House

You have never seen a movie like House.  Director Nobuhiko Obayashi made sure of it.

It was the early ‘70s and Jaws had just hit.  Toho studios, looking to capitalize on the horror market, asked commercial director Obayashi for a script.  Obayashi thought, ‘If Jaws is a success, what’s next?  Movies about bear attacks and bee attacks and ant attacks.  How boring.’  He talked over the project with his ten year old daughter, talked about what scared her.  He wrote down her ideas as scenarios including mummies, skeletons, ghosts, vampires, hungry pianos, murderous reflections, demonic cats ,and much more.  He gave the scenarios to his writing partner and told him to have at it.  The result?  A film that processes a little girl’s night terrors through the sensibilities of the men who made the classic Charles Bronson “Mandom” commercials.

The result is a bold, creepy, and funny horror fantasy.  It gathers seven young women whom the camera will love, fetishisize, and terrorize in combinations that’ll alternately make you smile, squirm, recoil, and guffaw.  It sends them to a spooky house on a hill.  It introduces them to a friendly old woman who may not be friendly at all.  Before long, the flying head of a decapitated Japanese girl will take a bite out of the rear end of one of her former classmates.  And away we go.

Ok, so far so good.  But you’ve seen Sam Raimi pictures and you’ve seen early Peter Jackson flicks.  What makes House so very different?  Execution.  This horror fantasy luxuriates in the fantastic.  It uses every imaginable camera trick to focus the eye, to leap from image to image, and even to play within an image to give the impression of a story told by someone whose mind is racing through and among characters and events faster than she can get the words out.  House’s sets, including deliriously colorful matte paintings and generous helpings of cobwebs, heighten the sense of unreality.  Its use of color, music, and editing make it feel like it has so much story to tell, that it wants to pile on so many ideas, that it can’t squeeze them all into 90ish minutes of classical narrative film.

In other words, House stands as a delirious exercise in excessive, feverish, joyfully weird and innovative filmmaking.  It’s the most fun I’ve had at the movies since Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and I can’t wait to see it again.

And the second time through, I’ll still have never seen anything like it.