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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. But time has allowed us a clearer perspective on Obayashi’s vision, and the young generation that so loved the film in its infancy is key to this new understanding. House is a classical gothic romance repackaged in a counterintuitive wrapper—its VFX orgy intense to near-illegibility, its sense of humor a bit puerile, and most crucially, its soundtrack a mélange of the nostalgic and the funky, the classical and the experimental.
Film Review: The Christ of the Skull (Short Film) (Panic Fest
The surreal comedy-horror bit is often trumped by absurdist melodrama with an incomprehensible plot encompassing demonic possession, ESP, telekinesis, and cannibalism. 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. A schoolgirl and six of her classmates travel to her aunt's country home, which turns out to be haunted.House featuring Kimiko Ikegami and Miki Jinbo is streaming on MAX, streaming with subscription on The Criterion Channel, available for rent or purchase on iTunes, and 3 others. It's a comedy and mystery movie with a better than average IMDb audience rating of 7.3 (32,366 votes). 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.
Letterboxd — Your life in film
Like a cat which materializes one day on Oshare’s window sill, spews blood in another scene, and plays the piano in reverse. It’s no coincidence that the music is so closely tied to the moods of the girls. House’s soundtrack had been finished a year before Obayashi shot the film, and when he found himself struggling to give effective verbal direction to the novice actresses, he played the soundtrack for them as they acted out the scenes. In “Constructing a House,” Obayashi mentions that the actresses “belonged to a younger generation that found it easier to express emotion through chords, melodies, and rhythms than through words. House tells the story of high school ingenue Gorgeous, who embarks on an ill-fated summer vacation with her six friends to her aunt’s lonely house in the countryside.
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In the morning, Ryoko arrives at the house and finds Gorgeous in a classic kimono. Gorgeous tells Ryoko that her friends will wake up soon and that they will be hungry.
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Obayashi’s collaborator Asei Kobayashi wrote the score, but Kobayashi conceded early on that he was “too old” to do justice to a firecracker like House, so the two called in 25-year-old Mickie Yoshino and his band Godiego to actually arrange the tunes. The resulting soundtrack, like the film itself, attempts to span the generation gap by putting each generation’s outlook into paradoxical dialogue. 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. As Kung Fu lunges into a flying kick, she is eaten by a possessed light fixture. Kung Fu's legs manage to escape and damage the painting of Blanche on the wall, which in turn kills Blanche physically. Prof tries to read the diary, but a jar with teeth pulls her into the blood, where she dissolves.
In the heart of a violet forest, an old house awaits young girls.
Even after the flesh perishes, one can live in the hearts of others together with the feelings one has for them. Therefore, the story of love must be told many times so that the spirits of lovers may live forever. Reelgood is the most extensive streaming guide in the US and UK, with every TV show and movie available online.
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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. 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. Although Obayashi is quick to textualize his observations about the differences in perception between younger and older Japanese moviegoers—“it’s like a cotton candy!
The encounter is initially disregarded by the other girls, but over time they also begin to encounter other supernatural traps throughout the house. 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. Seven girls on their summer trip pay a visit to a possessed house which plans to eat them in extremely bizzare and surreal ways. The film, which received generally negative reviews, was a box office hit in Japan.
Interview: Director Andy Armstrong and Danielle Burgio (SQUEALER)
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. Click here to read more on The Hollywood Insider’s vision, values and mission statement here – Media has the responsibility to better our world – The Hollywood Insider fully focuses on substance and meaningful entertainment, against gossip and scandal, by combining entertainment, education, and philanthropy. This website uses Pico to reflect your current subscription status, as well as keep you logged in. Leaving this enabled will mean that you don't need to log in each time you access this website to unlock articles. Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. A schoolgirl and six of her classmates travel to her aunt's country home, which turns out to be haunted.
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. To this end, music and the transitory emotional states that music induces are illusions, fantasies, temporary self-regulations that allow us a few minutes to negotiate reality’s waking contradictions…but they’re only illusions insofar as the whole of human perception, generation to generation, is also illusory. The “love” that keeps Auntie infinitely suspended in the house, and the youth and beauty foregone as she sat waiting for that love, are illusions. The adventurous horizons and unblemished romance promised to a post-war generation, on which she feeds to sustain her bitter unlife, are illusions. What Obayashi allows us to do through the soundtrack is cope with the eternal war between these opposed illusions, our fears and our futures, by reconciling them rather than turning away from them completely.
The Cine-Files: Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 horror film 'House' - Miscellany News
The Cine-Files: Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 horror film 'House'.
Posted: Wed, 10 Nov 2021 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Auntie’s fractured reflection weeps blood, a sinister cackle resounds, and Gorgeous, shellshocked, is consumed by ghostly flames. The leitmotif’s musical simplicity grants it an immediately recognizable quality, which primes the viewer for its approximately 20 appearances in various permutations throughout the film. 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.
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. 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.
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. Its appearance signals a turn in both the girls’ understanding of their dire circumstances and the viewer’s understanding of how House uses music to create a false sense of comfort. Through Godiego’s young hands, Obayashi inspires feelings of romantic warmth and hope as we get to know the girls, only to cast doubt on the meaning and validity of those feelings once the horrors of Auntie’s house obliterate their youthful illusions.
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”. Quite the contrary, there are outlandish visuals and moments in the film that will make the audience wonder how the heck that even happened, like a man turning into a pile of bananas. The visual wonder of ‘Hausu’ will keep audiences glued to the screen while causing them to never expect what will happen next.
Browse through every TV series and movie and sort by title, release year, genre, IMDB rating, and, most important— see where to watch it. 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.
Auntie, a retired piano teacher who lost her betrothed to World War II, works in tandem with the house to possess Gorgeous and systematically devour her friends, so that they might both feed on the joyous youth that the war stole from her so many years before. This simple story, relatable in theory to all ages, can be hard to make heads or tails of amidst the daunting volume and furor of Obayashi’s aesthetic choices. 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. 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.
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