You'll Laugh, You'll Scream: House (Dir Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1h28m, 1977)

House is not an easy film to write about; I can note facts and figures and plot, certainly, such as the fact that director Nobuhiko Obayashi, originally an experimental and advert director, was tasked by producers Toho to make a film capitalising on the success of Jaws (1975), or that his daughter, Chigumi, came up with many of the film's most outlandish ideas, Obayashi senior noting that "children can come up with things that can't be explained".

We can note the film's cult resurgence in the 2010s, buoyed by its first US release, making the film a cult favourite outside its native Japan, the fact that almost its entire cast were amateur actresses, and its soundtrack would mostly consist of a single haunting piano piece from the keyboard player of Japanese pop-rock band, Godiego, later to produce the theme for cult Japanese series, Saiyuki, later released in the UK as Monkey. 

What House is, beyond its central tale of seven Japanese school girls journeying to a rural mansion and encountering the supernatural, is one of the strangest and most singular cinematic experiences ever committed to celluloid.

Japanese horror comedy itself is a strange field. For every cheaply made splatter comedy, such as Tokyo Gore Police, Battlefield Baseball, and the gloriously lurid, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl; most of these lifting from the one and only Shinya Tsukamoto's iconic Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989), there is the cult oddness of Wild Zero in which the garage rock band Guitar Wolf star as themselves in an alien invasion movie, the Romero-riffing found-footage satire, One Cut of the Dead, and Takeshi Miike's "zombie movie meets The Sound of Music" extravaganza, The Happiness of the Katakuris. House can't be compared to any of these films, though sharing some of its more offbeat moments, and its use of mixed media with Katakuris. 

Beginning by introducing its septet of girls, in particular Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) - all the girls have one name nicknames, based around their main personality trait (Kung Fu, Fantasy, Prof, Mac, Melody, and Sweet) - whose father's intentions to remarry cause Gorgeous to write to her reclusive aunt (Yōko Minamida), who agrees to let them visit. So begins the film's oddness. 

Even before arriving in the countryside, Obayashi and cinematographer Yoshitaka Sakamoto (Obayashi's longtime cinematographer, up till the director's death in 2020) have given the film an eerie quality, the scenes at Gorgeous' house and surrounding area shot on a soundstage with beautiful but deliberately artificial skies, whilst the arrival of her intended mother-in-law involves a series of mirrors such that we get a fractured image of her. 

There's even a flash of the film's slapstick to follow, just before the girls set off, from their teacher, Mr Togo (Kiyohiko Ozaki), who is startled by Gorgeous' cat, Blanche and ends up awkwardly stuck in a pot. This, and the girls' journey into the Japanese countryside, essentially de-mark where the film moves from a straight drama to, well, House. Even on the train, where the septet recount-via voiceover-the backstory of Gorgeous' mother and her aunt, this is a black and white retelling of the tragic loss of her aunt's lover in the Second World War, over which the girls bicker and riff, so Obayashi's idiosyncratic and, surprisingly modern style of filmmaking begins to focus; together with the animation in this sequence, which is purposefully childish. So House's oddness and mixed media visual style begins to take shape. 

Arriving at the house, so the film doffs its cap to sense, kicks off its shoes, and proceeds to be the strangest movie I've had the pleasure of seeing this year; only getting weirder once the bodies begin piling up, in a series of bizarre sequences, with the true nature of Gorgeous' aunt and the house itself slowly revealed. There are many things that House can be compared to-the wildly changing tone, from comedic to horror to farce to cartoon, and back to horror, which may draw comparison to all manner of classic cartoons, especially the work of Hanna Barbera's Scooby Doo. There is undeniably the logic of cartoons, but this is perhaps a degree of oversimplification, attempting to summarise and compare a film with a deliberately outlandish visual style to a children's animated series. Closer to the mark is the distinctly Japanese "horror house", not unlike the British and American ghost train, but walked through, rather than on rails

Like the Horror House, House is stuffed with strange and surreal sights: floating heads, furniture coming to life, including a bizarre moment when one of the girls is attacked by futons, and the infamous killer piano and dreamlike imagary of one of the party stuffed, via primitive but effective compositing, into the cogs and mechanism of the house's clock. Even with these spooks and frights, there's moments of surreal comedy: the arrival of a giant head, the morbid humour of disembodied fingers continuing to play the murderous piano even after they have been lopped off- a la The Beast with Five Fingers-and the knowing winks and glances to the audience from the film's main antagonist that lean heavily upon the fourth wall. Part of this is the fact that many of the special effects are crude, deliberately or otherwise. 

Atop all of this is the film's most memorable scare, the gleefully unpleasant and downright malevolent form of Blanche, whose transformation into a (purely animated) foe gives the film its most iconic visual, adorning the equally iconic, and memetically remixed poster for the 2010 US release, now  also adorning the Criterion release. It is also the film's ethos in miniature; the effect is cheap animation, a still image, a pair of lights and a pump with which the cat memorably projectiles blood. Blanche is a bakeneko, a fearsome figure from Japanese folklore. Blanche is also, frankly, absurd, the protagonist's pet cat going on a supernatural rampage only to be stopped by the disembodied legs of one of our heroines, at which point, the dream logic of the film at full flow, they spurt out blood that nearly drowns the entire ground floor of the house. 

House is Blanche-bizarre, memorable, frightening and hilarious, all at once. Yet, House defies classification; it simply is too odd to be a straight horror film, too goofy and packed with offbeat comedy moments to be a pure art-film, and too unnerving to be simply a comedy. Even in terms of Japanese cinema, it stands alone, a tottering horror house on the hill, casting a crooked, and unmistakable shadow over horror-comedy as a genre.

Rating:Highly Recommended 

House is available via BluRay from Criterion and streaming from Mubi

Next week, we complete our horror-comedy adventures in London with Edgar Wright's ZomRomCom, Shaun of the Dead.