Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 02: Shivering Ghost (2012)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

72 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm not sure if I've ever reviewed anything by Koji Shiraishi before, but he has the distinction of having made possibly my favorite horror movie of all time, Noroi: The Curse. I know I throw around the term "favorite movie" often, but Noroi is head and shoulders above everything else and is one of the finest works of horror I've ever seen. It is also, by far, Shiraishi's best-known film; he is quite prolific but with little following outside of Japan. The majority of his horror films are found-footage and all involve a very specific theme, which I will go into further later. I'm also going to spoil basically the whole plot of this thing with reckless abandon, because I feel a burning need to talk about it, so if you're interested in watching this, don't read past this paragraph and just go do it. I consider Koji Shiraishi an essential director for any found-footage horror fan because of the way he messes with a subgenre that tends to get a little same-y after a while.

(I should note that this is the second in a series, and I haven't yet seen any of the others, but based on how good this one was, I'm going to take care of that immediately. The preceding film is mentioned at some points during this one, but the mentions of it do enough explaining that you don't feel like you're missing something.)

So on the surface this is a very straightforward found-footage movie. It purports to follow a film crew who investigate video files of strange, paranormal activity that are sent to them, traveling to the location shown on the videos and trying to see if they can capture or replicate the phenomena. They don't seem to have any context on the video they're sent in Shivering Ghost, but backstory on the people involved in the video will unfold throughout the film. The film depicts another amateur ghost-hunting crew going into a fairly disgusting abandoned building in search of an apparition. They start hearing weird noises, like the sound of a bell with no apparent source, as they home in on the location of the ghost. This is all filmed in a fantastically creepy way: Your mileage may vary with regards to how much you can stomach found-footage movies where somebody is whining and crying out of fear the whole time, but personally, if the rest of the film is handled well, I think having a character react with abject terror onscreen does a lot to boost my own feeling of anxiety towards the film. Shiraishi is really nothing less than a found-footage master; he knows exactly when to pause and zoom on a "ghost" so that, although it may be just a couple of blurry pixels, you feel like you're seeing something horrifying.

The ghost footage ends with the crew running out of the building in fear after having seen the apparition, and Shivering Ghost itself picks up when the documentary crew tracks down most of the people from the original footage and decides to accompany them back into the building to investigate further. All but one of the original crew go along for the ride: One of them, a woman named Yuko, is apparently missing. This will become important later. The second exploration of the building doesn't reveal any more ghosts, but there's still bizarre things going on, like most of the crew members from the original video suddenly seizing at the same time, and a spot in the ghost room that swallows up flashlight beams. Neither of these things are ever explained or brought up further.

This is pretty much where the ghost story ends. The genius of this film is that it only looks like a ghost story on the surface, and beneath, it's hiding something much, much less comprehensible. The direction the documentary crew goes in next is to try to find out what happened to Yuko, spurred on by one of the original crew members admitting that, after the footage, Yuko started acting "strange". (Another reason why you may find it hard to suspend your disbelief for this movie is how often people hold important information back for seemingly no in-universe reason; in actuality, it's clearly so that Shivering Ghost can have some kind of a plot, because if all the information was on the table from the start, there would be no movie.) During filming, the crew gets a voicemail from Yuko that's just gutteral screaming, so they go to her apartment, where she isn't there, but more bizarre events follow, as well as the manifestation of another apparition. We learn that Yuko has been in simultaneous relationships with several men and women, and those of them that the crew interviews talk about her as if she is herself some kind of strange entity; hinting - even coming out and saying - that she isn't human, and occasionally spawning an aura of darkness at, uh, inopportune times.

Trying to explain all of the individual events that happen in this movie is useless, because it goes off in so many different directions after the initial ghost video ends that you can barely keep track of them. But at the heart of it is an idea that Shiraishi revisits over and over in his films. Nearly everything of his I've seen has, at some point or another, circled back around to this concept that there are invisible, extradimensional, wormlike beings inhabiting or possibly invading the Earth, visible only to certain people, who are usually dismissed as insane. To my knowledge Occult is the film of his that deals with this most directly. Noroi, perhaps contributing to its being more accessible than the rest of his ouevre, deals with it only minimally, if at all, although the ghost fetuses do bear a resemblance to how Shiraishi usually depicts the creatures when they're made visible.

