A Haunted HOUSE
On the many faces of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 HAUSU.
I grew up with Halloween. The holiday, yes, but the 1978 movie more specifically. Sometime after turning 11, I had a bedroom to myself, and a 19-inch television to myself. When you have the ability to master technology at such a young age, like I did, you can even have cable (I screwed one cable into the one port in the wall). AMC, channel 36 back then, held incredible seasonal movie marathons throughout October, and the first material I remember feeling ownership over was horror movies, specifically the Halloween movie franchise. I remember the effectiveness of watching the original, in broad daylight immediately coming home from school, and also feeling the infinite elation of discovering there was a second movie (and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth).
Horror movies have been a big part of my life, though not to the extent of my oldest sister, whose viewing habits prepared me for the genre, and my twin brother, who I grew up with alongside all of these classics. I’ve come to enjoy them for their creativity more than their ability to burrow inside me and linger in fright. I’ve built up something like body armor, a knack to see things coming, and to not jump when they arrive. Honestly, it has dulled the joy a bit, but it has also protected me and kept me sane, and has allowed me to forge forward into the darkness.
So every year, I plow through my watchlist and streaming recommendations, and sometimes even cable channel offerings, to fill my spooky cup for the year, as this is really the only time I imbibe, save for the annual sneaky-great January horror release. The typical fare is art that is aimed to hit you in the chest with whatever weapon it is brandishing: a knife, an ax, a chainsaw, a giant container of liquid that is actually the devil, a VHS tape, and basically any tool that has ever existed at this point. The filmmakers want to hurt you, to scar you, and if at all possible, make your neighbors worry for your safety after hearing you scream through their walls. This, of course, is where the joy lives.
Several years ago, while searching for more joy to collect, I came across Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 feature HAUSU (HOUSE). I knew nothing outside of what Bill Hader quipped and what a few strangers on the internet said (“it rules”). Expecting the unexpected, I was still surprised – at the attempts at horror tropes, at the comedy, at the absurdity, at the broad strokes, at the lightness of being. I had, and have, never seen anything like it. But its longest lasting effect has been its reach, its goals and efforts of creation and of its own existence. HAUSU didn’t stab me in the chest with a knife, or haunt my dreams with knife fingers. Instead it reached out, in desperation and longing, and missed me, like a severed hand flying through the air, missing me by just an inch, continuing behind and beyond me towards something bigger.
Much of the film’s elusiveness and inventiveness comes from the co-writer: Nobuhiko’s then 10-year-old daughter Chigumi, who was then practicing piano, and who would stay with Nobuhiko’s parents at a house where they would chill watermelons in the well, and sleep on big heavy futons, and use a large, looming grandfather clock. The elements were used to write a script that was specifically requested after a young, amateur filmmaker in America had made a big, exciting movie that raked in cash at the box office – Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975). Starting from scratch, from a child’s memories and fears, from Japanese tradition (groups of seven are the ideal amount), from a friend and screenwriter Chiho Katsura, and from a very short story by the English writer Walter de la Mare, the Obayashis created something totally their own.
But that’s just what was put to paper. What happened between the script and the screen was the vision and ingenuity of Nobuhiko, a commercial short-film director. After the movie was green-lit by Toho studios based on the script alone, the film sat idle for two years while they searched for a director. Obayashi finally asked “why not me?” (he wasn’t a part of their company and roster of directors, is why, but the company eventually made an exception).
The alchemy of a daughter’s imagination and her father’s experimental creativity yields a product that is maximalist on the surface and maximalist underneath. The filmmaking on display is boundless, timeless. The 45 years of maturation have done nothing to dull the laughable, barebones ideas nor the indelible hand-made special effects. It couldn’t be more obvious that this movie came from a 10-year-old, but the sincerity and clear intentionality of the direction and translation of those ideas is so moving and captivating and wonderful.
Upon first watch, the experience is so bizarre and overwhelming that explanation seems impossible. The script actually had no explanation, originally. A house just killed a group of girls, and that was that. Obayashi decided to add some text, and some sub-text. A ghost would haunt the house, a lonely woman who lost her lover in the war. A classic idea. A filmmaker father would remarry and disappoint his daughter — a little fun at his own expense. The explicit story beats end there. The subtext lives in the filmmaking, when a flash of a camera bulb cuts to a two second reel of the mushroom clouds of the Hiroshima bomb. “It’s like cotton candy!”, one of the characters says off screen. A connection made, underneath, from the entertainment on screen to the horrors of the recent past. Obayashi, born in the Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan in January 1938, says all of his close friends were killed by the bomb. Just kids, witness and subject to senseless death. He decided he’d drop some elements in, as a theme.
So an explanation of the film and its plot I did find, and a natural sense-making I did make. It seemed an open and shut case, until I put the bluray back into my player this week and watched the movie again, for a third time in my life, and things became even less clear. The knowledge I had gained in my interest opened a new door, rather than closing or concluding anything. A new door that led to another room of the HOUSE. The movie felt impossibly expansive and unobtainable, not in the lines it wrote with or the ink it painted with, but with the spaces in between, in the alchemy between a daughter’s ideas and a father’s interpretations. A duality of character and idea lifts this movie above most anything else I’ve seen before, and my current estimations cannot hold it to any description.
The real joy, of course, doesn’t lie in the grandeur of the themes or sub-text, or in the weight I am very intentionally putting on its shoulders, but in the chase of the scream. This thing exists to do what JAWS did, to frighten and to entertain and enthrall and excite. And it does that so well. Nothing had ever been this weird, and nothing has been since. You may not want a weird “kid’s” movie to be your Halloween pick, but this one has an ability to be one of many things you may want, and many things that you weren’t expecting, and a couple of things that you need. This is one of our finest materials in which to bring no expectation, to assume nothing of its intentions or content, and to let something wash over you, and find it where you are.
Popcorn entertainment, a lover’s loss, 1970’s wacky cinema inventiveness, deep despair, a floating severed head, a frightened ghost in a mirror shattering and bleeding. There’s something for you in this House. Will you dare to enter?
Oh, and yeah, the soundtrack goes hard.
Thank you, as always, for reading. If I don’t see you again: Happy Halloween. It’s the best night of the year.
The sports season is over, and the nesting season has begun. I hope to be a much larger presence in your inboxes in the coming weeks, as we near the one year anniversary of this… thing that I do. I’ll see you soon, with some new things that I’ve enjoyed.
TTFN,
B