Hausu (1977)

From http://68.media.tumblr.com/282473672b032bdf91
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a.k.a. House

Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi

Screenplay: Chiho Katsura (screenplay) and Chigumi Ôbayashi (original story)

Cast: Kimiko Ikegami as Gorgeous; Miki Jinbo as Kung Fu; Ai Matubara as Prof; Kumiko Oba as Fantasy; Mieko Sato as Mac; Eriko Tanaka as Melody; Masayo Miyako as Sweet; Yōko Minamida as Auntie; Kiyohiko Ozaki as Keisuke Tôgô

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #131

Synopsis: Mortified by her father's new girlfriend, "Gorgeous" (Kimiko Ikegami) decides to travel to her late mother's family home to meet her aunt (Yōko Minamida). Going with her nicknamed friends - Melody (Eriko Tanaka), Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo), Prof (Ai Matubara), Fantasy (Kumiko Oba) Mac (Mieko Sato), and Sweet (Masayo Miyako) - they will all eventually realise, when they start to disappear one-by-one and weird things start to happen around the house, that going there was a bad idea.

Hausu's reputation as one of the weirdest films of the 1970s is known. I first heard of Hausu, or House, a year or so before the West properly discovered the movie, managing to find a version to view¹. Now, even Michael Sheen has talked of Hausu in an interview in the Radio Times, a middlebrow TV listings magazines, of watching it with his daughter and bonding over it. It's a great progression for Hausu, from an utter obscurity unknown outside of Japan to becoming a known film that doesn't lose any of its strange power with mainstream attention. More so knowing of its well documented origins, which help as well explain so much of Hausu's weirdness and charm. The later especially as, on the first viewing with a barely viewable version, I hated Hausu. Viewed with comprehensible visual quality in a physical DVD release, over multiple times, I can truly say I love Hausu as the re-viewings helped it stand out a lot more.

From https://filmgrab.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/24.jpg

It's important to stress Nobuhiko Obayashi's beginnings as an avant-garde filmmaker during the golden age of this type of cinema in the sixties. You see, long before the main characters get to the titular house, numerous techniques that show both this and his career afterwards as a prolific commercials director when his experimental work caught peoples' attentions., put onscreen in a constant barrage. If the beginning of Hausu, following Gorgeous' disdain of her potential new mother and deciding to go to her aunt's with her school friends, feels like a seventies commercial for a camera, with its brown hued gloss and light rock music from the band Godiego, that's not a detraction in this case as Obayashi went into production with a film meant to do something radically different. Something irrelevant and deliberately ridiculous, something in contrast to the box office slump that took place everywhere else in Japanese cinema at the time. In context of this, this was a grab at the youth market but with total creative control for Obayashi as one creative individual, given carte blanche to do whatever he desired, a manic giddy tone of strange quirks as a result, an artificiality that he openly embraces when the beautiful countryside going past on a train is a painted canvas.

From https://brendancultfilms.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/untitled-12.jpg

There's a visible embracing of Western culture, a mukokuseki slant which came at least a decade before, as much reflecting a debuting director who made his name making ads with Western stars like Charles Bronson selling cologne. Ironically, for what was seen as an attempt to make a blockbuster like Jaws (1975) for the Japanese market, a literal haunted house to get teenagers to the cinema, Obayashi doe actually have subtext in Hausu which is about this contrast between modernity and tradition which makes up his own aesthetic style clashes violently in the narrative. A countryside of pure idyllic fantasy, which he skewers with references to publicity campaigns from around that period which tried to encourage the young back to said countryside from the cities. One which has been directly scarred by World War 2 where a woman lost her fiancée and never married, becoming the aunt living in the family home who behaves suspiciously. The expectations of marriage as tradition becomes  literal curse picking off women whilst the young schoolgirls, caricatures, are from urban centres finding themselves in a gristly scenario, one which openly evokes sexuality (clothing left behind, a river of blood) at points sub textually as fairytales would as well as be deliberately silly about it.

