Works as a drinking game ‘midnight B-movie’ for cultists, this teenage-girls-visit-haunted-house psychedelic head trip entertains with its over-the-top and bewildering horror-comedy and creative special effects.
Review #2,945
Dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi
1977 | Japan | Horror, Comedy, Fantasy | 88min | 1.33:1 | Japanese
NC16 (passed clean) for some nudity and disturbing scenes
Cast: Kimiko Ikegami, Kumiko Ohba, Ai Matsubara, Miki Jinbo, Eriko Tanaka
Plot: A schoolgirl and six of her classmates travel to her aunt’s country home, which turns out to be haunted.
Awards: –
Distributor: Toho
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Haunted House; Innocent Schoolgirls
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Normal
Audience Type: Cult Mainstream
Viewed: Criterion Blu-ray
Spoilers: No
Almost unheard of in the West for a long time, House became a cult sensation when it was put on home media circa 2009-ish, increasing its accessibility exponentially around the world.
The debut feature of Nobuhiko Obayashi, who dabbled in creative advertising in his early days, House is that over-the-top, outrageous, bewildering and highly entertaining piece of eye-popping art that goes beyond its seeming B-movie roots.
It’s still a B-movie at heart (and I say that with affection), yet it is so wild and unhinged that there is no way to view it except to be unserious about it.
It’s a movie where you can round up your friends for a midnight psychedelic head trip, and play drinking games for every [insert weird/strange/bizarre scene, action or dialogue] that you see.
A marvel of special effects including the use of animation, House takes the teenage-girls-visit-haunted-house trope and tears it apart, not so much narratively but visually and perhaps even metaphysically.
”My fingers are gone.”
One can find a good dose of morbid humour in the horror, be it decapitated heads, severed hands or the gallons of fake blood used that would make that blood-soaked elevator scene in Kubrick’s The Shining (released three years later) seem unimpressive in comparison.
Featuring also a demon cat (a ubiquitous entity in Japanese supernatural mythology), House is at its core a tale about failed relationships, where the lonely dead seek vengeance against the lively youths, who seem to possess everything they desire until they are literally consumed in a myriad of creative ways by objects in the house.
Even the girls seem to be, at some point, accepting of their fates, despite their struggles to rebel against the forces against them.
House would make a terrific double-bill with Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987), which shares a similar bonkers tone and a proclivity towards gleeful sadism in the name of unadulterated exploitative fun.
Grade: B+
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 