Hausu (1977)
I did a rubbish job explaining TV ad wizard, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s inexplicable cult Japanese horror and directorial debut on the podcast, so here’s the basic premise again – a troupe of quirky Japanese high school girls head to our lead, Gorgeous’ seemingly kindly yet menacing, eye-gobbling aunt’s mansion, where each of them are done away with in an insane manner, as the mysteriously wheelchair-bound auntie must eat unmarried girls in order to wear her bridal gown again. The general idea, I think, is that when we die, we can live in the thoughts and feelings of others. Flesh perishes, love doesn’t, which for something so batty, is actually a deep and lovely message.
Each gal has a stereotypical nickname and matching, one dimensional personality – “Gorgeous” is the motherless protagonist, the creative “Fantasy” constantly constructs stories, the musical “Melody” plays piano, the pigtailed, bespectacled “Prof” is studious and prudent, “Mac” eats a lot and always talks about food, “Sweet” is cutesy, timid, and afraid of mice, “Kung Fu” (perhaps my personal fave, aside from Blanche, the cat) is a heroic and tough martial artist, karate chopping and kicking everything in sight – she even has her own theme song.
Warning: this film will divide audiences. It’s safe to say, almost every frame of Hausu contains something odd – peculiar visuals and framing, mad music, an OTT performance, strange backdrops, fourth wall breaking, kooky sets, long dissolves, double exposures, human stop motion, drawn-on animation, bizarro lighting, iris ins, soft focus, slo-mo, and a batshit plotline. The way Obayashi covers scenes is so strange, but when you factor in the director’s preteen muse – his 10-year-old daughter, Chigumi, came up with the concept, and view Hausu through the prism of a child’s dream, with a young girl’s imagination running wild, constructing this psychotic kids’ show feel – the illogical structure, surrealist imagery, and peculiar tone actually make a great deal of sense; as much as a dream can, or should, make sense anyway. Then when you add bloodthirsty gore and nudity to the equation, you get a combination of ideas and tones I’d never witnessed until absorbing Hausu. Something similar, yet much more commercial, and easier to digest would be Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, which would also qualify as an approved double bill with Hausu this Hallowe’en.
Hausu is an assault on the senses and can be exhausting, but it has an innocence, charm, and a fairytale freakishness unlike anything else I’ve seen. If you fancy stepping out of your comfort zone to watch something truly unique, with instances of death by hungry piano, decapitated head bum-biting, dissolving nude underwater dips, a haunted exploding telephone, reverse motion hair in a bath, inadvertent blood drinking, a girl trapped in time and in the cogs of a bleeding clock, haunted watermelons, cannibalism, psychedelic chandelier battles, walls raining rivers of blood in a psychedelic funhouse, with a possessed, singing, blood-vomiting cat called Blanche lording over everything as a purveyor of madness and the macabre, this is the Hallowe’en pick for you.
Scarious Artists 