JAPANESE HORROR FOR THOSE OF US WHO HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED AN ACID TRIP
★★★★☆ (Worth the Watch)
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi
1977
I recently had an emergency appendectomy. They cut Miss Wilkes like a salami and then threw some pills at her and said, “Your appendix is ours now. Just sit around all day and don’t cough” and Miss Wilkes told them, “That’s what I do anyway” and hobbled home. Not used to anything stronger than Advil, she couldn't focus on reading so she moved onto her movie list and wound up watching Hausu (House), a film so trippy and electric, she wasn’t sure if her magic pills or the Japanese were to blame. Turns out it was a little of both.
The seven girls at the center of the story are all named according to their traits: Prof is a rational brainiac, Mac is the eater, Melody likes music, Kung Fu kicks ass and takes names, and Gorgeous is well, you know. This last girl is the reason everyone ends up in a haunted house in the first place. In order to get away from her new stepmother, Gorgeous takes the train with her friends to her estranged aunt’s house in the countryside. A peppy road trip with cartoon backgrounds and a 1970s Disney-esque beatnik score hides the fact that we’re about to watch a schoolgirl massacre. Sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows don’t exactly go with someone dying in a vat of blood acid, but this is what makes Hausu so special, even if I did feel bad for being so intrigued by what I was watching. Every scene guaranteed I wouldn’t turn off the film because I had to see how far the director would go, and I wasn’t disappointed. As things start to become serious—and the cynical girls realize they’re in real trouble—they wish and hope their male teacher will come to save them, but in the end, only they can figure out how to save themselves.
A perfect storm of medication and batshit movie may have collided, but Hausu is an incredibly creative film on its own, and I highly recommend it for horror fans who think they have seen everything. From VHS overlay to keyholes to silent movie cards to lush matte paintings, Obayashi used every trick in the book; these distractions make you forget what you just saw, as if you were looking out the windows of a bullet train. Hausu was so hyper, I caught myself waving my hands at the air trying to calm the movie down, like a kitten batting at a ribbon. Nothing about the movie isn’t on brand, the Japanese are masters of frenetic filmmaking (have you seen some of their game shows?). I normally avoid anything that makes me feel like I'm trapped in a small room with two-hundred toddlers, but sometimes this kind of enthusiasm can lead to really unique work. Few directors have the guts to take major risks—the first movies that come to mind are Coppola’s Dracula and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. I would add Obayashi to that list of visionaries.
I promise you’ve never seen anything like Hausu before. One has to really have a sick sense of humor to make a movie that slaughters Japanese schoolgirls with a smile, but if we’re this entertained, what does that say about us?
GENRES: Atmospheric, Diverse Characters, Teens in Peril, What the Fuck Was That
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