House (1977)

As with my previous viewing, I was warned that this gets strange. Unlike my previous viewing, it is too escapist to make any attempt at relevance. Cracked.com described a few scenes that put it among the five weirdest horror movies they knew, and I thought it should be higher up from their description. I probably would have skipped it if not for its showing at AFI (not that I watched it there), its enduring cult, and my desire to have a good lineup for October.

A synopsis sounds ridiculously simple and hackneyed: Seven high school girls decide to take a vacation at the remote mansion of one's aunt, which, as you probably guessed, is haunted. But House (a.k.a. Hausu) is ridiculous in the finer details, to the point that I can hardly think of another picture like it. Even contemporary Japanese found it bizarre.

Perhaps the first sign that this won't be a typical horror flick is the mood of the first third of the 98 minutes. Apart from the title sequence and a couple eerily quirky moments (that was no ordinary shine in the cat's eyes), it comes across as whimsical, pretty, funny, and poignant at times. It uses all sorts of unusual cinematography tricks. The music usually sounds quite innocent -- even after the scares start streaming in.

The girls all go by nicknames: Gorgeous, Sweet, Melody, Prof, Kung Fu, Mac, and Fantasy. Most have sparse personalities to match, and only "Mac," short for "Stomach," requires any explanation. I don't mind; it's enough to tell them apart and make you feel just a bit sorry for them. Naturally, Fantasy is the first to see anything very wrong happening, but the others figure her imagination has been running away with her. That gets harder to believe the longer someone remains missing.

I won't spoil any of the horrific specifics, which rarely border on predictable and don't seem to follow much of an internal logic. It seems like the demonic presence in the house can do just about anything, even from a mile away. There turns out to be a good reason for randomness: Director Nobuhiko Obayashi (whose short Emotion, also included on the DVD, I opted to skip) asked his young daughter for ideas. It's basically the mind of a scared, imaginative child writ large. Nevertheless, while the film is unrated, I'd venture an R for the U.S., between dismemberment and ostensibly asexual nudity.

The other aspect noted as weird is the girls' behavior. Sometimes they appear to underreact to terrible, impossible things happening to themselves or their friends. Granted, I'm not sure what I'd do in their situations, and for the one who emotes least appropriately, I suspect either hysteria or a sort of hypnosis. But it's just as likely to stem from most of the actresses having little training or experience. They were chosen from among advertising models. Obayashi discovered that they performed better when listening to the score rather than his verbal instructions, so they almost dance through it all.

I wasn't surprised to learn from the DVD extras that the makers didn't consider it horror (a genre all but unknown to Japan at the time) so much as fantasy with emotions running high. They were definitely experimental and artsy, with unrealistic effects not just to save money but to avoid realism. You may think that '77 was a bit late for the psychedelic, but bear in mind that Japan was trying to recover from its people broadly abandoning cinema for TV.

Oddly enough, while Toho gladly green-lighted House right away, they couldn't find a willing director for a long time. What followed were two years of numerous promotional materials, building up lots of hype aimed primarily at young adults. When they finally made the darn thing, professional critics and even some people who worked on it hated it, but the box office told another story.

Did it scare me? A little. Amuse me? A little. Make me feel emotion in general? A little. Challenge me? Oh yes. If for no other reason, I recommend watching House because no mere description can do it justice. You will surely get something out of it, even if you don't know what that something is.