My Cultural Diet

I first learned of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House well over 15 years ago, and honestly? I’m a bit disappointed in myself that it took me this long to finally watch it. House begins like countless other horror films, with a group of high school students deciding to spend their vacation at a remote house that looks idyllic but turns out to be all kinds of haunted. Of course, the students take way too long to realize something’s wrong, but by then it’s too late, and we spend the rest of the film waiting for the inevitable to happen. But Obayashi, who worked in both experimental film and TV advertising prior to making House, finds the most creative ways of presenting the inevitable. He employs every cinematic trick in the book and then some, and the resulting film is one for which words like “bizarre,” “psychedelic,” and “surreal” just barely begin to scratch the surface. As such, I hesitate to call this a horror film even though it features a haunted house, a demon cat, dancing skeletons, possession, a teenager-devouring piano, and more blood than The Shining’s elevator. Indeed, you’ll probably spend more time scratching your head and/or laughing than actually being scared. Oh, and would you believe that House also works as a metaphor for the trauma caused by the atomic bomb? (Obayashi was born in Hiroshima and all of his childhood friends were killed by the attack, an experience that he worked into the script.) This film’s got layers, I tell you, as well as a floating head that bites people’s butts.

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