House (1977) Review

Author's Note: Originally written June 2nd, 2020. Wanted to write some really long form thing about this movie, and just showing that it's way more than how people present it like a "random movie" - connecting it to childhood fears and so forth. Probably one of the pieces I'm most proud of, but there are definitely with structural issues with this review, as well as a slight verbosity to it.

House centres around a schoolgirl named Oshare or Gorgeous/Angel who decides to spend her summer vacation down at her aunt’s house with six of her classmates, who lives alone after her husband was killed during World War II. But, as it turns out that the house is haunted and their aunt subsequently disappears like a ghostly apparition, and it turns out that the house is actually out to physically consume each of the girls until none of them are left – so the girls try to find a way to escape the house, and find an explanation for all of the bizarre occurrences that are happening all around them.

I think this is definitely one of those movies that would appear nonsensical without any sort of context – but the recurring themes in this movie are that of childhood nostalgia, longing, trauma and regret – where there’s quite a lot of explicit references towards World War II and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings – and the central premise of the movie is that the aunt’s husband died after having his plane shot down during the second World War. But the whole movie is concocted so that it feels like a very visceral and vivid nightmare that would come straight out of a child’s imagination – and one of the credited writers on the film was Chigumi Obayashi who was the then 10-year-old daughter of Nobuhiko Obayashi. A lot of the teenaged girls in this movie are oddly infantilised, and oddly constricted to central roles – to the point where the girls’ names are just references towards their central roles like Sweet, Fantasy, Prof and Kung Fu, and each of them seems to have a central gimmick which they seem to rely upon over and over again – especially with the character of Kung Fu who is an expert in aerobics and fighting.

The visual design of the movie is within another league of its own – where so much of it feels bizarre and just seems to through basically everything at it, and I especially loved all of the beautiful matte paintings and all of the gorgeous set-design – where everything about the visuals are incredibly sharp and colourful, and it’s incredibly inventive with so much of it – where it has the general tone that pretty much anything could happen to these girls, and I mean that in the utmost sense – and yet we’re drawn into it just entirely down to how great the movie looks, with all of the inventive camera-work and the strange off the wall sequences – where it seems to just switch tones on a whim. It’s genuinely good to look and there’s a lot about this movie that seems to look like a bizarre painting – especially with the lighting which seems to just saturate every single scene with rich primary colours, and there’s an element to it where it looks a bit fake with all of the scenes where objects have obviously been cut out with the lines surrounding them – but then we just totally accept it all because of the surrealist atmosphere.

Although, the shear inventiveness of the camera-work is amazing – particularly with how there’s so many simple but effective shots in the movie, such as with the overhead shot where the girls are first introduced into the mansion – and there’s just a lot of space and shadows surrounding them as the girls are brightly lit. And there’s a number of other select shots that I really like – such as a conversation scene over a piano where the camera just glides and pans towards each of the girls as they are talking, and it’s done so organically and smoothly where our attention is being constantly diverted. Or with a shot of a room which just seems to be imploding – with futons and pillow cases being thrown all over the place, and it’s shot from below at an incredibly low angle – through a pane of glass as the camera keeps rotating and it becomes more and more disorientating.

One of the recurring elements in the movie is with the spooky ambient main theme – which is constantly played throughout the movie, funnily enough by the character Melody, after she’s introduced to the piano room by her aunt – and it’s such an ear-work where it just keeps playing and overturning all of these events. But, the soundtrack is also really good – where it’s mostly predominantly composed by the band Godiego who are usually great with everything, often very ambient and spooky with somewhat of a jaunty quality to it – and I think the most memorable song is “Cherries Were Made For Eating” which is just incredibly joyful and vibrant, and everything else is somewhere between spooky and joyful. Although, even the piano is eventually introduced to be an instrument of terror later on in the movie – where Melody comments that the piano ‘bit her’ and everything about the piano room just seems to be filled with more anxiety and dread.

And yet, so much of this movie is knowingly absurd – often times where it seems to break the fourth wall repeatedly, and with so many different satirical tirades – as well as portions of bizarre violence which are about as funny as they are horrific, and it’s hard to really describe the general tone of this movie because it’s so uniquely its own thing – and it operates on such a surrealist abstract logic that it’s hard to really make any logical sense of the film and yet it makes sense in the abstract. But, then again – the actual plot to the movie is really simple and straight-forward – and I feel that upon rewatching the film that it’s clear that they’ve actually explained what is happening and why it happens by the end of the movie, but then the hard part comes with trying to figure out what it all means – as so much of the movie feels incredibly fractured and metaphorical, especially with the instances of watermelons and cats which are somehow like ghostly and cursed apparitions in this world.

And there’s a tension that is derived from the fact where pretty much anything could happen during their visit – and characters are either injured or killed off in ways which are hard to describe with how surreal they are, where it ramps up straight after a scene where a watermelon transforms into a flying severed head which tries to eat one of the characters, and it goes even further once the characters actually begin to realise what’s going on – like the whole world and the whole movie is just collapsing in on them. It’s genuinely terrifying at portions – and surprisingly so given that the first few moments of this film are so goofy and innocent-looking, but then there’s an underlying eery and spooky tension underpinning pretty much all of it – and there’s a lot of portions that seem to play somewhat like a nostalgic montage of various photos or videos of people who are going on holiday, and I think the success from the horror relies on how it makes so many familiar and innocent seeming things just taking on completely horrifying connotations and implications.

Which isn’t to say that this movie is essentially a bunch of nonsense that’s put up on the screen in order to provoke people just out of the sheer bizarreness of it, and it’s actually really tightly written with how it introduces certain elements that pay off later – with one of the main examples being the statement “Any cat can open a door, but only a witch cat can close it.”, or with how the watermelon farmer that they meet who shows them the house seems to be a bit off when we first meet him – where it’s clear that he knew that the girls were coming along the way. There’s a lot of strange and subtle hints that are placed throughout the movie – and there’s very clearly a structure and a rhythm to the mayhem even if it’s all incredibly surrealistic, and I think the movie is more or less a commentary on childhood anxieties and fears and about the increasingly rapid turmoil of time – and it’s clear as the movie develops that the haunting of the house is an incredibly strange and grandiose metaphor for this, and there’s a lot of moments in House which are strangely sad and mournful in tone.

Although, it’s the type of movie where I feel that it’s so surrealistic and abstract that there’s so many different interpretations that could be made about it – and I don’t think there’s any sort of words that can really do it justice. There’s things in this movie which are so unbelievable and incredibly off the wall – and it just seems to collateralise itself beyond comprehension to the point where the images are moving much faster than we can really comprehend them, and yet we’re constantly just wanting to figure out what is really going on with this movie. The process of watching this movie feels like a completely enigmatic and baffling mystery – and every subsequent viewing just feels like I’m inching closer and closer to something that I can only ever really explain to myself, and it went from a bizarre oddity into pretty much an obsession with trying to figure out what this movie means and what Obayashi was really intending with it – and interestingly so many of his other films also have a similarly strange and eccentric tone and visual design which cover the two critical themes of time and memory. 

This is definitely Obayashi’s masterpiece – something which is so incredibly approachable with the visuals and with its bizarre sense of humour, and yet there’s always something underneath the surface of it all which seems to amaze me as much as it baffles me – and there is not a single film out there which is like House, or at the very least there hasn’t been a single haunted house movie just as bizarre and off-the-wall as House. It’s such a weirdly personal and inventive piece of work that it just stands out as totally unique – and there’s not a single frame in this movie which goes to waste.