“The power of cinema is in the strange and inexplicable.” – Nobuhiko Obayashi
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws created a defining moment in cinematic history on a worldwide scale. It brought the advent of the summer blockbuster, and its massive success inspired countries all over the globe to chase similar success. That included Japan, where audiences had previously lost interest in theatrical releases. Film company Toho approached filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi to develop a film like Jaws. They had no idea what they were in for; the filmmaker found adult brains boring. Instead, bouncing ideas off his young daughter and working with screenwriter Chiho Katsura, the filmmaker created a ghost-and-fantasy film that confounded everyone, save for the young audience that contributed to the film becoming a major hit. As with most genre fare, critical and cultural appreciation has long since turned around on one of horror’s most exceptional, and weirdest offerings.
House, or Hausu, isn’t a film that’s easily explained. Distilled to its most basic premise, seven schoolgirls travel to an aunt’s country home, which turns out to be dangerously haunted. What plays out is unlike any other haunted house experience committed to celluloid. It’s as though Alice went through the looking glass and then tumbled into the nine circles of phantasmagoric hell. On acid. The girls deal with dancing skeletons, extreme blood pools, floating butt-biting heads, and a house that attempts to eat them at every opportunity. A film that begins as over-the-top as this one does could quickly lose momentum in a lesser visionary’s hands. Here, Nobuhiko Obayashi manages to escalate the crazy, topping every zany moment that came before with something even more jaw-dropping.
Save for the basic premise, not much about what transpires makes much sense. Not traditionally, anyway. It’s absurd for absurd’s sake. Of course, that’s what the filmmaker wanted to achieve. This was always meant to be a child’s fantasy film, despite drawing from grim history. Having grown up in Hiroshima Prefecture, Obayashi lost many close childhood friends to the atomic bombing of the Japanese city in 1945. This permeates throughout the film, thematically. Though it’s a narrative saturated in whimsy and surrealism, it’s defined by two generations pre and post-war. Auntie (Yoko Minamida) lived through the war and tragically lost her fiancé to it. Her grief and wrath fuel the haunting, triggered by a group of schoolgirls who have never endured or experienced the hardship of war. For the briefest moment, the mushroom cloud appears on-screen, and the girls giddily say, “it’s like cotton candy!”
It’s not just the symbolism and foray into the bizarre that makes Hausu such an enduring cult favorite, it’s that it’s a collage of techniques, one endless string of technical experiments for the filmmaker. Nobuhiko Obayashi played around with composite shots, fisheye lenses, freeze frames, superimposed imagery, fade-outs, and any other trick in the book. As for special effects, he didn’t allow Toho’s special effects director to film them; Nobuhiko Obayashi wanted the effects to look fake. He had a particular aesthetic in mind, and he went for it with gusto.
Upon release in Japan, critics had no clue how to process this film. In short, critics and studio executives hated it. Even crew members that enjoyed their time working on the film didn’t think highly of the end product. Youth, however, adored it and made it a commercial hit. Perhaps not so surprisingly, Hausu was influential on kids that grew up with the film. Many of which went on to become filmmakers and critics themselves, giving Hausu the reappraisal it deserved.
Visually and narratively, there’s nothing like Hausu, and there never will be again. Nobuhiko Obayashi was a visionary who eschewed traditional rules. A studio tapped him to develop something in the vein of Jaws, but he had no interest in creating another animal attack film. He wanted to make a fantasy for kids, inspired by his childhood. One he looked to his daughter Chigumi Obayashi, credited for the film’s original story, to help him create.
The recent passing of Nobuhiko Obayashi means there’s a good chance you’ve recently revisited the masterful charms of Hausu. If not, I highly recommend watching through the streaming platform Criterion Channel. Unlike most streaming services, Criterion curates their offerings and offers supplemental materials. There’s a 45-minute interview with Nobuhiko Obayashi on the platform that doesn’t just provide a ton of insight into the film’s road to creation but also gives touching anecdotes from the filmmaker on working with the actors and crew. He offers his thoughts on the importance of fantasy and the inner workings of a child’s imaginative brain.
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s spirit, tenacity, and innovation as a filmmaker will be tremendously missed, but at least he left us with one of the most significant entries in weird cinema. Bizarre, bloody, and delightfully surreal, Hausu is an experience…to say the least.
