How Seven Beauties Were Eaten! The Strange History of an Even Stranger House
We have Steven Spielberg and a killer shark to thank, albeit highly indirectly, for the indescribable experience of House (Hausu, as it is known in Japan). Following the massive success of the movie Jaws, the Japanese film industry, which had been in something of the doldrums throughout the 1970’s, decided that they needed to create their own equivalent to Spielberg’s blockbuster. In 1977, the esteemed Toho production company solicited a script from Nobuhiko Obayashi – at the time a young, experimental filmmaker lately turned successful commercial director. Obayashi had started out, along with many of his impoverished cinephile friends, in the late 1950’s, making very short experimental films. Heavily influenced by the French New Wave, Obayashi was a co-founder of the experimental cinema collective Film Indepéndent. Unlike his friends, however, when Obayashi was approached by advertising firms to make commercials for them, he gladly went along, seeing the format of the commercial as, in its own way, just another kind of film. Additionally, because commercials at the time often had very large budgets, working on them allowed Obayashi opportunities to experiment creatively, what would have been impossible for him in any other contexts. Over a period of just a few years, Obayashi shot over 200 commercials, many featuring big stars from the West like Kirk Douglas and Charles Bronson, and established a name for himself as one of the most sought-after commercial directors.
When Toho approached him about a script, Obayashi decided to turn to his then 10-years-old daughter, Chigumi, for a consultation. He was interested in finding out what sort of things a child would be most interested in seeing in a movie. He took a number of the ideas generated from conversations with his daughter – the main one was about a house that eats young girls – and turned them over to a screenwriter friend, Chiho Katsura, to prepare a script. Obayashi gave Katsura free rein to do whatever he wanted with the material, instructing him only to try to incorporate the ideas suggested by Chigumi. The resulting script for House was in some ways a relatively straightforward ghost story about a house haunted by the vengeful and embittered spirit of a woman whose lover had disappeared in the war, and seven unsuspecting young schoolgirls who show up for a visit. There are many traditional elements – the demonic aunt in the film is essentially a bakemono, a vengeful, shape-shifting entity straight out of Japanese folklore, who also appears as the fluffy but malevolent ghost-cat, or Kaibyo. But the logic of the story had been filtered through the fractured prism of a child’s sensibility.
Toho green-lighted the script remarkably quickly – to Obayashi’s surprise, the executives loved it. But, they told Obayashi, the film unfortunately could never be made. Every director they had shown the script to refused to work on it. Why don’t you let me direct it, Obayashi asked. Impossible, Toho said, you are not an employee of Toho.
What followed was perhaps an unprecedented media blitz, all engineered single-handedly by Obayashi. He took the highly unusual step of publishing Katsura’s script, which was well received by the public. The script was subsequently released as a manga, also to great success. Meanwhile, Obayashi continually discussed the film with the press as if its production was an established fact; he cast the main actresses and made sure they received plenty of attention in print media. An album of the non-existent film’s soundtrack was released. Over a period of two years, public demand for the film version of House grew and grew, until finally Toho had no choice but to capitulate. Obayashi was brought on to direct on what would be his first feature-length film.
A deep devotee of cinema, a student of the works of everyone from Kurosawa and Ozu to Truffaut and Godard, Obayashi wanted to make a film that was radically different from anything that was being made in Japan (or perhaps anywhere) at the time. He was not particularly interested in making a Jaws, or anything like an outright horror film at all – at the time, horror movies didn’t really exist as a distinct genre in Japanese cinema anyway. Rather, Obayashi conceived House as an example of what he describes as the “ghost-fantasy” genre of Japanese film. But Obayashi wanted to approach this genre through the prism of childhood, to embody a reality that represented the way a small child experiences the world. Obayashi saw filmmaking as ultimately a very complicated form of play, and he wanted the logic of play to drive not only the finished film, but also its very production. Drawing upon his extensive experience as a commercial director, pushed experimentation in every aspect of the film’s making, creating such an infectious atmosphere of playfulness on the set that eventually even those most stolid of Toho’s lighting and camera men began to enjoy themselves. Obayashi created no storyboards for the film, instead working completely out of his own head, arriving on the set each day with a grab bag of new ideas.
In House, Obayashi continually reveals, and revels in, the inherent artifice of cinema, continually, in almost every frame of the film, pushing it to its fullest extreme. There is not the slightest attempt at realism; rather, through his relentless exposing of filmic artifice, Obayashi creates an entirely new reality. The film is a kind of delirious catalog of the history of special effects – there is hardly a single scene that does not employ some form of animation or in-camera trick – but Obayashi continually exposes all of these as effects; his goal, he says, was for all the special effects in the film to look as fake as possible. There is plenty of gore in House, but it is a strangely innocent gore, a child’s drawing version of violence, full of disjointed, cartoonish imagery that literally explodes off the screen in a shower of jagged animated sparks. The film rockets along at a breakneck, ADD pace, full of rapid, disjunctive editing and abrupt shifts in visual style that are at first utterly disorienting, but which make perfect sense if one attempts to take on the mindset of a restless, very excitable child.
But what is in some ways most remarkable about House, looking back, is how amazingly successful it was. For all its seemingly radical experimentation, the film was in fact a huge hit in Japan – mainly with the very audience Obayashi had been inspired to make for it, children under the age of 15, who lined up around the block to see it – something that hadn’t really happened before in Japanese culture. And while the mainstream press of the day unsurprisingly dismissed the film as an inchoate mess, a certain older guard of Japanese film critics saw something in Obayashi’s film that spoke directly to the nature of filmmaking itself. With House, Obayashi expanded the possibilities of the medium, and in doing so, established a permanent name for himself in Japanese cinema. In 2009, with over 40 films as a director, Obayashi was awarded the Badge of the Order of the Rising Sun.
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Anthony Discenza introduced House at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center on January 24, 2012.
