In some ways, I have a hard time believing that House and Equinox didn't form the framework that Sam Raimi eventually built The Evil Dead around. Watch all three and it's hard to dismiss that notion.

Please don't take it that House is simply nutty and not worth your time, or something to watch drunkenly and make fun of; this is a film that people could build dissertations on, and I strongly suspect there's plenty of method to be derived from the madness. Seek House out in any way you can, but make sure you're in the proper frame of mind (which, honestly, could be several, and not all legal), but are prepared for a film that doesn't care if you keep up or not. Oh, and enjoy the Rocky Horror Picture Show reference.