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As the video essayist is keen to note, Ôbayashi Sr., a Hiroshima survivor, had plenty of his own childhood trauma to draw upon. And the ultimate impression is of a father-daughter duo working through the things that scare them on-screen (be it cannibalistic pianos to losing your friends to an unfathomable catastrophe). Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that looks at the making of the Japanese 1977 horror movie House. The unpredictable quality of the film adds to the horror since the audience never truly knows what to expect. There is not one moment in the film that will make the audience roll their eyes and say “of course, I saw that coming a mile away”.
The Super Media Bros Podcast with Filmmaker Geno McGahee (Rise of the Scarecrows: Hell on Earth)
House: Marriage Is the True Horror in This 1977 Japanese Film - Collider
House: Marriage Is the True Horror in This 1977 Japanese Film.
Posted: Fri, 24 Jun 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
‘Hausu’ is the funnest haunted house movie ever made thanks to its trippy visuals and playful nature. It plays homage to the typical haunted house story while turning its tropes and visual style on its head. With its bright colors, hybrid of different visual effects, and rapid editing, ‘Hausu’ is a film that one can’t look away from. It will keep you glued to the screen and wondering both what will happen next and how we even got here in the first place. Hausu is a gleeful and playful look at the demented, a fun and engaging experience that any horror fan will love. While ‘Hausu’ is an extremely rewatchable film no one will forget their first time watching the mind-bending treat.
Nobuhiko Obayashi's House Is STILL the Weirdest Japanese Horror Film - CBR
Nobuhiko Obayashi's House Is STILL the Weirdest Japanese Horror Film.
Posted: Wed, 29 Apr 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Top 10 Best 70’s Horror Films
Commercial director Obayashi came up with a story inspired by his daughter's nightmares, and with presumptuous rogue campaigning and promotion that hyped the film and got him signed to direct, he took the helm of one of the most unusual pieces of cinema to ever be created. It’s a film that is as frustrating as it is enlightening; perhaps a misguided masterpiece, perhaps excessively self-indulgent, but more creative and comprised of more vision than most of the horror films made in the past thirty years. To read this, one might think that this were a horrible film and in a way it is, however, Obayashi is very self-aware and uses the lackluster/subpar cast and limited budget to his advantage. He does not attempt to obscure the shortcomings of his resources and this is a respectable twist on making the most of what one’s stuck with.
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‘Hausu’ makes you feel like you’re tripping at a Halloween party in the best way possible. Moreover, it was perhaps Chigumi’s input that began moving the project further and further away from Toho’s initial brief, imbuing the emerging story with a certain dream logic. At times House almost feels like a children’s film, its opening scenes featuring broad slapstick, a cheesy pop song and endless girlish giggling. ‘Hausu’ isn’t one of those movies that is “so bad that it’s good” because its look is fully intentional, it doesn’t look this way due to a lack of budget like other cult classics such as ‘Troll 2’. It instead looks like a children’s Halloween themed pop-up book because of the film’s inspiration. While making the film, Obayashi regularly talked to his pre-teen daughter about what scary ideas she thought should be in the movie.
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To add to the absurdity, characters are named after singular traits which define them throughout the film such as Melody who plays the piano, Fanta the daydreamer, and Mac the glutton. Following this, she shrugs and sighs, musing, “It must have been my imagination.” She continues on as if nothing ever happened and the scene is never referenced again. The film is chockfull of scenes like this and it will either captivate or infuriate the viewer to no end. Like a cat which materializes one day on Oshare’s window sill, spews blood in another scene, and plays the piano in reverse.
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Hausu
The encounter is initially disregarded by the other girls, but over time they also begin to encounter other supernatural traps throughout the house. Influenced by ideas from his daughter Chigumi, he developed ideas for a script by Chiho Katsura. After the project was green-lit, it was put on hold for two years as no one at Toho wanted to direct it. However, Obayashi kept promoting the film until the studio allowed him to direct it himself.
