|Matthew Christensen|
Hausu plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Thursday, October 29, through Sunday, November 1. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
***Spoilers Ahead***
In 2006 I moved from Minneapolis to Japan to teach English in one of the large adult language schools they have there. It was a good job, and my students were an enjoyable eclectic assortment of businessmen and women, housewives, retired folks, and high school students. One of the textbooks contained a simplified retelling, in English, of a Japanese fairytale called “Urashima Tarō.” I read the puzzling story with my students, all of whom were as familiar with it as I was with “Rip Van Winkle,” a fairytale that shares a similar aging of its protagonist. Urashima Tarō is a fisherman who rescues a sea turtle and is rewarded by being taken to a palace at the bottom of the sea. There he meets princess Otohime who thanks him for his act of kindness and entertains him there before giving him a box to protect him from harm. The only catch is, he can never open it. The turtle brings him back to the surface where he realizes he no longer recognizes anyone or anything in his village. This is because he spent a whopping 300 years at the palace with Otohime. Bummed out, he opens the box and immediately grows old: long beard, rheumatism, everything. This fairytale ends with Urashima hearing the plaintive voice of the princess coming from the sea saying, “You should have heeded my warning. The box contained your old age.”
Now I promise I will get to Nobuhiko Obayashi’s horror fairytale film, but before I do, I just want to say that “Urashima Tarō” did not sit right with me. I asked my students what the point was. Their reply? “Well, he shouldn’t have opened the box.” That weekend, I was in Tokyo and while chatting over a glass of wine with my sister-in-law, I asked the same question. I was pretty certain that Maki had also grown up with the fairytale. Her reply? “He shouldn’t have opened the box.”
“But he performed this unconditional, unselfish act of saving the princess’s turtle!” I argued, feeling the story was unfair. “Why tempt him with or not warn him about something that will ultimately bring him grief after this nice thing he has done?”
Maki shrugged, “He shouldn’t have opened it.” She took a sip of her wine and added, “That’s the lesson.”
I had the same emotional response to the “injustice” of the 1977 film Hausu when I first saw it two years ago as I did talking with my sister-in-law twenty years ago. My hopelessly Pollyanna opinion that in stories bad things simply do not happen to good people and that evil is always punished, momentarily took over and marred my thinking. But as always, returning to films offers the opportunity for reassessment.
House, or Hausu, tells the story of Gorgeous, a high school student who invites her six friends, Mac, Sweet, Melody, Kung Fu, Prof, and Fantasy, to spend their summer holiday with her at her aunt’s house in the country. The aunt, who has lived a solitary life ever since her fiancé went away to fight in the Second World War and never returned, and her white Persian cat named Blanche, welcome the girls. The seven girls, in turn, show their appreciation by planning a meal and cleaning up the home. After the meal, Fantasy goes to retrieve a watermelon suspended in a well to keep it cool. She instead finds the severed head of one of the companions, Mac. The fun really begins when Mac’s head floats around Fantasy before biting her in the ass. This is just the start of the unfettered creativity and wacky horror that typifies the film. And I suppose it is appropriate that Mac, whose nickname is short for Stomach, and who is always hungry, is the first to go as this is a film about consumption, the consumption of seven girls by a hungry house.
As you probably have guessed, the other girls’ names reflect their personalities and, to an extent, the way in which they are consumed. It is nice to have logical elements like this to hang on to as the chaotic energy of the film offers little grounding. It’s a horror film, but it is also a comedy and a coming-of-age story. As a horror film, Hausu stands apart from and even rejects most of the tropes we come to expect from the genre. Yes, there is blood—the house is flooded with it—but then there’s a carnivorous piano, attack futons, and a clock that digests one victim (products of the unbound imagination of the director’s daughter, Chigumi, with whom he consulted). The soundtrack further adds to the wonderful head-scratchiness of the film. The recurring piano tune seems better suited to a Studio Ghibli film than a horror flick. We do get the usual screams of panic from the hapless victims and finders of dead bodies, sounds that we hear in any horror flick, but then we also get an unnerving amount of smiles and laughter from these same characters at some of the direst moments.
Visually, the film is unapologetic in its use of over-the-top cinematic techniques: there are iris and wipe transitions, jarring overlays, animation, silent film-era monochromatic tinting, and blue and green screen masking effects. At different points in the film, we are treated to hovering abdomens, heads, breasts, limbs, and fingers, images that may remind one of similar fragmentation of the female body in Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, another film that explores consumption but in a fundamentally different way. The graphic images of horror in Hausu fall into the Monty Python camp of gore with over-the-top blood spurts and handling of severed arms and legs. These effects, too unrealistic to be believed, still somehow have the power to unnerve.
That takes me back to my qualm with justice in the film. I couldn’t understand why, even if the jealous aunt of Gorgeous has become an evil spirit preying upon young maidens, she has to terrorize, consume, and destroy innocence. I much prefer the logic of Agatha Christie’s justice in her horror (not mystery) novel And Then There Were None, where the victims all pretty much deserve their fatal ends. When I consider the meaning of Hausu, I jokingly imagine my sister-in-law topping off my wine glass as she says, “Well, they shouldn’t have changed their plans and gone off to a secluded house,” or better yet, “Maybe they shouldn’t have been virgins.”
One of the advantageous things about writing about a film that you already own on Blu-ray is that you can watch the extras to gain more insight into it. In watching interviews with Nobuhiko Obayashi, I discovered the director was born and raised in Hiroshima and lost many of his childhood friends at the end of the war when the US dropped the atomic bomb on his city. This knowledge put to rest my question about the logic of fairness and why innocent or good people should have to suffer. Hausu, with its zany, camp approach to horror still disturbs, because, like many other films of the genre, it presents a world that is illogical, a world where death is indiscriminate, a world that ultimately consumes us. Obayashi asks us to confront what is uncomfortable and challenging, and to sit with the fact that, in the end, we have very little control over our fate. And that is unfair.
Edited by Finn Odum