HOUSE (1977)
Produced & Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi
Written by Chiho Katsura
Released by Janus Films
Japanese with English subtitles
Japan. 87 min. Not Rated
With Kimiko Ikegami, Eriko Tanaka, Kumiko Oba, Ai Matsubara, Masayo Miyako, Mieko Sato, Miki Jinbo, Yoko Minamida, Saho Sasazawa & Haruko Wanibuchi
 

Don’t be late, horror fans, assuming House is playing as part of a midnight cult program. This feature-length piece of Japanese psychosis, in the guise of a new 35mm print, is now enjoying its first ever run in the United States. Come early, for this is a premiere, and it is quite a raucous one at that, a funhouse of psychedelic imagery, ghostly absurdities, and a surprising amount of gratuitous up-the-skirt shots. Seven teenaged girls, nicknamed accordingly to their individual personality quirks (Sweet, Fantasy, etc.), spend the summer in the country, and are eventually picked off one by one, dying in grisly yet pertinent ways, including being eaten by a piano and death by pillow fight.

In 1977, director Nobuhiko Obayashi, an accomplished adman, commissioned his 11-year-old daughter to brainstorm ideas for his debut film. What followed was this effects-heavy schoolgirl-killed-by-numbers escapade, presented from the childlike, over-simplified perspective of one of the girls, Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami), who rebels over her father’s new choice of girlfriend. She sees her vacation as an extension of childhood freedom, and induces her friends to join her.

Obayashi defies any and all symbolic logic here, piling on horrific, comic, and grotesque images of what could only be described as a haunted house on potent hallucinogens. He defies as well any familiar standards of taste in special effects, using his considerable advertising chops to create scene after scene of now-cheesy analog tricks, including clunky slow motion, rotoscoping, and superimposition.

House won’t offer much in the way of a technical breakthrough though, and it’s hard to pinpoint a real historical significance besides helping to define the teen-horror genre. It’s more than a “so bad it’s good” situation, though, in that Obayashi must have been fully aware of how bizarre the project would be. Obscure films don’t garner much more than a cult following anyway, but House is a perfect combination obscurity and a genre that begs to exist purely underground. Offbeat horror films often taste better with age.

Obayashi’s film embraces a low-budget chic, but it is a far different experience than the usual cheese-fest fare populating the midnight slot. Most of the film feels thrown together, even made up on the spot, yet it quickly becomes apparent how meticulous this filmmaker is, who ties each element of the lunacy together by the end. Obayashi provides a small lesson in form here, demonstrating an everything-at-once kind of storytelling, where imposed meaning disappears into the ether, and for an hour and a half the actual universe is exposed, or at least the 1970’s-era Japanese pop culture universe.

There is powerful commentary, however, but it’s more a disgusted reaction than a theme. The schoolgirls revel in irresponsibility, clinging to their juvenile interests and defying the path of adulthood. Obayashi delights in destroying them not out of a misogynist impulse, as horror directors are sometimes accused of, but more out of sheer contempt for their cushy childishness, and subversively indicts the rest of society for creating these skirted, spoiled monsters in the first place. Michael Lee
January 15, 2010