HOUSE (HAUSU) 1977

Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, Starring: Kimiko Ikegami, Miki Jinbo, Kumiko Ohba. Horror, Japan, 1977, 88mins, Cert 15. 

Nobuhiko Obayashi’s HOUSE is a phantasmagorical ghost train ride through a haunted mansion bursting with psychedelic surrealism. 

On paper the wafer-thin plot reads as a standard genre set-up. A group of teenage school girls take a trip into the countryside to spend their summer holiday at an isolated mansion belonging to their friend Angela’s aunt. This grey-haired aunt – who Angela hasn’t seen for some years - is wheel-chair bound and seemingly lives alone in the old cobwebbed house...

This is a film brimming with every conceivable visual technique (or at least every one available to a Japanese filmmaker back in 1977). It’s maddeningly uneven pace reveals the director’s commercial advertising background, but just like a good ghost train ride in the fairground, every corridor you turn down reveals something startlingly inventive.

On the train which conveys the girls out of the city (presumably Tokyo), a fellow passenger is briefly glimpsed reading a copy of Denis Gifford’s ‘A Pictorial History of Horror Movies’, and it’s not much of a leap to conclude that director Obayashi’s agenda for the film is to present a live-action tongue in cheek flip through some of that book’s pages.

The white Persian cat with the flashing eyes appears to be the catalyst for a large portion of the spooky and sometimes gory mayhem on display, and this monstrous moggie would surely have proved to be a more worthy adversary to James Bond than even Blofeld himself!

With its manically animated furniture and erupting geysers of blood, it pre-dates Sam Raimi’s EVIL DEAD 2 by 10 years. Mind you, even Raimi never conceived of transforming a schoolteacher into a bunch of bananas (sadly off-screen).

HOUSE is a visually stunning, at times beautiful cinematic piece of artifice, gorgeous matte backdrops and an animated train jostle for screen time with the frenetic jagged lunacy of a schoolgirl eating piano, a floating severed head with a taste for posteriors and a dancing skeleton (who went on to sell Scotch video tapes in the 80’s).

Recommended.

**** (out of 5*)

Paul Worts