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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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Gorgeous enlists six of her friends as accompaniment, a giggling retinue of nymphs fancifully named Sweet, Melody, Fantasy, Prof, Mac and Kung Fu. Traveling by train, wheels and foot, they arrive at an isolated house, where the aunt, who’s in a wheelchair (if not for long!), lives with her white cat, whose eyes beam out ominous green sparks and who has been immortalized in artwork throughout the house. Upstairs in the house, Kung Fu and Prof find Gorgeous wearing a bridal gown, who then reveals her aunt's diary to them.
Filming
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 reading is interrupted by the giant-sized head of Gorgeous, who reveals that her aunt died many years ago while waiting for her fiancé to return from World War II. Her spirit remains, eating unmarried girls who arrive at her home. As Kung Fu lunges into a flying kick, she is eaten by a possessed light fixture. Kung Fu's legs manage to escape and damage the painting of Blanche on the wall, which in turn kills Blanche physically. The attacked Blanche portrait spurts blood, causing the room to flood. Prof tries to read the diary, but a jar with teeth pulls her into the blood, where she dissolves.
The film, which received generally negative reviews, was a box office hit in Japan. After being widely released in North America in 2009 and 2010, it was met with more favorable response and has since gained a cult following. “This is my great grandmother, Maggie Hundley Garrigus Porter, when she was 80," said Smith as she pointed to a photo from a book in the forum's collection. Enjoy large covered patio with mature trees in this one story 3 bedrooms/2 bathrooms home on 0.43 acres with a flex room that has a full bath that can be used an a study/office, mother in law suite or a maid’s quarters.
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.
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Love, Lies, and Leitmotifs
Delirious, deranged, gonzo or just gone, baby, gone — no single adjective or even a pileup does justice to “House,” a 1977 Japanese haunted-house freakout. Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, this energetic exemplar of pulp surrealism began surfacing in the United States last year, playing at events like the New York Asian Film Festival. Now, in advance of the Criterion DVD, which will be released later this year, it is receiving its first, must-see-now domestic theatrical run at the IFC Center in New York. A midnight movie in lysergic spirit and vibe, this was a film made for late-night screening and screaming.
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Despite the protestations of the old guard, though, the movie was a hit, and in the ensuing decades, Obayashi’s esteem has only grown. It’s no coincidence that the music is so closely tied to the moods of the girls. House’s soundtrack had been finished a year before Obayashi shot the film, and when he found himself struggling to give effective verbal direction to the novice actresses, he played the soundtrack for them as they acted out the scenes. In “Constructing a House,” Obayashi mentions that the actresses “belonged to a younger generation that found it easier to express emotion through chords, melodies, and rhythms than through words.
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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.
This simple story, relatable in theory to all ages, can be hard to make heads or tails of amidst the daunting volume and furor of Obayashi’s aesthetic choices. But time has allowed us a clearer perspective on Obayashi’s vision, and the young generation that so loved the film in its infancy is key to this new understanding. House is a classical gothic romance repackaged in a counterintuitive wrapper—its VFX orgy intense to near-illegibility, its sense of humor a bit puerile, and most crucially, its soundtrack a mélange of the nostalgic and the funky, the classical and the experimental. Obayashi’s collaborator Asei Kobayashi wrote the score, but Kobayashi conceded early on that he was “too old” to do justice to a firecracker like House, so the two called in 25-year-old Mickie Yoshino and his band Godiego to actually arrange the tunes.
If Obayashi’s “younger generation” is as musically inclined as he claims, the message must be as unequivocal to them as it is to us, especially when communicated through melodies crafted by their own cohort. With this in mind, House’s popularity with Japanese youth comes into focus. Although Obayashi is quick to textualize his observations about the differences in perception between younger and older Japanese moviegoers—“it’s like a cotton candy! ” one of the girls coos early in the film at footage of an atomic detonation—his intentions in doing so aren’t initially clear. Are the girls simply callous, or is 32 years of distance from unprecedented horror enough to justify their lighthearted attitudes?
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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