is the Verge’s weekend editor. He has over 18 years of experience, including 10 years as managing editor at Engadget.
Spooky season is upon us, and traditional horror films like Bring Her Back (excellently gruesome) or The Evil Dead (stone cold classic) are obvious choices for a cozy movie night at home. But, if you’re looking for something that’s a bit more weird than wicked to get you in the Halloween spirit, I highly recommend the 1977 fantasy horror film House.
Describing House is an exercise in futility. Here’s the basic plot: A girl goes to spend the summer with her aunt after her widower father brings home a creepily sedate woman and declares that he intends to marry her. When she arrives at the countryside home, with six of her friends in tow, strange supernatural things immediately begin to happen.
That’s the gist of it, but it fails to even come close explaining the absolute insanity contained within its 88 minute run time. The trailer below offers a small taste.
House is the vision of director Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose frantic hyper-stylized experimentation gives the film its singular visual style. But much of the nightmare logic found within it can be attributed to the film’s co-writer, Chigumi Ôbayashi, Nobuhiko’s 10-year-old daughter.
In an interview found on the movie’s Blu-ray release Nobuhiko explained his approach saying that:
“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.”
The result is a film that abruptly and dramatically shifts tones from family melodrama with gauzy visuals, to slapstick music video, to proto J-horror. Circle wipes and obviously matte painted backgrounds brush up against severed heads and gallons of bright red blood. Underneath it all though is a narrative firmly rooted in folklore that confronts trauma by embracing morbid absurdity.
House is unlike any other film you’ve seen. In reviewing it for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carrie Rickey called it “too absurd to be genuinely terrifying, yet too nightmarish to be merely comic.” And that’s what makes it so compelling. Its influence on the slapstick horror of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 feels obvious, and it shares DNA with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks where an undercurrent of malevolence is explored through a series of seeming non sequiturs.
I’ve seen House more times than I can possibly count, and I still walk away from it wondering to myself “WTF did I just watch?” — and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s an undeniable cult classic that’s impossible to turn away from and, if you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself to change that immediately.
House is available to stream now on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.
