13 Nights of Shocktober: House (1977)

 by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. So, for the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some horror movie recommendations to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 5: Japanese Horror Night

“Any old cat can open a door. Only a witch cat can close a door.”

House (1977)

The 1977 Japanese horror film House (AKA Hausu) is weird, wild stuff, to put it mildly. This is a movie with so many peculiar cinematic choices and strange, puzzling sights that the demonic cat, floating severed head, or killer piano might make you forget about the watermelon laughing over someone’s shoulder. So much about House is intentionally off kilter that it is equally funny, interesting, creepy, silly, thoughtful, scary, but, above all, unforgettable.

The weird and bizarre nature of House comes from what happens on screen, not from how it is told. There is no toying with narrative structure, or points of view, or chronology. This goes a long way to keeping the audience engaged. At the start of summer break, teenager Gorgeous invites six of her friends to stay at her estranged aunt’s house. Unfortunately, the house is haunted by a vengeful spirit that preys on unmarried (virgin) girls. Yes, the main character’s name is Gorgeous. Her friends are: Fantasy, Mac (short for Stomach), Prof (short for Professor), Melody, Sweet, and Kung-Fu. Those names are descriptive (Prof reads a lot, Kung Fu knows kung fu, etc.) but the actresses all bring youthful energy to the roles. Each girl finds herself attacked by her fear or distinctive trait (Melody is attacked by the piano, for example). 

The making of House is a fascinating story. In 1975 Japanese movie studio Toho (the studio behind the Godzilla movies) hired Nobuhiko Obayashi to make a film that would be a box office hit like JAWS. Instead, he asked his adolescent daughter, Chigumi, what she thought was scary. She said it would be scary if her reflection in the mirror suddenly attacked her. Obayashi wisely chose his daughter’s idea over the studio’s order. “It’s not all that strange for ants or bears to attack people, but to be attacked by your reflection in a mirror is a fantasy that could only happen in a movie,” Obayashi says in a documentary included with the Criterion home video release.

Many of Chigumi’s other ideas made it into the movie and she received a story credit. Obayashi never expected for the movie to be made so he gave it an English title, something “taboo” for Japanese films at the time. When he finally did make the film two years later, Obayashi made a conscious decision to do things unlike the traditional Japanese filmmaking style of Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) and Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story), two of not only the greatest Japanese directors but the greatest of all directors. If Obayashi thought that Kurosawa or Ozu would be offended by a stylistic choice, that was the choice he made. The result is a film unlike any that came before, or even after for that matter. 

You can enjoy House purely as a phantasmagoria of the bizarre and macabre, as I did the first time I saw it, but it is also rich with subtext. Gorgeous’s aunt has a substantial backstory that is presented as a black and white silent film with the girls watching and making comments. In short, her fiancé was drafted into the army and never returned from the war but she continued to wait for him. When they see brief footage of the atomic bomb one of the girls says that the mushroom cloud looks like cotton candy. It is worth noting that Obayashi grew up in Hiroshima and lost many of his childhood friends to the devastation of the atomic bomb. The divide between the older generation that fought and lived through World War II and the younger generation that was born after the war also looms large. Gorgeous and her friends are separated from her aunt not just because of their youth but because of their varied personalities and opportunities thanks to post war feminism. 

The generational divide played a big part in the movie’s success too. It was the movie that every kid wanted to see and no parent wanted their kid to see. It was a commercial success thanks to its younger audience but a major flop with critics. Even executives at Toho were unhappy with the success of House. One studio executive even told screenwriter Chiho Katsura, right to his face, that he was upset with House’s success because he wanted a hit but not with a movie like this. Katsura was understandably offended. Time passed and the kids that loved House grew up to be critics and filmmakers and moviegoers and its influence and place in international cinema is firmly secure.

House airs on TCM on Wednesday, Oct 26th at 1AM CT and is streaming on the Criterion Channel and HBOmax.