A decapitated head in a wishing well, a piano that eats its player, and a dancing skeleton. While this may sound like a list of random spooky story ideas, these are all scenes in ‘Hausu’, the 1977 Japanese film by Nobuhiko Obayashi. ‘Hausu’ may have been criticized when it was first released, but it has since become a cult classic, especially among the film buff community. Interestingly enough, the horror film is not admired for being scary but is instead admired for being fun and quirky thanks to its trippy visuals and off-color humor.
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I had a hard time getting into it but when it finally kicks in...it really kicks in. Seven girls on their summer trip pay a visit to a possessed house which plans to eat them in extremely bizzare and surreal ways. Hollywood Insider is a media network thatfocuses on substance and meaningful entertainment/culture, so as to utilize media as a tool to unite and better our world, by combining entertainment, education and philanthropy, while being against gossip and scandal. There is, however, something underpinning all the madness, a quietly melancholic undercurrent that ultimately elevates the film.
The pretty but pensive Gorgeous is joined by Prof (brainy), Kung Fu (violent), Fantasy (a daydreamer), Sweet (homely), Melody (musical) and the ever-eating Mac (short for ‘stomach’) on a summer trip to her aunt’s creaky old house in the countryside. The result plays like a head-on collision between The Evil Dead (1981) and Yellow Submarine (1968) – a fevered flight of horror-fantasy like no other. “A movie” is right, for few films have as much fun simply being a movie as House does.
Like many a good ghost story, House reflects the ways in which past events can reverberate into the present and, on some level, this is a story about seven happy-go-lucky teenagers being starkly confronted with the wartime trauma their parents’ generation endured. While House is inarguably a work of dense visual and technical complexity, its narrative may well be deceptive in its simplicity. After being widely released in North America in 2009 and 2010, it was met with more favorable response and has since gained a cult following. Another Japanese series made with a similar outward-looking approach will drop April 24 on Disney+. House (Hausu) is a 1977 Japanese surrealist horror comedy Toku film directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi.
Hausu’s creepy old woman is Auntie (Yōko Minamida), who is just having a great time in the film. Instead of being old and shrewd, Auntie revels in the spooky, eating eyeballs and dancing with skeletons. Auntie, like the film itself, has a playful energy unlike the trope of the “creepy old woman”. Auntie acts as a parody of the “creepy old woman” trope by putting the trope on its head, acting differently than the creepy old women that came before her yet still being spooky.
There’s a central musical theme that reoccurs through the film which is fantastic, but some directorial choices are ineffective (it is only Obayashi’s debut after all). The art design is meticulous as is the sound, but the acting is horrid most of the time. The story of Hausu was a radio hit following relentless promotion by writer/director Obayashi which persuaded Toho studio to adapt it into a feature film. It is often cited as a precursor to Evil Dead 2, but given that it was released in 1977 and the fact that it was almost never made makes this eclectic horror romp rather impressive and more than just a little influential to horror cinema in general. The surreal comedy-horror bit is often trumped by absurdist melodrama with an incomprehensible plot encompassing demonic possession, ESP, telekinesis, and cannibalism.
Despite Auntie’s hermetic lifestyle and tragic wartime backstory (her fighter-pilot fiancé never returned to marry her), she is far from the Miss Havisham type. The girls find both her and the titular house perfectly charming upon their arrival. But with spooky happenings around the house and the visiting party starting to shrink in numbers, both home and homeowner reveal their sinister true natures. Not to be confused with the American haunted house movie called House, or that other House who's a snarky doctor. The visual style of ‘Hausu’ can’t be explained with rational thinking since children can come up with things that can’t be explained like an adult can. This unexplainable style with little to no logic also adds to the horror of the film.
It is as if the film takes what we expect from a regular haunted house movie and gives us the exact opposite, a funhouse mirror look at the tropes we have become accustomed to. The visual wonder of ‘Hausu’ comes from how the film avoids realism in favor of outlandish imagery and surrealism. The visual approach in the film is more based on a childish playfulness than a desire to look realistic. Obayashi does every trick in the books for the visual effects of the film, from animation mixed with live action to rapid-paced editing to whatever this is. While this visual style may seem disorienting at first, it soon immerses the audience in a viewing experience like no other. In a world where every horror film is trying to be more realistic than the last, ‘Hausu’ is a refreshing change of pace, favoring a child-like whimsy to the boring reality that we live in.
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