Obayashi Nobuhiko's House
House (1977), directed by Obayashi Nobuhiko, stands out not only for its surreal story, but also for its visual style and innovative editing, which enhance the film’s bizarre atmosphere and play a key role in the narrative. The film follows Gorgeous, who invites her six friends (each named after an aspect of their personality, like the dwarves in Snow White) to spend a week with her aunt. This is after her father introduces her to a new woman, who in Gorgeous’ eyes is an attempt to replace her mother, who died eight years ago. She hasn’t seen her aunt in ten years, but she and her friends are welcomed with open arms. What starts out as a carefree vacation quickly turns into a nightmare. One by one, the girls disappear in the strangest ways, and the film gradually transforms into an increasingly strange experience. This is the kind of movie you tell your friends “you have to see it to believe it.”
Visually, House stands out for its stylistic choices: with superimpose, freeze frames, Dutch angles, bluescreen, different frame rates, slow-motion, flashbacks, cutouts, bright colors, rotoscoping, painted backgrounds, fast editing work and much more, House sets itself far and wide apart from the rest of the horror films of both the 70s and every decade after. These special effects are laughable in quality, but this does not prevent you from enjoying this film for a second. It is therefore not surprising that Obayashi Nobuhiko was an experimental short film maker and advertising director before he started working on this film. House is his first full-length feature film. When making this project, he was not only the director, but also the writer, producer, and did the special effects. He did not take on all four of these again, until the making of his Labyrinth of cinema, the last film he made before his death in 2020.
The reason that this film sets itself apart from other horror films is not only the audiovisual bombardment of special effects, but also the mixture of genres that is secretly present, which ensures that your expectations are often not met. Of course, these are many aspects of Japanese horror of that time, for which Obayashi not only found inspiration from the Japanese corner, but also partly Jaws, a film for which producers asked him to create a similar commercial success. Although Jaws and House are two completely different creations, you can still make connections. This is certainly in the unpredictability, and the fact that although in Jaws this takes a physical form in the shark, in both films the danger is largely invisible. Both films also use humor to ease the tension of the audience. House is therefore not only a horror film, but also a comedy.
The girls’ fate is presented early in the film. In the very first scene, Fantasy and Gorgeous are having a little photoshoot, after which Fantasy tells Gorgeous that she looks like a witch from a horror movie, a comment that will manifest itself later. In another scene on the bus, Gorgeous tells her friends ‘Any old cat can open a door, but only a witch’s cat can close it.’ Upon arriving at the aunt’s house, her cat Blanche opens the doors a few times, and later, after it is clear that the house is evil, the cat closes them.
The significance of House, however, goes beyond the supernatural horror. Obayashi's youth during the Second World War, and the loss of his childhood friends to violence and the atomic bomb, seep into the theme of the film. The grief and trauma of the aunt, whose fiancé disappeared during the Second World War, reflect the grief of a generation. This grief is the foundation of House, the grief she experiences permeates her environment and swallows up unmarried young women. The film is a tribute to the torment that young women in Japan experienced after the Second World War. Within this, the cat Blanche serves as a symbol of loneliness and the consequences of the atomic bomb. Through the cat, the house and the aunt, the film casts the Second World War and post-war Japanese conservatism as a monster for the younger generation.
At the same time, the film is steeped in themes of youth, love, and marriage. Gorgeous' father's new lover, and her new mother, is contrasted with her grieving aunt, who symbolizes lost love and a never-ending past. Gorgeous stands between these women. She is young, and experiences the pressure of expectations from both sides. The film suggests that these young girls, through their innocence and naivety, are slowly being swallowed up by the traditions and norms of society, especially marriage and its loss of identity. At the beginning of the film, the girls congratulate a teacher on her engagement, Gorgeous’s aunt has lost her fiancé, and Fantasy has a crush on her teacher. The expectations of marriage run like a thread through the plot of the film, and the friends’ youth is woven into this. Interestingly, the friends are all characterized by their character. Their names, their clothes, and ultimately their deaths all point to their identity. Melody is eaten by a piano, Gorgeous is possessed after putting on make-up, the watermelon in the well is replaced with Mac's head. Towards the end of the film, nudity is also used more often. Sweet loses all her clothes when she disappears and is replaced by a naked doll, Prof loses all her clothes when she falls into a literal bloodbath in one of the last scenes of the film, and Gorgeous exposes one of her breasts after being possessed. In Gorgeous's case, it is not only the element of nudity, but also the fact that she exchanges her outfit for traditional wedding attire after being possessed. The loss of their youth is central to everyone's fate, especially clear in Sweet's painful fate. Her disappearance and replacement by a naked doll are a clear symbolism of objectification, which shows the loss of childhood purity. Later, in the scene that I remember most as perhaps the most horrifying moment of the film, her body appears in a clock. The gears of the clock turn and crush her, the film's most explicit symbol of the merciless influence of time on youth and the innocence that comes with it.
It will come as no surprise then that many of the film’s ideas come from the director’s young daughter. Who else could you approach for a childlike take on horror? The visual effects further support the depiction of youth. Every situation the friends find themselves in, including their eventual doom, is rendered in bright colors, flying limbs, and dreamlike filters. Often, the visuals also support the characters’ feelings, such as halfway through the film, when the frame rate is suddenly slammed down to reflect the girls’ panic, resulting in a vague, trance-like depiction of their mentality.
House is a film that you should watch multiple times. Not only because there is so much to experience visually, but also because with every viewing you may be able to notice something new about the story and because it is difficult to find the words to describe this film after you have seen it once. Over the years, this film has built up a cult following, which is remarkable considering it took 30 years for the film to be released abroad, after critics received the film poorly in Japan. Despite this, Obayashi did receive the blue ribbon award for House in 1978. House is revolutionary in its own way, and it is certainly a work that you will not soon forget.