You need to watch the bonkers Japanese fantasy horror film House
Spooky season is upon us, and traditional horror films like Bring her back (perfectly horrible) or The evil deaths (stone Cold Classic) are obvious choices for a cozy movie night at home. But if you’re looking for something a little more weird than nasty to get you in the Halloween spirit, I highly recommend the 1977 fantasy horror film. Home.
Describe Home is an exercise in futility. Here’s the basic plot: A girl goes to spend the summer with her aunt after her widowed father brings home a creepy, quiet woman and declares he intends to marry her. When she arrives at the country house, accompanied by six of her friends, strange supernatural things immediately begin to happen.
That’s the gist of it, but it doesn’t even begin to explain the absolute madness contained within its 88-minute runtime. The trailer below offers a little taste.
Home This is the vision of director Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose frenetic, hyper-stylized experimentation gives the film its singular visual style. But much of the nightmarish logic within can be attributed to the film’s co-writer, Chigumi Ôbayashi, Nobuhiko’s 10-year-old daughter.
In an interview found on the Blu-ray release of the film, Nobuhiko explained his approach saying this:
“Adults can only think about things they understand, so everything stays at that boring human level. But children invent things that can’t be explained. They like the strange and the mysterious. The power of cinema lies not in the explainable, but in the strange and the inexplicable.”
The result is a film that abruptly and dramatically shifts tones from family melodrama to gauzy visuals, to slapstick music video, to proto J-horror. Circular wipes and obviously matte painted backgrounds brush against severed heads and gallons of bright red blood. But beneath it all lies a narrative firmly rooted in folklore that confronts trauma by embracing morbid absurdity.
House is unlike any other movie you’ve ever seen. By examining it for Philadelphia InvestigatorCarrie Rickey called it “too absurd to be truly terrifying, but too nightmarish to be merely comical.” And that’s what makes it so compelling. His influence on the slapstick horror of Sam Raimi Evil death 2 seems obvious, and it shares DNA with that of David Lynch Twin Peaks where an undercurrent of malevolence is explored through a series of apparent non-sequiturs.
I saw Home more times than I can count, and I always walk away from it wondering “WTF, did I just watch?” – and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s an undeniable cult classic that’s impossible to turn away from, and if you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself to change that immediately.
