I'm sure that if it were not for Dawn Luebbe we would not be talking about House (Hausu) tonight. It's not, as Manohla Dargis pointed out, easily classifiable. In fact, I think we can all agree that it defies categorization. It's sometimes horror in a way that maybe re-edited “Tom and Jerry” cartoons are also horror. It is quirky. Or maybe “highly stylized” is the better way to say it. And it's unrestrained filmmaking that I think explores large ideas through a very specific lens. Both of which are sometimes horrific and horrifying, but maybe, to crib a phrase out of Eric's blue book, “Is It Horror?” So maybe without Dawn's bringing it up as a suggestion, I'm not sure that it would have been added to the syllabus. I've only seen it three or four times myself at this point. I'm not sure I would otherwise have had the confidence to tackle something whose nuance can easily be confused with a kind of sledgehammer or lack thereof on your first viewing.

Around 2008 or 2009, I would say that my appreciation for auteur cinema had probably reached its zenith. I had, in the late and very hot summer of 2009, played a character called Pinto Degas, who was an accidentally brilliant, infamous, wunderkind Italian film director, very much in the vein of Pasolini, in a play called The Erotic Diary of Anne Frank. The script was brutally brilliant and hilarious, and it was filled—maybe littered might be a better word—with so many references, both oblique and straightforward, textual and super textual, to the universe of filmmaking, of auteur filmmaking, that when this film from 1977, Hausu, was finally released at the IFC Center on Sixth Avenue, a few of us, including Bobby Frederick Tilley, the playwright Timothy Charles Browne, and I trundled down to the IFC to give it a watch. We had seen the trailer, and watching the original trailer, you probably think to yourself, “Is this some kind of an elaborate joke? What am I even looking at here? And if this is the trailer, if this is what they're showing us, what are they holding back? What the hell could this actual film actually be like?”

Hausu is like somebody took Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou and a couple of the actual Teletubbies and just put them in a blender. And then some cinema augurer rooted around in that chum until he found his inspiration because it's got the aesthetic sensibility of James Bidgood if he were collaborating with Monty Python and shooting for the Harajuku market. This is, as we've pointed out, Japan's answer to Jaws. But the only thing that it has in common with Spielberg's blockbuster are one Hitchcock dolly zoom, some blood in the water, and a great white Blanche. And it's all kind of filtered through the imagination of a 10-year-old because he asked his daughter to help create the story of Hausu. He has said that children come up with things that can't be explained. They like the strange and mysterious. The power of cinema isn't in the explainable but in the strange and inexplicable.

And though there is a menacing, swimming tin can that looks a little bit like a lamprey, I think that that's probably where the similarities to Spielberg's end. It sounds an awful lot like the dream logic of the surrealists without the necessity of a movement to actualize it. And I think that these impulses yielded something that's as much informed by Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, as it is by Pasolini's art horror film, Salo. And I think the winking acknowledgment of its own cleverness comes in much the same way you might expect from Godard and the Nouvelle Vague.

We're introduced to seven young, nubile, young protagonists whose names are possibly derived from their talents or qualities that they represent as much as maybe by future Mariah Carey's canon. I think maybe Big Mac is bringing some of the humor of Scooby-Doo and Shaggy's unslakeable haunted house hunger. Each one of these characters is about as dimensional as one of Uncle Walt's dwarves. But character development is not of paramount importance here. They go off on an adventure in the countryside that bifurcates reality at every opportunity, like the layers of a parfait. Everything that's presented to the viewer is really just priming our palettes for the next delicious surprise. Which is saying something when you start out at a level of stylization and remove from reality that's already fairly intense. Because Obyashi literally shatters the sort of confining concepts of realism and reality in something that may or may not actually be a horror film. Something that uses the conventions of horror to explore maybe a nobler idea. And I think that that idea is the possibility or promise of cinema.

This is the kind of movie that you might dream about making when you're eight or nine and have figured out that movies don't just happen, but they're made. Before you have any kind of regard or understanding of act structure or traditional storytelling. It’s a radical descent through stratum after stratum of artificiality that consistently left me wondering at every turn whether what I was seeing was real. Is it real to the characters or are these young fabulists taking me on constant detours through their own subjective experiences and imaginations?