From https://s3.drafthouse.com/images/made/hausu-4_758_426_81_s_c1.jpg

And of course a significant influence on this, and the reason behind Hausu's legendary strangeness, is that Obayashi used ideas from his adolescent daughter Chigumi Ôbayashi of what would be scary for her, and didn't neuter them onscreen with screenwriter Chiho Katsura. Using the delirious, unfiltered imagination of a child or an adolescent is not that rare in art. Pablo Picasso was influenced by the unguided, unfiltered drawings children do and praised their creativity. For a more pop culture related example there's Axe Cop (2009-onwards), a web comic where graphic novelist Ethan Nicolle collaborated with his then five year old younger brother Malachai and purposely kept it as faithful to Malachai 's take on storytelling for effect. The influence of a young girl's imagination on Hausu, even filtered through her father and a screenwriter, of what was scary for her does have a subconscious effect in terms of having a female perspective on events. This is particularly important within a film where most of the characters are female and the sole male character of any importance, the male teacher one of the girls has a crush on, is a bumbling fool who in one of his opening scenes gets stuck buttocks first in a bucket, the knight in shining armour (literalised in a fantasy scene) who is utterly useless. It's her feverish imagination and how her father interpreted it that turned out the madness you witness. The futons and cushions that jump a schoolgirl in a scene which evokes Dario Argento. The watermelon that turns into a head. A girl in a grandfather clock. And, the most infamous moment, a very ravenous piano inspired by his daughter's piano lessons and how she imagined the pain in her fingers being the instrument trying to bite her.

From http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/house_hausu.jpg

Helping is Obayashi's background, his use of now obsolete visual and editing techniques with added age turning this material, like fine wine, into more potent weirdness. The fact he was purposely using "fake" looking techniques back when the film was new, for delibarely artificiality, helps in this fact. The piano sequence for example evokes avant-garde animator Stan VanDerBeek who used cut-outs for stop motion. The use of actors as props for choppy stop motion evokes not only comedy skits but Jan Švankmajer and early Walerian Borowczyk animation shorts which manoeuvred actors like they were clay figures. Obayashi's work at parts becomes so quick in pace it can be difficult to figure out what's going on, a factor of why I first hated the film watching an awful looking version. Upon re-watches with a better looking version of the film improves it, with how meticulous the work in single heightened scenes the production was. Apt as the film took a long time for it to actually be produced, Obayashi promoting the film before an actual production existing with a soundtrack album, promotional radio spots, manga and as much to get the project started that it allowed him to work out his intentions before he got behind the camera. The result is disorientating especially when, by the final act, he speeds up the tone to manic levels. What's also great however is that he's as capable of slowing down scenes, not only letting them pass quietly in the few parts you are allowed to catch your breath through but in also with the use of slow motion, almost flickering distortion of scenes to give another form of disorientation. Once I got used to its own, distinct tone, Hausu does grow with reward with what its kind a simplistic film in plot.

From https://assets.mubi.com/images/film/21467/image-w1280.jpg?1445906993

Personal Opinion:

Hausu lives up to its reputation. It has taken a while for me to appreciate the film, a delirium with an almost romantic hue to it that stands out in spite of all the gore and weirdness involved. Even in context of other Japanese cinema from this period it's still an oddity, isolated from the others, whose success financially in its home land came from film producers letting Nobuhiko Obayashi make the film how he wanted to, in a famous anecdote, even if they didn't understand what the script actually was about. Sadly this seems alien to modern day cinema, so let's appreciate it here when that was actually the real life scenario and someone could make a film like Hausu in that context.

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

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1) A podcast, still going in 2017 sporadically, known as The Gentlemen's Guide to Midnight Cinema, reviewed Hausu back in 2009, a time just before Janus Films and the Criterion Collection brought the film into Western culture and gave it the eventually cult following it deserved.