Since this is a series, I really can't say if any of the others pick up the thread or expand on what happens in Shivering Ghost, but the exact reason why I love this movie so much is because it is just utterly inexplicable. Something weird will happen and everyone will move on. Nobody seems to be much affected by having had actual seizures at the same time for no apparent reason. The thing with the flashlight beam disappearing once it crosses an invisible line in the ghost building is really, really creepy, and it's never explored. After a while it comes out that the actual building itself was designed to have something to do with these invisible beings, and that Yuko and the building's architect had some kind of teacher-student relationship, which hints at a far, far deeper history than just a simple ghost video. This whole thing, without the context of any other films around it, is so totally weird and out there, when at first all it looks like is a movie about an old haunted building. This is what you get from Shiraishi every single time: Something that continually stumps you, leading you to dead ends and roundabouts, constantly reinventing the story and dragging it by force into weirder and weirder places until you're not sure what a haunting or a possession really is anymore.

The Vampire Doll (1970)

directed by Michio Yamamoto

Japan

71 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is the first, and most obscure, of what would eventually become Michio Yamamoto's "Bloodthirsty Trilogy", comprising The Vampire Doll, Lake of Dracula, and Evil of Dracula. It is odd (to me) that the first film in a trilogy should also be the one that's generally regarded as not being as good as the others, but that's the situation here. The word "trilogy" is kind of used loosely, as the three movies are only vaguely connected to each other - the last two more so than this one, which is essentially a stand-alone film - but I much prefer the latter two because they feature Shin Kishida as maybe my favorite on-screen Dracula of all time.

(Also, as a sidenote, this is my third time attempting to watch this movie; the first two times the file was either corrupt or too large and just buffered endlessly. I think the difficulty I've had in procuring a watchable file of this goes to show that it really is more obscure than Lake of Dracula, the trilogy's standout hit, which you can probably just buy off the internet or something.)

The film begins when Sagawa, who we're sort of lead to believe will be our main character, is summoned to the remote country estate of his girlfriend Yuko, only to find that he's arrived too late and that she died in a car crash some time ago.  I'm not entirely sure about the specifics of their relationship, it's a little strange to me that he was spending six months away in the city while she was hanging out at her mom's place, but hey, whatever. There's no real plot reason for this, it just kind of seems to be the way the two characters were doing things for their own personal reasons. But anyway,  Sagawa ends up staying over at his girlfriend's mother's house, and things are as chock-full of red flags as they could possibly be. Mysterious wailing sounds and impossible visions of his deceased girlfriend plague Sagawa until finally he is lured outside by one of these visions, and the last we see of him until the final act is when his apparently reanimated girlfriend overpowers him. Again, there's no real reason to think Sagawa is not going to be the main character if you don't know anything at all about this movie, so it's a bit surprising that he disappears from the screen so early on.

He is replaced with his sister and her boyfriend (played by future Godzilla Prime Minister Akira Nakao) who follow him to the house and then fake a busted car as an excuse to stay over and snoop around. Everything around them at this point is indicating that something seriously weird is going on at the crumbling, once-beautiful country house; the townspeople seem to know that there's some suspicious aura surrounding the place, not only because of the tragic story behind Yuko's parentage and the death of most of her family, which is apparently an open secret in the town. The two start hearing the same strange noises in the night as Sagawa did, and are menaced by Yuko's mother and her ever-loyal silent butler, but remain determined to get to the bottom of Sagawa's disappearance.

This is a very short film at 71 minutes, but its compact nature works to squeeze all the creepiness into one condensed cup of perfect gothic horror. It's unsettling because while we do know a little bit more than the characters do about what's happening, we still don't know why; we can, in our heads, warn Keiko Sagawa and her boyfriend that there's a weird corpse hanging around, but even we are blind to certain elements of the story. I like the Bloodthirsty Trilogy specifically because it plays so loosely with the concept of what a vampire is. The film's original title notably does not use the word "kyūketsu", which is what generally gets translated as "vampire", but the title does imply that Yuko sucks blood, so... I don't know, man, don't worry about it. Maybe she's just a miscellaneous blood-sucking fiend who does not feel the need to adopt the title of "vampire". But this vagueness is good! This allows for more freedom to give Yuko a backstory that is really genuinely chilling. We find out that the murderous acts she's committed are entirely against her will, and in moments when she manages to break through the spell she's under, she begs anybody around to kill her. I will keep the exact details vague because the whole story is complex and really upsetting, but the end result is that Yuko is stuck as a revenant, only partially in control of herself, haunting the landscape in a perpetual state of limbo. It's awful when you think about it.

