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Auntie’s fractured reflection weeps blood, a sinister cackle resounds, and Gorgeous, shellshocked, is consumed by ghostly flames. When her friends see her next, Gorgeous isn’t quite herself anymore. The leitmotif’s musical simplicity grants it an immediately recognizable quality, which primes the viewer for its approximately 20 appearances in various permutations throughout the film. This creates an orienting locus of stylistic uniformity amidst the film’s immediate visual carnage. It first appears immediately after the title cards; Gorgeous is shrouded in a sheet for a photo shoot in a candle-lit, empty classroom. Pairing the leitmotif with talk of witches and horror offers a microcosm of the film’s emotional span there in its first two minutes.
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How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? Equally absurd and nightmarish, House might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. Never before available on home video in the United States, it’s one of the most exciting cult discoveries in years. To this end, music and the transitory emotional states that music induces are illusions, fantasies, temporary self-regulations that allow us a few minutes to negotiate reality’s waking contradictions…but they’re only illusions insofar as the whole of human perception, generation to generation, is also illusory.
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Gorgeous appears as her aunt in the reflection in the blood and then cradles Fantasy. The aunt disappears after entering the broken refrigerator, and the girls are attacked or possessed by a series of items in the house, such as Gorgeous becoming possessed after using her aunt's mirror and Sweet disappearing after being attacked by mattresses. The girls try to escape the house, but after Gorgeous is able to leave through a door, the rest of the girls find themselves locked in. The girls try to find the aunt to unlock the door but discover Mac's severed hand in a jar. Melody begins to play the piano to keep the girls' spirits up and they hear Gorgeous singing upstairs. As Prof and Kung Fu go to investigate, Melody's fingers are bitten off by the piano, and it ultimately eats her whole.
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The resulting soundtrack, like the film itself, attempts to span the generation gap by putting each generation’s outlook into paradoxical dialogue. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House was released in Japan in 1977 to a highly polarized reaction. To the lifelong devotee of classical Japanese cinema, it was indeed sacrilegious, a mutant child born of American genre bombast, anime-style hyperkinesis, and manic psychedelia.
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Youth is on display, sweetly scored and dead center in the frame, briefly warped by ghoulish imaginings. How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie HOUSE (HAUSU)? Equally absurd and nightmarish, HOUSE might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. The piano swallows Melody whole, and her remaining disembodied fingers plunk out a final few bars of the leitmotif before hitting a sour note and being crushed under the piano lid. Between the leitmotif’s obliteration of Gorgeous’ personality and its consumption of Melody, it becomes clear that this “beautiful song” belongs neither to us nor the girls; it’s not ours to find comfort in, but instead a painful relic of an era whose youth saw their dreams and futures leveled by the atom bomb.
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Although all of House’s music is evocative, its leitmotif is the Rosetta Stone to understanding its complex attitude toward romance, youth, and the specter of post-war Japan that looms over them. It’s initially used as a malleable, expressionistic representation of how the girls are feeling at any point in time, often warm and jovial with a strongly nostalgic character. At the halfway point, however, the leitmotif enters the film’s diegesis in the form of a music box, changing from an emotional signpost into an icon of wartime grief. Its appearance signals a turn in both the girls’ understanding of their dire circumstances and the viewer’s understanding of how House uses music to create a false sense of comfort. Through Godiego’s young hands, Obayashi inspires feelings of romantic warmth and hope as we get to know the girls, only to cast doubt on the meaning and validity of those feelings once the horrors of Auntie’s house obliterate their youthful illusions.
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Even after the flesh perishes, one can live in the hearts of others together with the feelings one has for them. Therefore, the story of love must be told many times so that the spirits of lovers may live forever. In a bid to get away from home, Gorgeous decides to visit her dead mother’s sister (Yoko Minamida). The aunt agrees in a letter that arrives, partly or so it seems, with the help of a white cat that inexplicably materializes one day.
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In the morning, Ryoko arrives at the house and finds Gorgeous in a classic kimono. Gorgeous tells Ryoko that her friends will wake up soon and that they will be hungry.
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The “love” that keeps Auntie infinitely suspended in the house, and the youth and beauty foregone as she sat waiting for that love, are illusions. The adventurous horizons and unblemished romance promised to a post-war generation, on which she feeds to sustain her bitter unlife, are illusions. What Obayashi allows us to do through the soundtrack is cope with the eternal war between these opposed illusions, our fears and our futures, by reconciling them rather than turning away from them completely. House’s leitmotif evokes youthful wonder (the “fantasy”) and maps it to an aesthetically and emotionally polyvalent experience, but through the narrative in which it’s figuratively and literally situated (the “ghost story”) it also warns us not to forget the past when beguiled by the beautiful things that spring forth from it. This is one of the many elements that makes Gorgeous’ possession so powerful. At the midpoint of the film, she enters Auntie’s room and sits at a vanity adorned with tokens of youthful beauty—makeup, fancy hairpieces, a photo of a lover long since passed.
Kung Fu follows Gorgeous as she leaves the room, only to find Sweet's body trapped in a grandfather clock, which starts bleeding profusely. Panic-driven, the remaining girls barricade the upper part of the house while Prof, Fantasy and Kung Fu read the aunt's diary. After a tour of the home, the girls leave the watermelon in a well to keep it cold. When Fantasy goes to retrieve the watermelon from the well, she finds Mac's disembodied head, which flies in the air and bites Fantasy's buttocks before she escapes. The encounter is initially disregarded by the other girls, but over time they also begin to encounter other supernatural traps throughout the house.
Toho Studios approached Obayashi with the suggestion to make a film like Jaws. Influenced by ideas from his daughter Chigumi, he developed ideas for a script by Chiho Katsura. After the project was green-lit, it was put on hold for two years as no one at Toho wanted to direct it. However, Obayashi kept promoting the film until the studio allowed him to direct it himself.
It isn’t until the final two survivors find and read Auntie’s diary that they recognize not only the tremendous loss and betrayal that the war left in its wake, but how the shadow of that loss has deformed into the specters and nightmares that now assail them. Their only hope as they float upon an ocean of blood, out of options and no exit in sight, is that Mr. Togo might finally arrive at the house just in time to save them. This lilting music-box melody is the prime transformative catalyst not only for Gorgeous, but for actress Kimiko Ikegami. Without the benefit of seeing the visual effects that accompany her possession, Ikegami has only the leitmotif to inform her new thousand-yard stare, the flat affect that crawls into her voice, her slow shuffle down the stairs and to the telephone.
A schoolgirl travels with six of her classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky, remote country home, where supernatural events occur almost immediately. They come face to face with evil spirits, bloodthirsty pianos, and a demonic housecat. Not much has been published in English on Mr. Obayashi, though there’s a useful overview of his life and work by Paul Roquet at midnighteye.com. Mr. Obayashi was born in 1938 and started making experimental films in his 20s, becoming involved in the 1960s with an art group whose members included Yoko Ono, before going on to a prolific career as a director of commercials. The press notes for “House” state that the story originated from the “eccentric musings” of his 11-year-old daughter, a nice, perverse touch. Whether “House” was her fantasy or his, Mr. Obayashi has created a true fever dream of a film, one in which the young female imagination — that of his daughter, Gorgeous or both — yields memorable results.
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