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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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. The girls try to find the aunt to unlock the door but discover Mac's severed hand in a jar. Melody begins to play the piano to keep the girls' spirits up and they hear Gorgeous singing upstairs. As Prof and Kung Fu go to investigate, Melody's fingers are bitten off by the piano, and it ultimately eats her whole.
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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.
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During its opening titles, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (Hausu, 1977) introduces itself on screen as “a movie”, briskly knocking down the fourth wall before the action has even begun. This slyly knowing gesture at the film’s outset serves as a statement of intent, with everything in House reinforcing a sense of hyper-cinematic unreality, from its painted skies and candy-coloured palette to its hyperactive editing and every-trick-in-the-book visual effects. A schoolgirl travels with six of her classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky, remote country home, where supernatural events occur almost immediately. They come face to face with evil spirits, bloodthirsty pianos, and a demonic housecat. The reading is interrupted by the giant-sized head of Gorgeous, who reveals that her aunt died many years ago while waiting for her fiancé to return from World War II.
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Quite the contrary, there are outlandish visuals and moments in the film that will make the audience wonder how the heck that even happened, like a man turning into a pile of bananas. The visual wonder of ‘Hausu’ will keep audiences glued to the screen while causing them to never expect what will happen next. 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. When Fantasy goes to retrieve the watermelon from the well, she finds Mac's disembodied head, which flies in the air and bites Fantasy's buttocks before she escapes.
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.
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.
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. Now, if all this sounds like style over substance to you, that wouldn’t be an entirely unfair assessment. After all, House is ostensibly a horror film and, although often a little creepy, it’s never truly scary; it’s much too excitable to establish any considerable dread or tension. But as with many other ‘midnight movies’ of the period, the style itself proves substantive, offering viewers a spooky, funny and often downright trippy ghost-train ride. 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.
The film, with its vibrant colors and confusing editing, doesn’t look like our reality. The film, not looking like our version of reality, takes the viewers on an immersive journey into the unknown. After the blockbuster success of Jaws, the Toho studio wanted to produce a Japanese competitor in that market.
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