As the spooky season draws near, classic horror flicks like Bring Her Back (perfectly chilling) or The Evil Dead (an all-time favorite) are typical choices for a snug movie night at home. If, however, you’re craving something more quirky than terrifying to embrace the Halloween vibe, I strongly suggest experiencing the 1977 fantasy horror film House.
Attempting to describe House is practically a lost cause. The basic storyline involves a girl who plans to spend the summer with her aunt after her recently widowed father introduces a suspiciously calm woman, announcing his intention to marry her. Upon their arrival at the countryside residence with six friends, they are immediately thrust into a whirlwind of bizarre supernatural events.
That gives you a rough idea, but it doesn’t begin to convey the sheer chaos packed into its 88-minute runtime. The trailer below provides just a glimpse of what’s in store.
House is the imaginative work of director Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose lively, highly stylized approach grants the film its distinct visual flair. However, much of its surreal logic can be credited to the film’s co-writer, Chigumi Ôbayashi, Nobuhiko’s 10-year-old daughter.
In an interview found on the movie’s Blu-ray release Nobuhiko explained his approach saying that:
“Grown-ups can only think about things they comprehend, so everything remains on a mundane human level. But children dream up things that defy explanation. They revel in the strange and mysterious. Cinematic power lies not in what is explainable, but in the bizarre and unfathomable.”
The film emerges as a piece that jarringly and dramatically fluctuates between family drama with soft visuals, slapstick music video elements, and early Japanese horror. It pairs circle wipes and clearly painted backgrounds with flying heads and streams of bright red blood. Beneath these layers lies a tale deeply embedded in folklore that addresses trauma through an embrace of dark absurdity.
House is unlike any other film you’ve seen. In reviewing it for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carrie Rickey called it “too absurd to be genuinely terrifying, yet too nightmarish to be merely comic.” And that’s what makes it so compelling. Its influence on the slapstick horror of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 feels obvious, and it shares DNA with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks where an undercurrent of malevolence is explored through a series of seeming non sequiturs.
I’ve seen House more times than I can possibly count, and I still walk away from it wondering to myself “WTF did I just watch?” — and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s an undeniable cult classic that’s impossible to turn away from and, if you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself to change that immediately.
