How to watch Hausu: In This House, We Support Obayashi

There is an undeniable thrill to watching a "bad" movie. You know the films I'm talking about. The Room, Troll 2, Howard The Duck… the kinds of movies so removed from our understanding of acceptable film grammar and logic that it becomes absurdly hilarious. There's a reason Mystery Science Theater 3000 lasted so long and has remained so beloved. Even for genuine, non-ironic film lovers, sometimes a film is just hilarious for things it doesn't do, the qualities it doesn't have.

House/Hausu is not that type of movie. Nobuhiko Obayashi is a deeply thoughtful director operating on a level much closer to David Lynch or the Quay brothers than Ed Wood. Obayashi's works feel like the types of dreams a movie would have. There's an emotion, a genuine sentiment, but the path it takes to get there requires you to adjust yourself to the movie's wavelength to a certain extent.

Am I making it sound like homework? I really shouldn't be. House, especially, is hilarious, and purposely so. The main cast of high school girls have one main personality trait with names to match. A floating head bites a rear end, and there's a banana-related punchline that is the funniest use of the fruit you've ever seen in a film. But there's a tendency I've found to treat these moments as accidentally hilarious, rather than give credit to the filmmaker.

And House isn't just laughs, either. Obayashi famously wrote the film based partly on his daughter's childhood fears and opinions. In an interview with the Criterion Collection for the release of House, Obayashi said,

“Adults can only think about things they understand, so everything stays on that boring human level…but 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.”

— Nobuhiko Obayashi

The fears of a child are protean; they can be influenced by the works of adults in the stories they hear and the things they see, but the horrors that children see in the darkness can't really be adequately explained. Obayashi took these childhood fears and blended them with his own childhood trauma of being born in Hiroshima and losing friends and family to the horrific nuclear bombing. There are nods to both of these types of fears in House; in one scene, piano keys that bite the fingers of anyone who plays it; in another, one character's reflection is shattered by an explosion, her sense of self exploding to match. Hard not to see how that might resonate symbolically.

But again, House is funny. It's not meant to be dreary and overly symbolic—these aspects are there, but Obayashi is interested in making the film fun. He wants you to have a good time at the cinema. I don't think he really minds if you enjoy the film as a comedy, a horror, or something in between as long as you're enjoying it. And it's hard not to enjoy it; even 50-plus years later, there's no film like it. Obayashi was a unique talent—just remember that while you watch the film.

Hyperreal Film Club is playing House/Hausu at Wax Myrtle's on October 11. RSVP here.