Table Of Content
The “love” that keeps Auntie infinitely suspended in the house, and the youth and beauty foregone as she sat waiting for that love, are illusions. The adventurous horizons and unblemished romance promised to a post-war generation, on which she feeds to sustain her bitter unlife, are illusions. What Obayashi allows us to do through the soundtrack is cope with the eternal war between these opposed illusions, our fears and our futures, by reconciling them rather than turning away from them completely. House’s leitmotif evokes youthful wonder (the “fantasy”) and maps it to an aesthetically and emotionally polyvalent experience, but through the narrative in which it’s figuratively and literally situated (the “ghost story”) it also warns us not to forget the past when beguiled by the beautiful things that spring forth from it. This is one of the many elements that makes Gorgeous’ possession so powerful. At the midpoint of the film, she enters Auntie’s room and sits at a vanity adorned with tokens of youthful beauty—makeup, fancy hairpieces, a photo of a lover long since passed.
Watch Out for That Disembodied Head, Girls
The resulting soundtrack, like the film itself, attempts to span the generation gap by putting each generation’s outlook into paradoxical dialogue. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House was released in Japan in 1977 to a highly polarized reaction. To the lifelong devotee of classical Japanese cinema, it was indeed sacrilegious, a mutant child born of American genre bombast, anime-style hyperkinesis, and manic psychedelia.
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Much like the house (and House) itself, the leitmotif’s externally inviting character has been subsumed by its new association with a haunted, heartbroken past—for us, for the actresses, and for Gorgeous, whose dreams of eternal love are destroyed by her new stepmother and the vision in the mirror. The presence of the leitmotif acts, one more time, as our guiding star here. But reality itself is subject to distortion; those things once thought unreal often come storming into our lives without a moment’s notice, like an atomic cotton-candy bloom turning hundreds of thousands of lives into dust. Within the span of human existence, everything is permissible, and the incomprehensible often comes to haunt us, just as an incomprehensible horde of monsters haunts Gorgeous and her friends. House tells the story of high school ingenue Gorgeous, who embarks on an ill-fated summer vacation with her six friends to her aunt’s lonely house in the countryside. Auntie, a retired piano teacher who lost her betrothed to World War II, works in tandem with the house to possess Gorgeous and systematically devour her friends, so that they might both feed on the joyous youth that the war stole from her so many years before.
Movie Info
How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? Equally absurd and nightmarish, House might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. Never before available on home video in the United States, it’s one of the most exciting cult discoveries in years. To this end, music and the transitory emotional states that music induces are illusions, fantasies, temporary self-regulations that allow us a few minutes to negotiate reality’s waking contradictions…but they’re only illusions insofar as the whole of human perception, generation to generation, is also illusory.
Kung Fu follows Gorgeous as she leaves the room, only to find Sweet's body trapped in a grandfather clock, which starts bleeding profusely. Panic-driven, the remaining girls barricade the upper part of the house while Prof, Fantasy and Kung Fu read the aunt's diary. After a tour of the home, the girls leave the watermelon in a well to keep it cold. When Fantasy goes to retrieve the watermelon from the well, she finds Mac's disembodied head, which flies in the air and bites Fantasy's buttocks before she escapes. The encounter is initially disregarded by the other girls, but over time they also begin to encounter other supernatural traps throughout the house.
Auntie’s fractured reflection weeps blood, a sinister cackle resounds, and Gorgeous, shellshocked, is consumed by ghostly flames. When her friends see her next, Gorgeous isn’t quite herself anymore. The leitmotif’s musical simplicity grants it an immediately recognizable quality, which primes the viewer for its approximately 20 appearances in various permutations throughout the film. This creates an orienting locus of stylistic uniformity amidst the film’s immediate visual carnage. It first appears immediately after the title cards; Gorgeous is shrouded in a sheet for a photo shoot in a candle-lit, empty classroom. Pairing the leitmotif with talk of witches and horror offers a microcosm of the film’s emotional span there in its first two minutes.
Settings
Gorgeous appears as her aunt in the reflection in the blood and then cradles Fantasy. The aunt disappears after entering the broken refrigerator, and the girls are attacked or possessed by a series of items in the house, such as Gorgeous becoming possessed after using her aunt's mirror and Sweet disappearing after being attacked by mattresses. The girls try to escape the house, but after Gorgeous is able to leave through a door, the rest of the girls find themselves locked in. The girls try to find the aunt to unlock the door but discover Mac's severed hand in a jar. Melody begins to play the piano to keep the girls' spirits up and they hear Gorgeous singing upstairs. As Prof and Kung Fu go to investigate, Melody's fingers are bitten off by the piano, and it ultimately eats her whole.
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She finds a powder compact music box which, when opened, plays the now-familiar House leitmotif. At the same time, a piano downstairs calls out to her musically-oriented friend Melody. After briefly studying the sheet music, Melody begins to play the leitmotif as well. Gorgeous, music box still open, watches as her reflection turns into her aunt’s, whose face twists into a terrified scream before the mirror shatters.
Youth is on display, sweetly scored and dead center in the frame, briefly warped by ghoulish imaginings. How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie HOUSE (HAUSU)? Equally absurd and nightmarish, HOUSE might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. The piano swallows Melody whole, and her remaining disembodied fingers plunk out a final few bars of the leitmotif before hitting a sour note and being crushed under the piano lid. Between the leitmotif’s obliteration of Gorgeous’ personality and its consumption of Melody, it becomes clear that this “beautiful song” belongs neither to us nor the girls; it’s not ours to find comfort in, but instead a painful relic of an era whose youth saw their dreams and futures leveled by the atom bomb.
House was filmed on one of Toho’s largest sets, where Obayashi shot the film without a storyboard over a period of about two months. Snaps to reader Deanna, who tipped me off this this house — our first time capsule of 2014. It has been with the original owners since they built it — and it appears to have been impeccably maintained… clearly, it was carefully decorated, totally beloved. Deanna wrote, “This house looks like it hasn’t been touched since it was built in 1971. Mega thanks to listing agent Diana Gonzalez and real estate marketing firm CirclePix and photographer Matthew Wingate for permission to feature the photos.
