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.