Friday, January 13, 2012
Film / Television WTF? House (Hausu) Tonight on Turner Classic Movies?
Posted by Jim Ridley on Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 2:01 PM
Oh, and if you've never read Chuck Stephens' essay from the Criterion DVD release (designed by Sam Smith), whatareyouwaitingfor:
Disney had his seven dwarves, Kurosawa his seven samurai. For Obayashi (with the help of his eleven-year-old daughter, Chigumi, who provided many of the story ideas), it was seven teenage damsels in distress—Carrie raised to the seventh power, Suspiria spiraling ever upward into some psychedelic seventh heaven. House is a film that must be seen to be believed, and then seen again to believe that you really did see what you think you saw. A haunted and apparently hungry piano devours a girl named Melody, first finger by finger, then chunk after jagged chunk of her naked teenage torso; a Louis Wain—like portrait of a fluffy white bakeneko (ghost cat) redefines pussy power when it begins spewing more blood in a tiny four-mat room than The Shining’s elevator does in the entire Overlook Hotel; a chubby chick nicknamed Mac (short for stomach) seduces a watermelon away from a watermelon-shaped watermelon vendor (who’s actually the composer of the film’s soundtrack, and the voice behind the lower-than-Lurch enunciation of the film’s title, spoken aloud over the animated opening credits as if announcing, through a ragged loudspeaker, the beginning of a haunted-house ride at the fair); and before you can say “Sigmund Freud,” the girls’ favorite hunky schoolteacher is transformed into a man-size bunch of bananas. And that’s just for starters: in Obayashi’s House, there are many, many rooms . . .
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