Yukiko Kobayashi has experience playing a doll, from her time in Ultraseven as Zero One, an uncanny humanoid robot used in a plot to make toys come to life and attack people. I have little doubt that that role directly inspired her performance in The Vampire Doll, and may have even landed her the part, given how similar Zero One and Yuko look. She clearly has a talent for putting on a perfectly blank face while somehow giving off a threatening aura at the same time. This film also introduces what would become a recurring element throughout the trilogy, which is that yellow irises denote a vampire - I don't remember this ever being used in any other vampire media; as far as I know it's unique to these movies, but I really love it for some reason. The contacts look horrendous to wear, but the effect is creepy.

All in all, although it feels like it lacks the "staying power" that Lake and Evil of Dracula have, this is a really eerie film dripping in gothic atmosphere and hidden tragedy. There's not a lot of real grab-you-by-the-shoulders scary moments, but the sparse horror imagery that is there leaves an impression. We may never see Yuko suck anybody's blood, but one of the most horrifying moments of the whole film is when we see for a brief second what she did to Sagawa. Yuko's death scene is also strongly reminiscent of the vampire's deaths in the following two films, although in this case she takes a fairly normal amount of time to die and doesn't spend literally about ten minutes in the process of dying (I say this with nothing but affection in my heart for Lake of Dracula). The lack of connectedness between this and the rest of the trilogy makes them not quite gel together if you're doing a marathon of them, but The Vampire Doll is highly underrated and I wish I would hear more people talk about it.

Haunted Castle (1969)

directed by Tokuzō Tanaka

Japan

82 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Another entry in the "Kōjirō Hongō getting menaced by ghosts" cinematic universe. I only discovered after watching and enjoying this that I had, in fact, seen it before, and only four years ago, but absolutely nothing of it was retained in my brain. That is not a slight against the film itself, which is very memorable; I've seen over 1,700 horror movies and some of them just don't stick around for whatever reason.

This comes to us from Tokuzō Tanaka, a director whose most well-known credits are probably his Zatoichi films, but he's got a ton of heavy-hitters that are either cult favorites or just favorites. Just to name two out of the reams of stuff in his back catalogue, there's The Snow Woman and The Whale God, the latter of which has been getting some much-overdue attention lately via re-releases and restorations. His straight-up horror works are far and few between, but excellent, the lot of them. Haunted Castle is an adaptation of an old (and I mean very old) legend that has been done by many, many directors; much like Yotsuya Kaidan, the beats are usually the same, although some details may be changed from film to film. The basic story in Haunted Castle goes like this: During a game of Go, a retainer of the wealthy, apparently amoral daimyō of Saga Mansion displeases his lord by pointing out that he totally cheated, and is unceremoniously put to death. The Go incident was likely just a convenient opportunity to kill him off, though, as the retainer was not enthused about the daimyō putting the moves on his sister. Now left with the responsibility of dealing with the aforementioned sister, they choose to strip her of any and all official support, cutting off her income and essentially casting her into the wilderness. The night before this is to happen, however, she chooses to kill herself instead of facing a life of excruciating poverty. After she's stabbed herself through the stomach, she invites her pet cat, Tama, to drink her blood, thereby having the cat absorb a sort of curse from her and become a vessel for her vengeance beyond the grave. (Fun fact: When the play based around this legend was first performed, a member of the actual family depicted as having wrongly executed their retainer filed complaints to get it stopped, but this had the opposite effect of increasing gossip about the legend being true. To put the time spans into context, this is kind of like if a descendent of Lincoln were to campaign against Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.)

The specific way that Haunted Castle depicts this legend is, first and foremost, Scary-with-a-capital-S. I don't mean subjectively scary in that I found myself getting chills from it, but scary as in, this movie does literally everything it possibly can to be as atmospheric, dreadful, ominous, and terrifying as a movie can be. This is what stuck out to me while I was (apparently re-)watching it, because the kind of atmosphere present here is something I really don't see in Japanese horror films of this period, which utilize actual darkness and grotesque imagery a lot less than they do atmospheric music and implications of doom. The horror in this is more along the lines of something I would expect out of Koji Shiraishi or Hideo Nakata or somebody working in more modern times. You can watch things like Illusion of Blood, Kinoshita's Yotsuya Kaidan duology, or any other adaptation of a kabuki play, and not feel like you're watching a horror movie in the same way as you would if you're watching, say, The Exorcist, but this one feels like a horror movie.

(To be pedantic here: I do recognize that plays like Yotsuya Kaidan and the Nabeshima ghost cat story do not belong to the horror genre in the same way The Exorcist does; I'm not referring to their historical presence within a specific genre "canon", simply the response that a modern viewer might have while watching them.)

