Spooky season is approaching and traditional horror films such as Bring her back (excellent terrible) or Evil Dead (chill classic) is an obvious choice for a cozy movie night at home. But if you're looking for something weirder than evil to get into Halloween SpiritI highly recommend the 1977 science fiction horror film. House.
Description House this is a useless exercise. Here's the basic plot: A girl goes to spend the summer with her aunt after her widower father brings home an eerily sedate woman and announces that he intends to marry her. When she arrives at a country house accompanied by six of her friends, strange supernatural things begin to happen.
That's the whole point, but it doesn't even come close to explaining the absolute madness contained within its 88-minute running time. The trailer below offers a little taste.
House This is the vision of director Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose crazy, hyper-stylized experiments give the film a unique visual style. But much of the nightmarish logic contained within can be attributed to the film's co-writer, Chigumi Obayashi, Nobuhiko's 10-year-old daughter.
In an interview found in the film Blu-ray release Nobuhiko explained his approach by saying that:
“Adults can only think about what they understand, so everything remains on this boring human level. But children come up with things that cannot be explained. They like the strange and mysterious. The power of cinema is not in the explainable, but in the strange and inexplicable.”
The result is a film that abruptly and dramatically changes tone from family melodrama with gauzy visuals to music video farce and proto-J-horror. Circular napkins and a distinctly matte painted background touch severed heads and gallons of bright red blood. However, underneath it all there is a narrative. firmly rooted in folklore who confronts trauma by embracing painful absurdity.
House is unlike any other movie you've ever seen. When considering it for Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey called it “too absurd to be truly scary, but too nightmarish to be merely comic.” And that's what makes him so compelling. His influence on Sam Raimi's horror farce. Evil Dead 2 seems obvious and it shares DNA with David Lynch Twin Peaks where hidden anger is explored through a series of seemingly illogical conclusions.
I saw House more times than I can count and I still come away from it wondering, “What the hell did I just watch?” — and I mean that in the best possible way. It's an undeniable cult classic that you can't turn your back on, and if you've never seen it, you owe it to yourself to change that immediately.
