HOUSE (1977) Four stars

The year 1977 produced four of the definitive WTF movies in the history of cinema: ERASERHEAD, SUSPIRIA, EXORCIST II, and HOUSE, an item from the Japanese studio (Toho) responsible for Akira Kurosawa, Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and the H-Man.

Toho really outdid itself with HOUSE, which even surpasses GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER in nonstop funky weirdness. Janus Films describes HOUSE as an episode of “Scooby Doo” directed by Dario Argento.

Bottom line: HOUSE just might be even weirder than ERASERHEAD, more colorful than SUSPIRIA, and more whacked out bat shit crazy than EXORCIST II. You have been warned.

First-time director Nobuhiko Obayashi pulls out all the stops in realizing a rather simple tale on the surface: teenage girl Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) and her six friends Prof (Ai Matsubara), Melody (Eriko Tanaka), Mac (Mieko Sato), Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo), Sweet (Masayo Miyako), and Fantasy (Kumiko Oba) pay Gorgeous’ aunt (Yoko Minamida) in the country a visit. It just so happens that the aunt died in this house many years ago waiting on her fiancee to return from World War II and her spirit remains and feasts on unmarried girls. This is a haunted house movie where the house is hungry, very hungry indeed.

Obayashi’s at-the-time pre-teen daughter Chigumi Obayashi contributed ideas to her father. She came up with several childhood fears, her father relayed the fears to screenwriter Chiho Katsura, and they incorporated her ideas into the finished product. You’ll be able to recognize her contributions almost instantly and they contribute to the uniqueness.

Just as a fun exercise, I looked up the plot keywords for HOUSE on IMDb: “refrigerator,” “banana,” “watermelon,” “bloody spray,” “dismemberment,” “decapitation,” “full frontal nudity,” and “severed head” are some of the more interesting 75 keywords and they only scratch at the surface of the overall bizarre nature of the entire enterprise.

More than 30 years after its original release, HOUSE seemingly came from out of nowhere to develop a cult following in the United States, playing first as a midnight movie in Nashville and then at a film festival in Austin in 2009 before heading to DVD.

I first encountered HOUSE through its cover image for the Criterion Collection release on October 26, 2010. Maybe you remember seeing that artwork, as well. Nashville graphic designer and Ben Folds drummer Sam Smith came up with the distinctive image: “I used the first idea that came to me after watching a screener of the film — Blanche the cat’s psycho-screaming mug — and adapted it to stand alone as a symbol of the uncanny and over-the-top assault that our midnight-movie audience was in for,” Smith said. The poster first appeared for the film at the Belcourt Theatre in Smith’s hometown.

Then, I read the reviews for HOUSE and they’re nearly as over-the-top as the film itself.

Online reviewer Dennis Schwartz wrapped up his mixed review, “The director uses freeze-frames, jump-cuts, video effects to change dimensions, spiral effects, color tints, and assorted other techie tricks to play the scary pic card more for laughs than to be gruesome. It’s an experimental visual pic that becomes overwhelmed with low-brow slapstick comedy, a ridiculous killer house and garish visuals. But it’s a one-of-a-kind film that has its admirers, who just can’t resist such weird childish nonsense.”

Michael Atkinson opined in the Village Voice, “But though it plays like a retarded hybrid of ROCKY HORROR and WHISPERING CORRIDORS, it is, moment to moment, its own kind of movie hijinks. It even won a directorial-debut critics’ prize back in the day. Gigglers and cultists, pony up.”

I watched James Rolfe’s review for Monster Madness X from 2016. Rolfe started his review with a pause and a WOW! Of course, Rolfe picked HOUSE for one of the “WTF Wednesday” reviews.

I finally caught up with HOUSE in late summer 2019 and it lived up to expectations. It calls to mind a few pictures: EVIL DEAD II, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T, DAISIES, SUSPIRIA, and MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO. Like those films, though, HOUSE ultimately stands alone as an unique work because it creates its own world. I find that I respond more forcefully to fictional works that do that, rather than just rehash more of the same old already damaged goods. I want to be challenged, inspired, etc. I’ve never seen a haunted house movie quite like HOUSE.

HOUSE haunts one’s thoughts and gains in strength upon deeper reflection. At this moment of typing, I am thinking about Gorgeous’ aunt and how much time she spent waiting alone in that house for the love of her life to return from World War II. He never did, and they both died, she in that darn house and she’s cursed to haunt it for eternity because of her bitterness about the war. Then, I start thinking about the sheer enormity of the loss endured by the human race from Sept. 1, 1939 through Sept. 2, 1945: An estimated 70-85 million people died or three percent of the world’s population in 1940; 50-55 million civilians and 21-25 million soldiers no longer lived on this planet from a variety of causes, death on a mass scale that doubled World War I; the atomic bomb and the Holocaust two of humanity’s depressing advancements in death.

Obayashi was born in Hiroshima in 1938 and he lost all his childhood friends when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as post-WWII nuclear testing, inform many Japanese films of the last almost 75 years.