A lot of that creep factor has to do with lighting, or lack thereof, which is unfortunately also the film's downfall, in a way that's not entirely its fault. Watching this in a dark theater in 1969 would scare the utter pants off of me, but watching it on the small screen in the '20s was just kind of annoying, honestly. It's hard to get the lighting right when you're watching a movie in your own home so that you don't see your own reflection in dark scenes, and almost all of this movie is a dark scene. I think the lighting department should get a lot of credit here, though, because light is placed very deliberately within that darkness in order to achieve maximum creepiness. During scenes when Otoyo is possessed by the cat demon, or when a ghost shows up, light is cast on them that seems to reflect off of them only and then be swallowed up by the darkness of Saga Mansion. The effect is that the spirits or people possessed by spirits feel like they're glowing with an unearthly illumination. It's creepy as hell.

Naomi Kobayashi should also get credit for being one of the fiercest, most terrifying bakeneko I've seen on screen. Once she gets possessed by Tama's spirit, she's nothing but a snarling, yowling, grimacing vengeance machine. We get to see her do things like catch raw fish out of a pond, and Kobayashi nails all of these cat mannerisms with an unsettling grace that really drives home the unnatural nature of the character she's playing. She wasn't in a lot of other movies, and certainly didn't become a "bakeneko actress" like Takako Irie, but her performance here is super creepy. I always love to see women on screen in earlier times who aren't afraid to do "ugly", especially in something like this where we also get to see Otoyo dressed up in all the regalia of a lady of her status before turning into a horrifying cat demon with fangs and golden irises.

I've been watching a lot of kabuki adaptations this month, but this is the first one I've seen that feels like a Halloween-appropriate viewing. Even the title card, with the kanji dripping blood down the screen, informs you that you're in for some thrills and chills. I would probably rate this higher if it had felt more well-rounded, but it really is a movie carried by two major elements (the strength of its ambiance and the strength of its scary-ass bakeneko lady), and while those are important things, I still think it could have been filled out a little bit more around them.

WITNESS ME

Here I am in my home-made Mysterian cosplay, just in case anybody ever wondered what kind of person runs this blog.

Cat People (1942)

directed by Jacques Tourneur

USA

73 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I recently read a book on the history of horror poster art, and its extensive section on the art of classic horror films made me realize that there's a lot of pre-1950s stuff I just haven't seen. So, I've been taking care of that lately. Cat People is a film that resists classification and does not entirely fit within the label of "horror" in the way one might typically think about the genre, especially in an era when the horror films being released contained such predictable tropes that it eventually led to a bit of a burn-out around the middle of the 20th century. But what it is is an incredibly subtle story executed with an unusual sympathy and care for its main character, and a film that ends up being more quietly devastating than many others of its era I have seen.

We're introduced to our main character, Irena, by seeing her sketching a panther at a zoo, apparently unsuccessfully as she repeatedly tears up and discards her drawings. We're also, at this time, introduced to the man who will later become her husband, when he chides her for littering - valid; we all hate litterbugs, but also a bit of foreshadowing in that their first interaction isn't your typical meet-cute but rather him telling her what to do. He also doesn't do anything that shows genuine interest in her, like un-crumple one of the drawings and remark that she's really quite good even if she doesn't think she is. In fact, he seems pretty uninvolved in her work as a whole, leaving one of the sketches to be blown around with the leaves. His concern is mostly for putting her in her place - gently and amicably, but again: foreshadowing. From the first moment, it's made very clear that Irena sees a part of herself in the panther she's trying to sketch; throughout the film she will be drawn to it while also repelled by it, not wanting to acknowledge what of herself she sees in it.

Irena and Oliver, the man from the zoo, get married pretty fast, but she seems ill at ease from the start. Eventually she tells him about a story that's held as truth in the Serbian village she comes from: during a period of rule by outside invaders, her people had become wicked, and some of the village women had the ability to shape-shift into large cats, an ability triggered by strong feelings like rage, jealousy, or romance. Because Irena believes this legend is a part of her ancestry, she's been afraid to get close to anyone romantically. But there's something much larger than a simple fear of intimacy at play here, something much more fundamentally human.

The focus is not on Irena as a literal cat-person. It is very explicit that the things she's talking about are really happening to her, but the fact that she is turning into an actual cat is only secondary to the real point here. Irena's becoming a cat is used as a sort of half-metaphor for her deep insecurity. The panther she keeps returning to is a reflection of an inner wildness that she represses out of fear. This is not a movie about a temptress stalking her prey, it's a movie about a person who is anxious about her place in the world and has a deep-seated feeling of inferiority that dictates her whole life - and, importantly, it's also about a woman who is failed by pretty much everyone around her as they let themselves keep seeing her as a simple, silly girl instead of the human in need of understanding that she really is.

