Streaming Review: House (1977)

On paper the plot of Japan’s 1977’s unique horror film House is deceptively simple. Seven teenage girls spending their summer vacation in a remote and isolated house face deadly supernatural peril. Variations on this set-up have prompted everything from competent well crafted horror film to direct to video exploitive fare but nothing is like Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House.

Most movies take extraordinary care to never spoil the illusion of reality they are trying to achieve, to never remind the audiences that there are in fact watching a film but written by Chiho Katura and directed by Obayashi House, leaning heavily into the artifice of filmmaking, never lets you forget that this is fact entirely artificial. From obvious stages, painted backdrops for landscapes, animated sequences, to characters interacting with a diegetic backstory flashback House revels in shattering the facade between the art and the observer.

The artificiality is further enhanced by the names for the seven teenage girls with each only referred by a nickname that typifies that girl’s defining characteristic, Gorgeous for the beautiful daughter of a film composer, Prof for the girl drawn to intellectual talents, Kung Fu for the martial artist and athlete, Fantasy for the dreamer and so on. The characters are deliberately

Kumiko Oba (“Fantasy”), Masayo Miyako (“Sweet”), Eriko Tanaka (“Melody”), Kimiko Ikegami (“Gorgeous”), Ai Matsubara (“Prof”), Mieko Sato (“Mac”), Miki Jinbo (“Kung Fu”); seated: Yoko Minamida (“Gorgeous’s Aunt”)

drawn in the most simplistic terms existing as archetypes versus fully realized and motivated people but it is clearly a deliberate choice by the writer and director rather than a deficit of talent on either of their parts.

The resulting film is unique, frenetic, and hallucinatory, as though the filmmakers were simultaneously riding a sugar-high while tripping on LSD.

House is a difficult film to either recommend or to dissuade anyone from watching as it is so unique and unlike any other horror movie that everyone person watching it is liable to have a reaction as unique as the film itself. It is the truest melding of ‘art house’ with the horror genre I have ever experienced making such films a Midsommar or The Wicker Man appear as sedate and conventional as 70s prime time dramas. If you have a taste for experimental film and the description ‘Lynchian’ is familiar and not a turn-off then Obayashi’s House may be just right for you.

House is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.