Eat Drugs, Then Go See House
February 25th, 2010 by
By Emily Alexander
Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi has had a long and storied career, but the film that started it all, House (1977)—a blood-bathed teengirl slumber party flick that comes with a fat injection of psilocybin—despite being 33 years overdue, has finally made its U.S. theatrical debut, beginning with a popular late night run at the IFC Center in Manhattan.
With a brilliant new 35mm print, the psychotropic-horror-musical begins with two young girls Gorgeous and Fantasy (yes, those are their names) being, well, young girls: taking witchy photographs and chatting about summer vacations. They meet up with five friends (each supplied with an equally descriptive moniker) and continue to giggle about boys, their teacher Mr. Togo, and their plans for the summer. After they hug, kiss, and go their separate ways, we follow Gorgeous home, where she meets her father and his new fiancé—whom she despises. Gorgeous decides to ditch the plans with dad and step-mom and instead visit her estranged aunt (and her sinister housecat) at their secluded estate. She invites the best friends, who all happily agree that this will be the best summer ever. That’s where things begin to go awry…
The girls hop aboard a psychedelic train and depart for to the mansion, which sits isolated atop a mountain. When they roll up to the home, Gorgeous’ long lost aunt, a creepy, yet elegant, old wheelchair-bound lady, and the glinty-eyed cat, greet them. The aunt welcomes the girls into her home and serves them a nice dinner and watermelon for dessert, but it isn’t long before the girls begin to go missing. The rest needs to be seen to be believed, but suffice to say, it involves loads of gore and guts and even a virgin-eating witch.
Obuyashi has woven into his film every low-budget visual trickery imaginable, including chroma key, hand-drawn animation, puppetry, collage, stop-motion, slow-motion, dissolves, irising, and matte paintings. Parts are creepy (e.g. someone slurps on an eyeball), but other parts of the film are magically unnatural (the sky remains the color of an orange Creamsicle for much of the film). The movie is an artificial dreamscape, like a lysergic candy bar eaten before a trip to the planetarium.
House will be making its way across the country and Canada through the summer. Check for local screenings here, and check for the Criterion Collection DVD later on this year.
