Nobuhiko Obayashi

(Criterion Streaming, August 2021) I should probably explain that I frequently decide to see movies based on “best of” lists. In those cases, I often have just a title and a date to go from — sometimes a director, less frequently a plot summary. In other words, I often see those films without many preconceptions other than language and date of production. So… I really wasn’t expecting the looniness of House’s blend of low-budget comedy and over-the-top horror. Working with limited means and even-more-limited special effects technology, this is a film about seven schoolgirls going to a mysterious house possessed by an evil spirit. The plot details and mechanics are inconsequential to the mounting sense of dread and showpieces in which the schoolgirls are killed by the evil spirit — by the time a piano eats a girl’s fingers and then swallows her whole thanks to special effects that are now more hilarious than scary, we’ve attained the maximum of what House is going for. It was never intended as a serious film — the acting is amateurish (appropriately so, considering that most of the actors had no professional experience), the tone is deliberately light, the special effects are intentionally lousy, and the details are ridiculous. Still, the film is even funnier now considering how slap-dash the cinematography can be, with a handcrafted artificiality that only reinforces the surrealism of it all. It will take a more knowledgeable scholar of Japanese comedy/horror to confirm, but I do have the impression that House is the grandfather of the entire splatter-comedy genre that only the Japanese do like they do — that there’s a straight line from House to The Machine Girl and its ilk (not to mention the Anglosphere side-trip through Raimi and Jackson’s early work). Needless to say, that wasn’t what I was expecting when I saw that House was the next film on my list and it was available from the very serious Criterion collection — I was expecting something like Ozu, but clearly didn’t have a clue what to expect from director Nobuhiko Obayashi.