I didn't realize it until the next morning after I had watched this film, but the reason why Cat People feels so distinct from every other film surrounding it is because Irena's role is not written or played as the kind of cliche '40s femme fatale that so many other movies might have pigeonholed her into being. There is absolutely nothing seductive about her: her situation is not used as something to titillate outsiders, the entire thrust of the film is about her inner life and turmoil. This is a stance on women that we do not often see from films of the era. It's difficult even to find movies that are about women from this time period, let alone ones that deal with women's fears in such a deep and empathetic way. 

It's so frustrating the way that nobody around Irena believes anything she says at all. The narrative itself is the only thing sympathetic to her. Her husband is not a bad man, but he behaves in a way that makes it very clear that he's more infatuated with his idea of her - this is something that is also a huge part of Irena's own anxieties, that she has to perform the specific role of a woman that men are attracted to and deny her own individualism. She talks about envying every single woman she sees on the street because she ascribes to them a life of perfection, of pleasing their husbands, of being what a woman should be - something Irena feels like she isn't. Oliver might be a loving husband but he's not in love with her. Eventually he seems to get bored of Irena not being the ideal wife, and his attention drifts towards a woman who seems more outwardly put-together. Interestingly, the blame is not cast on this other woman per se; she's not even really a huge part of the film, just sort of another normal, regular person who Irena sees as an insurmountable Other that she, herself, is fundamentally different from. The film is so upsetting because Irena manages to get to and past a point of no return without a single person recognizing the pain in her. She spends the whole film convinced, with increasing surety, that something is wrong with her.

I guess I've kind of read a lot into this one in feminist terms. I realize that this may turn some people off or that I risk shoehorning this into a specific niche, but honestly I don't care too much about that (if feminist interpretations of film are something you don't want to see, I'm not writing for you, anyway). This is also, on its own, just a great film, one that seems to have been much-maligned at its time of release but thankfully has earned a better reputation over the years. Simone Simon - a prolific actress who I had somehow not heard of until now - is perfect in the lead role; her being so unassuming is, again, another point where the film thwarts the possibility of her being used as a kind of sexualized being for viewers' consumption. Overall I don't know if this was intended to be such a spotlight on personal insecurities and fears and on the way no one will listen to women, but that's what I'm getting from it. It's a film that has a lot of subtext, and subtext is not always a popular thing. I feel like this is something that would benefit from repeated watches with an eye for different angles of its story. But even my first watch, I could tell this was something new.

Hausu (1977)

directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

Japan

88 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Hausu is one of those rare movies made by a director who I would consider almost "arthouse" (at least in his earlier work) that has broken into, if not exactly the mainstream, then a wider circle of cult following than usual. You do not in any way have to be a fan of Japanese avant-garde cinema of the mid-20th century to know about this film, and in fact most people who have seen it probably aren't. From personal experience, I've asked people who are huge fans of this movie if they've seen any other Ôbayashi movies and the answer is usually "no". I'm not saying this to be condescending at all - cinema is an odyssey and one of the best things in life is the fact that we all of us have a bunch of great movies we haven't seen yet waiting for us - I'm just demonstrating how wide the audience that this movie has reached is.

What's also remarkable is that it is a rare instance of a time when the most famous work of an otherwise relatively obscure director retains a lot of that director's signature trademarks. Hausu is far and away the most bizarre of Ôbayashi's feature-length films (setting aside earlier short works like Emotion, Confession, and An Eater, the last of which has a lot of blueprints for what would later make it into Hausu) but a lot of his standout themes are still there. One thing that has been present in almost every film of his I've watched has been a background score that never stops for nearly all the film's running time. There are some bangers on the soundtrack, but there's also quieter, more ambient music that is almost literally in every scene, in places where there absolutely doesn't have to be music happening, and the result is a feverish, sensationally overwhelming atmosphere that is very unique to this specific director. Apparently, when the amateur actresses had trouble with direction, Ôbayashi would play music on the set to help them get into it, so the soundtrack was there in reality as well as the finished film.

