House Film Screening

How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip. Tasked by the studio with making a family horror film as Japan’s answer to Jaws, Obayashi asked his 10-year-old daughter about her nightmares, and began bringing them to life!  

House follows a schoolgirl, archetypically named Gorgeous, who travels with six classmates (Prof, Melody, Kung Fu, Mac, Fantasy, and Sweet) to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home and comes face-to-face with evil spirits, a demonic house cat, a bloodthirsty piano, and other surreal childhood visions of horror, all realized via mattes, animation, and collage effects. Surrounding these wild and spooky images, Obayashi wove in themes of generational divide, gender roles, and fallout from war. Equally absurd and nightmarish, House might have been beamed to…