ADVANCE WORD on the Criterion release of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s irresistibly crazy 1977 House likens it to a Scooby-Doo episode. That’s one possible handle, but House is easily grasped even without it. The film is a bursting bag of Halloween candy: a kid’s fairy tale with outlandish black humor, simmering Sapphicism and odd 1950s touches of lyricism. The James Whale–style preposterousness is matched by visual languor. Beautiful Leon Shamroy–style sunsets shimmer on the scrims of studio back lots, nimbused with mother-of-pearl coruscations of pre-flashed fog; and fan-blown chiffon scarves tickle arbors of wax grapes.
In tone, House is as hysterically cute as a Sanrio outlet going up in a four-alarm fire. Seven chirpy schoolgirls come to spend summer vacation in the country at the old-fashioned house of an elderly maiden aunt in a wheelchair (Yoko Minamida). Do these zestful sailor-suited innocents have real names, or did their mothers call them such things as Kung Fu, Fantasy and Sweeto (Sweet)? Likely the latter. The heartbroken Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) has no mother, but she has a new and unwanted stepmother; that’s why she’s leading the way to the old dark house.
The girls are none too bright (“A long time ago, Japan was in a big war,” explains one). In the typically excellent interview track Criterion includes, Obayashi mentions that he is from Hiroshima and lost friends in the atomic bombing. This makes him qualified to deliver a dire joke about a mushroom cloud looking like a cone of cotton candy—and to put these dizzy schoolgirls through it for their lack of historical memory.
At heart, House is surreal: it’s not every day in which you see a girl devoured by a musical instrument, a haunted severed head nipping someone in the butt or a man transformed into a bunch of bananas. Everywhere, we see the ingenuity of the pre-digital era. One technique used to make a girl disintegrate in a witches’ pool: pouring blue paint on a suspended nude model, so that she dissolves into a chroma-keyed blur. House is an ornament of the postmodern anything-went decade it came from, directed by a veteran (not to say inveterate) TV commercial director who had made some 200 spots before he directed House. Toho Studios got cold feet about the project. House was finally produced after a two-year-long viral campaign in Tokyo that included a movie soundtrack album released before the movie was made, a radio play and casting contests. Even its own producer deplored House’s success, though fans swooned to the perfume of its absurd horror. Primarily, House is “an exaggerated and beautiful world of fantasy,” as Obayashi says. His summing-up is as satisfying as David Lynch’s own description of his films: “A dream of dark and troubling things.”
House
Criterion
$29.95