So what is this thing about? It does have a plot, although the psychedelic visuals tend to overshadow it. After her father introduces her to his new wife, Gorgeous, missing her real mother, takes a trip to the countryside to visit her aunt's rambling old house where she's lived alone for some time. Along with Gorgeous go several of her school friends: Mac, Fantasy, Prof, Kung Fu, Sweet, and Melody. Very quickly and with almost no segue from "something strange might be going on in this house" to "something strange IS going on in this house", terrible and bizarre things start happening to the girls. There's no time for exploring, no time for the audience to warm up to the transition between what had just moments before been a summery, fun movie with a bunch of teen girls taking a trip together and what turns out to be a horror story involving a house eating people. The fantastic is not separated from the mundane in Hausu because there is no mundane. Everything is constantly happening at all times. Even the parts of the film that are "normal" are so hyperstylized and obviously artificial (in a good way, more on that later) that at no point does any of this feel like real life - and it shouldn't.

A bit of context that I personally feel helps put the plot of this movie into perspective is the cat. This movie famously has the biggest, fluffiest, cutest cat you've ever seen, and it is somehow connected to the house and the aunt and the series of strange happenings the group of girls find themselves stumbling into. When the characters talk about the cat being a "witch cat", the word they're using is "bakeneko", which as a term can refer to an entire subgenre of Japanese horror - a genre which Ôbayashi would later play with in Legend of the Beautiful Cat/Reibyo Densetsu, a film which is tied with this one for my favorite of his. The gist of most bakeneko films (but not all) is that a beloved cat witnesses something horrible happening to its owner, sometimes resulting in their death, and absorbs a kind of grudge or becomes a receptacle for its owner's spirit, which later takes revenge on the people who wronged them. Hausu doesn't follow this format exactly - it doesn't follow any format exactly, and that's why we love it - but the aunt's backstory, of having lost her fiance in the war, becoming bitter and alone in her old house, and slowly starting to kind of meld with both the house and the cat until the three of them form a persona that consumes young, unmarried girls, definitely makes it feel like this movie shares some DNA with bakeneko films.

I'm a big, big fan of house-as-character movies. Like I said, the aunt, the cat, and the house form a triad whose identities as separate beings occasionally blur into one. The legend is that the aunt eats unmarried girls but really it's the aunt as the house doing the eating. (Eating is a big theme running throughout the film.) And, really, what exactly happens to the girls the house devours is not always that clear. Some of them don't even seem to be having such a bad time with it. Mac's disembodied head comes up out of the well frisky and grinning. Melody is horrified at first to realize she's being eaten by a piano, but eventually giggles about it, and her dismembered body parts look pretty happy. Gorgeous doesn't even really "die" but instead becomes a new avatar for the house after the aunt's body is killed. But there is a real, serious terror underlying the events of Hausu, and not even just the house stuff but the thing as a whole, situated in real time and space - on the Criterion DVD, Ôbayashi talks a lot about the bomb and how it influences this movie, which I highly recommend looking into or reading about because I cannot fully get into it with the space I have here.

Ôbayashi plays a lot with nostalgia across his entire filmography, which is where that sense of artifice that I mentioned before comes in. I feel like he understands the notion that what exists in your memory is always going to be different, and more beautiful, from what really is. The sunset that you saw may have been objectively beautiful, but going out with a camera and capturing a picture of it is not going to capture the feeling that that sunset gave you when you saw it in that one specific moment of your life. So instead of using composite photography, a painted backdrop, more vivid and lush than life could ever be, conveys the feeling of the sunset that you saw, rather than the sunset that was. That's just one example, but the whole of Hausu is set up like a memory, like a dream, and I don't think any other filmmaker manages to capture that feeling so well.

I will try to wrap up this review, if I must. This is a movie that I could talk about for days but ultimately it's the kind of thing where if you see it and you really get it, you know it, there's no words that describe it. Except for maybe comparisons to Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's other films, there's nothing you can really refer back to when talking about Hausu because it is so much a thing by itself. There are some factoids about its production that can aid in partially explaining Why It's Like That, but not entirely. That the plot of the film was influenced by Ôbayashi's young daughter explains a lot. That it was shot with no storyboard also explains some. One thing I thought was particularly interesting is that Wikipedia claims it was filmed on one of Toho's largest sets - and this is Toho, like, Godzilla Toho. They do large sets. It doesn't necessarily come across when you're watching the film, but the house really is unimaginably huge, a weird labyrinth full of unpredictable things popping out and countless ways to be consumed and haunted. This was supposed to be a movie like Jaws. Instead, it ended up being a movie that experiments with what it even means to watch a movie, what it means to be a movie, what movies mean to us, and I'm so glad it exists the way it is.