House: Show Me the Way to Go Home

When I was TA’ing a course on American Television, several students told me their favorite show was Friends (1994-2004). I found this fact perplexing both because many of them were just born as the series went off the air and because, if they insisted on a 90s sitcom, Seinfeld (1989-1998) is the clearly superior choice. Matters made more sense when they clarified that “favorite” really meant “comfort.” It soothed them. Falling asleep? Put on Friends. Hanging out with, uh, friends? Put on Friends? Need some lo-fi chill beats to study/relax to? Friends.

It’s about to be Halloween—and I returned to my comfort movie. I don’t watch it when I’m with friends unless I’m taping their eyes open and making them engage against their will. I can’t recall ever putting it on to sleep—that strikes me as a bad idea. But it brings me great joy nonetheless. I return to it over and over. My comfort movie—for Halloween anyway—is Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (1977).

House requires multiple viewings. It’s only on this—my fourth or fifth attempt—that I believe I’ve comprehended the narrative in any detail. At first glance, the film shows itself to be just plain weird. Intentionally surreal 70s special effects, dancing party-store skeletons, characters named “Gorgeous” and “Kung Fu,” pianos that assault and devour teen girls, teachers named Mr. Togo who turn into piles of bananas—nothing about the film is normal. When friends first showed it to me, I confess to being drawn in by the sheer spectacle of it all. I’d never seen something strange in exactly this way before.

The next couple viewings help to get a grasp of the plot and its constituent elements. Seven teen girls—named like the famed dwarves based on their personalities—retreat to the countryside for summer vacation. They plan to stay with Gorgeous’ (Kimiko Ikegami) aunt (Yōko Minamida) in her descript rural home, where she’s lived for decades, waiting for her fiancée, who died in an airplane crash during World War II.

This much ought to be obvious on even cursory viewing. But what exactly the aunt does to the girls (and how she changes or doesn’t change) ends up obscured by the constant rewinding, jump cutting, and frenzied camerawork. The banality of the narrative hides behind the utter strangeness made available by the surface.

All that’s well and good enough. Strangeness enchants and the specifics of the plot only deepen the viewer’s sense of unease, unease which breeds (in my experience) nervous guffaws. On this go-around, however, I found a new feature of House: its endless inventiveness, a consistent and unrelenting reminder of the limitless possibilities of what we can do with cinema.

House interrupts itself constantly, rewinding and replaying sequences, often at break-neck speeds. It has no problem cutting from sheer (if goofy) terror to a comedic interlude. Dialogue is barebones, but in a way that never makes the girls feel like anything other than teen girls; they are, instead, perfectly themselves, age appropriate, though defined by only a single feature (beauty, love of food, love of music, etc.). Their emptiness allows the editing and cinematography to shine—they simply perform whatever actions their inner engines (and adolescent fears) require. Movie magic does the rest.

Yes, this means an utter strangeness; it’s fun. But more than that House reminds me that cinema has no limits. We can do with moving images whatever we wish. The possible combinations are infinite. You can use anti-realist special effects; you can implode your own narrative in the name of a bizarre tonal shift. You can speed up footage to show a girl slowly being torn apart by falling bedclothes and linens, only to have her transform into purple smoke inside a clock later on. You can put an upbeat, piano-centric soundtrack in a horror film. Sky’s the limit.

Maybe that’s all obvious. But in this age, when we complain about seeing the same things all the time despite the abundant possibilities, I found it refreshing. Sometimes it is precisely the obvious we need to rediscover. House seems obvious only because it once was not.