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I know he'll come back. Because he promised. He promised he would.

House (Hausu) is a 1977 Japanese surrealist horror comedy Toku film directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. It is considered the Spiritual Predecessor to The Evil Dead (1981).

After the blockbuster success of Jaws, the Toho studio wanted to produce a Japanese competitor in that market. Commercial director Obayashi came up with a story inspired by his daughter's nightmares, and with presumptuous rogue campaigning and promotion that hyped the film and got him signed to direct, he took the helm of one of the most unusual pieces of cinema to ever be created.

"Gorgeous" is the nickname of a teenaged girl who is unpleasantly surprised when her widowed father introduces her to a woman he plans to marry. Gorgeous decides to get out of town rather than go on vacation with her dad and future stepmom, and invites six of her friends—the also-nicknamed Fantasy, Melody, Sweet, Kung Fu, Prof, and Mac—to the country to visit the home of her maternal auntie to reconnect. Auntie receives them pleasantly but it quickly becomes apparent that something is very wrong with her. Something is very wrong with her house as well. Strange things begin to happen as it seems that evil forces are at work to kill them. It can be best described as a drug-addled David Lynch's version of a more colourful (if that's even possible) Suspiria (1977) remake. The Criterion Collection memorably described the film as both "a psychedelic ghost tale" and "an episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava"

It was released in North America in 2009 as House. Not to be confused with the American haunted house movie called House, or that other House who's a snarky doctor.


Hausu shows examples of:

