Over the years, any number of films purported to be cult classics have let me down in one way or another. I always assumed that I saw them beyond a time in my life during which I could have fully appreciated their appeal. Happily, the 1977 experimental fantasy horror comedy by Ōbayashi Nobuhiko (大 林宣彦) is not one of those movies that passed me by. Almost never has a film so anticipated, so hyped up, lived up to, nay, exceeded, my expectations as did House.
The plot, perhaps the least important part of the film, revolves around seven girls who have decided to vacation at their ringleader Gorgeous' aunt's house in the countryside. The wheelchair-bound aunt turns out to be a vampiric ghoul who prays on the girls to restore her youth, which was squandered after losing a fiance in the second World War. The girls are picked off one by one, despite the long-coming arrival of a male love interest, as well as Gorgeous' soon-to-be mother-in-law. What ensues are psychedelic freak outs where girls are torn limb from limb by killer pianos, decimated by mattresses and bedding material, or drowned in a room full of blood spewing from an oil painting of the aunt's ever-stalking Persian, Blanche.
Ōbayashi, an early pioneer of experimental film in Japan (and television commercials), is said to have borrowed the idea for the story from his seven year old daughter, and this goes some way toward accounting for the inexplicable happenings of the film (near the end, a would-be "knight in shining armor" is waylaid by a watermelon salesman and ends up becoming a heap of bananas), as well as its surreal pacing and quality. The film's palette is glossy and hyper-real: the young girls gaze dreamily into immaculate sunsets, silky black hair blowing in the wind, just moments before fishing decapitated heads from antique wells The house of the title rivals anything in Kwaidan or Ugetsu for atmospheric effect, and the movie is a slapdash juxtaposition of sugary sentiments and Argento-esque mutilation. House (or Hausu, as it is often re-transliterated from the katakana transliteration of the English word "house") in some ways sets the standard for creating an atmosphere and following through on it. All the while, the soundtrack consists of an unrelenting barrage of sound effects and eerie piano loops, with psychedelic rock orchestrated by Micky Yoshino and his band Godiego.
The special effects, which either by choice or by virtue of the film's release date are super lo-fi, are trippy to say the least. Reminiscent of Ken Russel's Altered States, but delivered in the manner of classic spookshow methodology (at any number of times I felt like I was watching the culmination of all the disjointed segments of Monsters Crash the Pajama Party), House pushes the medium of film beyond its limits, in ways more creative than anything the modern age of CGI entertainment has approximated. At times the film crackles and burns on the screen, at others a psychedelic montage of disjointed images and swirls of fuzzy color assault the viewer. At one point in the story, our heroine Gorgeous emerges from upstairs to a slowed-down and scratchy motion effect that feels as if the projector is slowly eating the film. Continuity and lucidity are two qualities that Ōbayashi decided to dispense with early on in the project.
But perhaps the most charming aspect of the film is its unabashed catering to cliches and fetishes, albeit like being force-fed gumballs laced with LSD. The seven damsels begin the movie in school girl uniforms and before it is out one spends the majority of the action in bow-adorned panties, another is dolled up in watabōshi, and various others are stripped bare for the hungry-eyed spectator. Painting in heavy strokes of melodrama, while at the same time sending up sundry porno plots (there is a bookish nerd, a cutesy housewife type, a kung fu heroine, a doughy-faced innocent, and so on) that had probably yet to emerge, House is a perfect blend of pop art and traditional horror genre elements--self aware, but also a tribute to the classic haunted house storyline. It runs the gamut of creepy felines, sinister crones, antiquated manors and plenty of gore to boot. Later genre entries from the J-horror explosion of the early noughts (St. John's Wort, for one) could have learned a thing or two by following Ōbayashi's example and not taking themselves quite so seriously.
In my book, House is a work of perfection, untouchable to the last detail. But then it's hard to imagine a movie that combines so many seemingly incompatible pieces of my personality. Waiting for the late October release from Criterion will be a trial of the will by any estimation. Fortunately, my first viewing of it was consummated in a slightly run-down, vintage-era theater, where it dumbfounded hordes of ironic hipsters that arrived expecting an ordinary low budget horror film from the 70's and got something more akin to Luis Buñuel channeled through Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark . Exiting the room, I heard a girl ask her friends what the hell had happened in the last two hours.
You just gazed into heaven's abyss, baby. And your tiny little world will never be the same again.