The experience begins, after all, by telling us that we're going to see A MOVIE in all caps lettering and Hollywood Deco typeface. Is this a page out of the Wes Craven handbook? In 1972, the trailer for Craven's Last House on the Left told us to avoid fainting, keep repeating, “it's only a movie, only a movie. only a movie.” So what could Obayashi possibly have in store for us, which could demand such a reminder that we are seeing a movie? What we get constantly parodies the tropes of cinema while genuinely celebrating its illusionistic qualities. It doesn't ever once apologize for its artifice. It sits in it. It utilizes that artifice to challenge the audience's relationship to both storytelling and the mode of storytelling.

Hausu is a singular piece of art unlike anything that I'd experienced before it. I think that it's subversive and self-referential, it skewers conventions of realism, it disrupts the audience's expected surrogate connection to the characters and events, and it forces us to have a different kind of relationship to spectatorship and media.

And while Obayashi's ostensible point is really driven home in the final moments that love never dies, I think the originating spark seems to be the horror of war. It's seen from the opposite side that we as a Western audience usually experience it and its effects on our humanity. Obayashi was seven when Japan was bombed. He lived in Hiroshima Prefecture. All of his friends were killed. He acknowledges that the bomb is a thematic element in Hausu. There is footage of it exploding in the black-and-white flashback sequence that explains Auntie's backstory, and in that inspired moment when the girls can see and hear and feel and interact with that flashback. Mac is describing the mushroom cloud as being like cotton candy. And like Mia Farrow's face in James Lapine's Fran's Bed, the skies over Hausu have a curiously irradiated quality that makes you feel like a nuclear weapon has perhaps recently detonated just out of frame.

Vampire ghost Auntie is created out of a cultural bitterness toward wartime that overwhelmed Obayashi's generation and threatens to devour the innocence of the next. And to go far, I think Blanche the cat is a metaphor for the atomic bomb. She seems to be the source of Auntie's power. Her eyes twinkle just like the flashback camera flash bulb that becomes the detonation of the atomic bomb. She, too, looks like cotton candy. She can be sent far and wide, seemingly, to cause her ultimate destruction. And even after she's destroyed, what remains of her, in this case, is fallout in the form of spouts and gouts of her blood, which fills the Hausu and drowns Prof and delivers Fantasy right into the clutches of Gorgeous. It's like fallout from a nuclear bomb.

While it is ultimately a brutal film that doesn't exactly end on a happy note, the brutality is couched in outrageous, ass-biting humor and really gonzo visuals in a run through a Japanese haunted house with a clock in its walls. It's got a little bit of madcap, Carnaby Street caper meets Benny Hill Show stop-motion spectacle for good measure. We could probably devote an entire episode's worth of time to the discussion of the soundtrack and ideas of diegesis concerning the score since the music that underscores all of this crazy action bleeds from memory into reality and vice versa. Sometimes it's in the form of what feels like an old Juicy Fruit commercial, courtesy of Godiego. Sometimes it's a piano love theme that ties the present to the past.

I have to say, I believe that when I saw this film on screen, on the big screen at IFC in 2009, I don't think that it was restored. I don't think that it was for another year or two that Criterion put out its beautiful Criterion-restored edition. And there was something about its unrestored haziness and its softer, not-so-lurid color palette that enhanced its dreamlike, fairy tale qualities even more, and gave it, and I mean this sincerely, a subtlety that I haven't felt in my successive rewatchings.

So ultimately Hausu is a one-of-a-kind experience whose influence can be detected in the work of other auteur artists. Most notably, I'm thinking of someone like Richard Elfman and his Oingo Boingo-meets-Max Fleischer Forbidden Zone and Takashi Miike, whose films feature violence taken to such a level that it becomes almost cartoon-like. His The Happiness of the Katakuris is from 2001 is a sort of musical comedy horror film with some claymation sequences. I don't think that could exist without Hausu's having been made. And avant-garde though it may be, I think that it opens itself up to its audience, instead of keeping us at arm's length. And it creates a one-of-a-kind experience into which this creative, experimental, campy, kitschy, eccentric, and deliriously original filmmaker put his whole heart and soul.

To listen to our take on House, click right here.

Bradford Louryk