Running from March 1st – 14th at Film Forum NYC, a 25-film Japanese Horror festival gives New Yorkers the chance to see Nobuhiko Obayashi’s (The Little Girl Who Conquered Time; His Motorbike, Her Island) House (1977). This Japanese blockbuster was the country’s answer to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), and the legendary Obayashi’s first film. The classic horror-comedy will screen on March 3rd, 6th, 8th, 12th, and 13th, and if you don’t book a ticket now, a witch will send a magic cat to come fetch you to the theater.
“How nice. Summer Vacation.”
House opens with a silly animated title, then a melodramatic, black and white, non-diegetic scene, a woman in a traditional Japanese bridal outfit telling high schooler Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami (The Man Who Stole the Sun)) that she’s waiting for her. Gorgeous then walks out of the scene and into another within the same frame. In that 30 seconds, we’ve been taught how to watch House. There will be reality and un-reality, and every camera trick in the book will tell us this story.
L-R: Miki Jinbo, Eriko Tanaka, Kimiko Ikegami, Kumiko Ôba, Masayo Miyako, Ai Matsubara, Mieko Satô in Nobouhiko Obayashi’s HOUSE. Image Courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
After school, Gorgeous finds that her famous movie composer father has returned from a gig in Italy and he’s brought home a new fiancé played by Haruko Wanubuchi (One Missed Call 2; The Most Terrible Time in My Life), a beautiful jewelry designer. Distraught at what she sees as a threat to her relationship with her single father, Gorgeous abandons her plans to vacation with him and instead flees with her friends to her family estate, inhabited by her old, mysterious aunt. The film follows Gorgeous and her group of friends, all named after a single personality trait of theirs, as they quickly realize that this house, and Aunt Hausu Karei (Yōko Minamida (The Crucified Lovers; Pigs and Battleships)) are hunting them down one by one. It’s a haunted house movie that combines the teen-beach youth films of 1960s Japan with their cultural idea of a bitter witch, streamlining several legends into one of the best horror comedies ever made.
A scene from Nobuhiko Obayashi’s HOUSE. Photo courtesy of Film Forum.
Despite its teen-beach stylings, the film is so shockingly modern in its construction at times that if it hadn’t been stuck across the Pacific for so many decades, one might assume it influenced the last 30 years of blockbusters. The needle drop of Cherries Were Made for Eating by Godiego, playing over their teacher’s hyper-cheerful neighborhood feels like a moment out of blockbusters like The Lego Movie (2014), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), or The Martian (2015). Gorgeous’s second handshake with her mother-to-be brings back tonal echoes of Gone Girl (2014) or The Farewell (2019). Early on, that same mother-to-be announces she will follow Gorgeous to the aunt’s estate a little later, just as Mr. Togo (Kiyohiko Ozaki (His Motorbike, Her Island; The Legend of the Stardust Brothers)), the children’s teacher, will. Two opportunities for rescue are promised to the audience, hanging over the plot like anvils on a string as the children encounter strange villagers, hungry pianos, and a magical cat, and the tension is drawn taught even as laughs abound.
Miki Jinbo as Kung Fu in HOUSE. Photo courtesy of Film Forum.
As a setting, the house immediately shows its threat with a falling chandelier, defeated by the film’s second lead, Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo (The Possessed; Women Who Do Not Divorce)), who leaps into the air like a tokusatsu hero and kicks it to smithereens. Going further into the house, the children find a piano with a witch’s hat on it (for just one scene), straight out of The Wizard of Oz (1939), right before the aunt moves through frozen time unnoticed to join their conversation. Reality and tone are always shifting in House, as are the cinematic tools in place.
“Bad news. My sister is going to have a baby.”
Throughout the film, Obayashi uses black circle mattes to isolate points of interest in the frame where other directors would change to a close-up. This allows him to forcefully dictate what he wants you to see and pay attention to without cutting (and once maybe to hide a cut). These circle mattes, cardboard miniatures and backgrounds, opacity tricks, forced perspective mattes, over-cranked and under-cranked shots, terrible blue screen, hand-animated blood, one of cinema’s great dolly-zooms, rear projection, color tints, repeated frames — the list of Obayashi’s magic tricks can go on and on. House is a tour de force of art and film directions constructed from every building block of cinema. It should be a slam-dunk starter-kit film for film schools and students alongside Citizen Kane (1941), Rear Window (1954), and Casablanca (1942), the films that so often teach us what film can be.
Kumiko Ôba as Fantasy and Mieko Satô as Mac as xx in HOUSE. Photo courtesy of Film Forum.
House connects so deeply with audiences because, more than anything, it’s about youth. On this summer vacation, we meet the young person’s desire to be beautiful, to be fed, to know that they are talented and kind, and to do kick-ass karate moves. These themes are wrapped up in a horror-comedy package because to the innocent, danger can still be fun.
“All of us will disappear. I’m sure of it.”
This dissonant truth is what elevates House to a masterpiece of surrealism, and its relationship with that school of filmmaking is easily translated via comparison with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Lynch and Obayashi share the same love and reputation for handmade effects which is really an obsession with abstraction, an obsession at war with their medium of choice, whose foundational nature is tied to a tool designed to render reality.
A scene from HOUSE. Photo courtesy of Film Forum.
The magic of Twin Peaks (1990-1991) came from the marriage of Mark Frost’s (Twin Peaks; Fantastic Four) comic earnestness and Lynch’s penchant for surreal horror and cosmic mystery. Obayashi’s House has stood the test of time as a horror comedy, as have the rest of his work as magical realism dramas, because his taste was analogous to if Mark Frost had Lynch’s eyes. A seminal talent and unique voice still missing from cinema, I don’t find House to be Obayashi’s crowning masterpiece (I’m still working through them, but, at the moment, I think it’s The Little Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983)), but House is absolutely the most fun to see with a crowd. I’m writing this from North Carolina, but I’ve looked at train tickets to NYC on March 3rd just to see House projected. A fool’s dream, but one any New Yorker reading this should rush to live out on my behalf.
Screening during the 2024 Film Forum Japanese Horror Fest.
For more information, head to the official Film Forum Japanese Horror Fest House webpage.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Home Release, In Theaters, Recommendation, Reviews
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