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If Obayashi’s “younger generation” is as musically inclined as he claims, the message must be as unequivocal to them as it is to us, especially when communicated through melodies crafted by their own cohort. 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.
Watch Out for That Disembodied Head, Girls
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. Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. After a tour of the home, the girls leave the watermelon in a well to keep it cold. When Fantasy goes to retrieve the watermelon from the well, she finds Mac's disembodied head, which flies in the air and bites Fantasy's buttocks before she escapes. The encounter is initially disregarded by the other girls, but over time they also begin to encounter other supernatural traps throughout the house.
Top Billed Cast
However, Obayashi kept promoting the film until the studio allowed him to direct it himself. House was filmed on one of Toho’s largest sets, where Obayashi shot the film without a storyboard over a period of about two months. House is ultimately all of a piece—a projection of a self-absorbed girl’s perceived threat of being replaced by her father’s new wife. Running to her aunt’s to escape her parents, Gorgeous (Ikegami Kimiko), and her friends stumble across monsters that ultimately embody her fears, and act as a logical extension of her own unchecked entitlement. House, despite the claims, isn’t really a horror movie; it’s a dark cartoon of unfettered play, an attempt to directly channel budding teens’ stream of consciousness with its neediness, triumph, exhilaration, confusion (the deaths aren’t meant to be taken seriously, as the children seem to be empowered by their pretend demises). House is successful in that aim, which means it’s about equal parts brilliant, baffling, ridiculous, and unwatchable.
Horror News Confidential w/ American Horrors’ Hart Fisher, June 5th at 9pm EST
Japanese Director Nobuhiko Obayashi Dies at 82 - Variety
Japanese Director Nobuhiko Obayashi Dies at 82.
Posted: Fri, 10 Apr 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]
To the lifelong devotee of classical Japanese cinema, it was indeed sacrilegious, a mutant child born of American genre bombast, anime-style hyperkinesis, and manic psychedelia. Despite the protestations of the old guard, though, the movie was a hit, and in the ensuing decades, Obayashi’s esteem has only grown. The decapitated noggin also flies through the air, but that’s getting, um, ahead of the story, which opens with two uniformed teenage girls putting on a little photo shoot, prettily posing and laughing. You quickly discover that one, who’s known as Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami), a moniker used by both her friends and father (Saho Sasazawa), is the center from which all the other chaotic parts flow and twist. The reading is interrupted by the giant-sized head of Gorgeous, who reveals that her aunt died many years ago while waiting for her fiancé to return from World War II.
Nobuhiko Obayashi and Crew on HOUSE
There are close-ups, but many are so glossy and stylized that they look like advertisements. Upstairs in the house, Kung Fu and Prof find Gorgeous wearing a bridal gown, who then reveals her aunt's diary to them. Kung Fu follows Gorgeous as she leaves the room, only to find Sweet's body trapped in a grandfather clock, which starts bleeding profusely. Panic-driven, the remaining girls barricade the upper part of the house while Prof, Fantasy and Kung Fu read the aunt's diary. The film, which received generally negative reviews, was a box office hit in Japan. 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.
This creates an orienting locus of stylistic uniformity amidst the film’s immediate visual carnage. It first appears immediately after the title cards; Gorgeous is shrouded in a sheet for a photo shoot in a candle-lit, empty classroom. Pairing the leitmotif with talk of witches and horror offers a microcosm of the film’s emotional span there in its first two minutes. Youth is on display, sweetly scored and dead center in the frame, briefly warped by ghoulish imaginings. Equally absurd and nightmarish, HOUSE might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. Never before available on home video in the United States, it’s one of the most exciting cult discoveries in years.
Nobuhiko Obayashi, Unpredictable Japanese Director, Dies at 82 - The New York Times
Nobuhiko Obayashi, Unpredictable Japanese Director, Dies at 82.
Posted: Mon, 20 Apr 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Although all of House’s music is evocative, its leitmotif is the Rosetta Stone to understanding its complex attitude toward romance, youth, and the specter of post-war Japan that looms over them. It’s initially used as a malleable, expressionistic representation of how the girls are feeling at any point in time, often warm and jovial with a strongly nostalgic character. At the halfway point, however, the leitmotif enters the film’s diegesis in the form of a music box, changing from an emotional signpost into an icon of wartime grief.
Audience Reviews
The art design is meticulous as is the sound, but the acting is horrid most of the time. There’s also some subplot involving a professor, a bucket, bananas, and a poltergeist but I’ll leave that to you, dear reader, to decipher. 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. We also have KunFuu who, in one scene, battles a battalion of lumber (yes, lumber).
Cast & Crew
But reality itself is subject to distortion; those things once thought unreal often come storming into our lives without a moment’s notice, like an atomic cotton-candy bloom turning hundreds of thousands of lives into dust. Within the span of human existence, everything is permissible, and the incomprehensible often comes to haunt us, just as an incomprehensible horde of monsters haunts Gorgeous and her friends. The piano swallows Melody whole, and her remaining disembodied fingers plunk out a final few bars of the leitmotif before hitting a sour note and being crushed under the piano lid. Between the leitmotif’s obliteration of Gorgeous’ personality and its consumption of Melody, it becomes clear that this “beautiful song” belongs neither to us nor the girls; it’s not ours to find comfort in, but instead a painful relic of an era whose youth saw their dreams and futures leveled by the atom bomb.
Obayashi was a director of TV commercials before this full-length feature and in many ways it shows. There is a glossy glow to everything and an obsessive attention to detail that allows even his greatest missteps to seem somehow intentional and (usually) technically sound. Although the undercurrent of incredible sadness that surges through House ages us just a bit, Obayashi still sends us out on one final swell of fantasy, forgiving us our naïve need to believe in beauty even as it walks hand in hand with his damning excoriation of humanity. There’s joy amidst fear, and there will be loss in our future, and from the cinematic overlap of these truths emerges Obayashi’s “story of love.” Like a leitmotif, no matter what form it takes, we all eventually hear the same melody. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House was released in Japan in 1977 to a highly polarized reaction.
Most haunted house pictures have something to do with the conflict of society and id, with the house (or whatever else) acting as agent that releases repressed feelings and/or resentments at the cost of stability. There’s no friction in House though; it never has any kind of stability to begin with, and I can’t imagine anything has been repressed. The characters, all young teenage girls with names such as Gorgeous, Fantasy, and Kung Fu, are giddily unrepressed—jump-kicking and chattering in front of purposefully artificial mattes with musical cues that would make Pino Donaggio blush. 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.
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