House (1977) Review

Originally written August 1, 2024.

House is genuinely fascinating for the ways in which it brazenly pushes past the limits into a borderline unwatchable realm of filmmaking, where the basics of editing, storytelling, and special effects are not disrespected so much as they are utterly disregarded. House was born from an alternate reality where no other motion picture was ever made. This is untrue of course, but the idea that there was honest-to-goodness intention behind this film is too much to bear and might have you believing in a multiverse if only to shift blame away from the human species as we know it.

Funny enough, it’s the fact that so many of House’s ridiculous ideas came from the 11 year old daughter of director Nobuhiko Ōbayashi that brings this insane picture back down to reality. When viewed through the lens of childhood fears, the whole thing begins to make a lot more sense. Perhaps House is best seen as a childhood nightmare, with its sometimes dreamy aesthetics, constant youthful piano motif, and the fact that you never quite have a grasp on what’s going on, not fully.

What is going on is this: a girl named Gorgeous invites six of her schoolmates, who also adorn interesting names like Prof, Fantasy, and Kung Fu, to her aunt’s home for a summer getaway. Gorgeous was initially going to vacation with her widowed film composer father until he reveals that he’s married a new woman in a sequence filmed through a distorting window grid that’s one of my favorite shots in the movie.

The entire opening of House, including the lengthy trip to the aunt’s home by train and bus, is entirely crazy despite the narrative mundanity. The film cannot go for more than a few frames without some blue screen madness, obvious matte painting backdrop, randomly sped up footage, faces superimposed in the middle of the screen, and more. These quirks only get wilder in the back half of the film—the blue screen usage especially—but it doesn’t take long for House to immediately make its personality known, as if to gatekeep those who would find it unbearable.

The aunt’s home is where everything goes down as the girls are tormented by the spooky older aunt menacingly creeping and smiling in their presence, and a cat that may or may not be harmfully supernatural. Hijinks ensue as the cast is possessed and ripped apart by unseen forces, but House delves more into comedic territory than gore fest, as apparent when a disembodied head floats in the air before biting a girl’s butt.

I cannot stress enough the volume of insane moments in House, both of the narrative and of the way this whole thing is put together, and it just about reaches such a point of absurdity that it almost becomes normal. Eventually House washes over you like a fever you’ve just come to accept, but I wonder if that point of no return is different for everyone. I knew I was too deep when the frame rate is halved for an entire segment for inexplicable reasons and I didn’t even bat an eye. Maybe for others it’s the ridiculous piano kill. Maybe it’s the aforementioned decapitated butt munch. Or maybe it’s the midway musical montage that suddenly incorporates meowing and a cat boomeranging across piano keys. I have no idea if this movie is any good but I sure can’t stop thinking about it.