  • Action Girl: Kung Fu is a skilled martial artist. She loses, but she goes down fighting.
  • Adults Are Useless: Mr. Togo, who was meant to join the girls and whom the girls later wait on to save them, never even makes it to the house. Instead he gets turned into a pile of bananas.
  • Agent Mulder and Agent Scully: Fantasy and Prof., respectively.
  • And I Must Scream: When a possessed Gorgeous pretends to call the police, voices screaming for help can be heard on the line. Later, when Kung Fu is swallowed by a ceiling light, she sees the dismembered bodies of all her friends in a multicolored limbo, all calling out to her, implying that even in death, they are all stuck in the house.
  • And That's Terrible: During the piano scene, Melody's disembodied head shows up to comment on how "naughty" and "indecent" the situation is.
  • Antagonist Title: If Auntie's real name is actually "Karei Hausu" as seen under Only Known by Their Nickname, then technically the title also counts as this.
  • Aside Glance: From Auntie. A camera on the roof shows Auntie go into the refrigerator. She then appears on the roof in the foreground, and looks right at the camera. Very creepy.
  • Ax-Crazy: Auntie, and her house, want to eat the girls.
  • Big Eater: Mac is the epitome of this. She's almost always eating food, and when she's not eating, she complains about being hungry. She also claims to always be hungry.
  • The Big Guy: Kung Fu is the only character who's physically capable, and her main role in the movie is kicking down doors when needed.
  • Blind Without 'Em: Prof loses her glasses in the flood of blood while reading Auntie's diary and remarks that she can't see without them.
  • Blood Is Squicker in Water: The film consistently shows blood mixed with water rather than pure blood, allowing an increase in blood volume while decreasing the gore. The first hint comes after Mac's head ends up in the well— the well water is a pale red. Near the end of the film, the whole house fills up with a mixture of blood and water.
  • Break the Cutie: Friendly daydreamer Fantasy takes the horror the hardest of the group, and save for the possessed Gorgeous, survives the longest and endures the most. By the end, Fantasy embraces a semi-topless Gorgeous/Auntie as a child to a mother, having been thorougly broken down by the experience. This is the last we see of her.
  • Butt Biter: Mac's head pops up out of the well to bite Fantasy in the butt.
  • Cats Are Mean: Shiro/Blanche has to be one of the meanest cats ever to appear in a film, being a catalyst and/or linchpin for most of the supernatural chaos and depicted as quite vicious in the transforming painting.
  • The Cavalry: Subverted at the end. As things get weirder and weirder, Fanta prays that Togo will arrive to save them all, even comparing him to a Knight in Shining Armor and fantasizing about him on a white horse. These hopes are interspersed with scenes of Togo making his way over. But at the end of the night, when Fanta is the only survivor and more desperate than ever, Togo nearly makes it, but gets transformed into a pile of bananas instead.
  • Closed Circle: The house shuts all of its doors and windows to trap the girls inside after Gorgeous leaves to supposedly go to the police station. Subverted just before where Gorgeous claims the phone isn't working to contact help, as she has been possessed and is lying about the phone.
  • Cool Teacher: Togo. It doesn't stop him from getting transformed into a pile of bananas.
  • Creator Cameo:
    • The weird guy operating the watermelon stand is composer Kobayashi Asei.
    • The hippie-ish guys briefly flirting with the girls at the station are the members of Godiego, the band that played the film's soundtrack.
  • Creepy Changing Painting: As things become more hostile, the painting of the cat changes to feature a hissing scowl that changes again to a more extreme form with a larger, more creepily cartoony mouth.
  • The Cuckoolander Was Right: Fantasy's the first one who notices something weird's going on, but everyone brushes off her suspicions because she's known for flights of fancy.
  • Dead All Along: Auntie. It is revealed that Auntie has been dead for many years, but that she wanted to be married so badly that her body "stayed alive after death" and eats all the unmarried girls that visit the house.
  • Death by Gluttony: Mac goes out to the well to get the melon she bought for everyone. The next time she's seen, she's a disembodied head who has somehow replaced the melon.
  • Death by Irony: Each girl's signature personality trait is preyed upon and turned against them and leaves them vulnerable to a different force in the house.
    • Mac is a Big Eater, so she is killed trying to fetch a watermelon she bought, and takes the place of the watermelon and is eaten.
    • Sweet is shy and likes cute things, leaving her vulnerable to being lured by a pretty doll into a trap.
    • Gorgeous is more fashion-conscious and ends up getting possessed by Auntie while using makeup at her mirror.
    • The musical Melody ends up stuck to and devoured by a piano she plays.
    • Kung Fu is strong and protective, and dies (heroically) while trying to fight an impossible foe.
    • Prof is interested in learning and explaining the things going on, and dies when trying to retrieve her glasses so she can continue reading Auntie's diary.
    • Fantasy spends the movie struggling to get people to believe her, and for all her struggles to warn people, ends up the last untouched survivor before she meets an uncertain end.
  • Dem Bones: There's a doctor's skeleton hanging around; it occasionally dances for some reason, most prominently during the haunted piano sequence. It's there because Auntie's dad/Gorgeous's grandpa used to treat patients there. So the house is technically also an Abandoned Hospital.
  • Demonic Possession: Gorgeous in the end is fully possessed by Auntie and the spirit of the house.
  • Developing Doomed Characters: A pretty straight example, with the establishment of Gorgeous, her friends, her home situation, and the trip to the eponymous house taking up a good amount of the runtime, and even after they get there there's still a decent amount of meandering. Like everything else in the movie, this gets weird.
  • Downer Ending: Gorgeous is seemingly possessed either by the spirit of her aunt or the house or both. All her friends are dead, including their teacher who never even got to the house in the first place. Ryoko shows up and after some polite talk, she is set on fire. The house will presumably keep killing any unwed women who stumble upon it.
  • Dramatic Wind: Ryoko favors ethereal, gauzy clothes that catch the wind in spectacular fashion. This gets a bit ridiculous during the ending, where her clothes are constantly floating around her while Gorgeous is in a conspicuously non-flowing kimono.
  • Dub Name Change: Criterion's subtitles slightly alter a few names. Shiro the cat is renamed Blanche, with both meaning "white" in Japanese and French, respectively. Oshare is translated as "Gorgeous", when the original name is closer to "fashion-conscious", and Fanta is expanded to "Fantasy", possibly to put both translated nicknames in line with the others.
  • Dull Surprise: Some of the acting, is, uh... a bit shaky.
  • Dwindling Party: The house kills the girls one by one over the course of the movie.
  • Empty Piles of Clothing: The remaining girls find Sweet's clothes strewn around the room, and it seems that she was either consumed by the living mattresses or turned into a Creepy Doll. However she is not naked when they later find her dead and bloody inside the grandfather clock.
  • Ethereal White Dress: When the other girls see Gorgeous lurking in the closet in a white wedding kimono, they assume she is a ghost and are terrified. She's possessed with the ghost of her aunt. Gorgeous also wears a flowy, diaphonous nightgown in the scene where the possession first happens, adding to the creepiness.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: And that does mean everything.
  • Evil Stepmother: Subverted with Ryoko, Gorgeous' would-be mom. Eeriness aside, she seems like a kind enough woman who wants to get to know Gorgeous, and rides up a day after the girls get to Auntie's house to spend time with her.
  • Fanservice: Tasteful (is that anything like the kind of word you'd use for a film like this?) for most of the film, but then it increases during the climax. Gorgeous takes a bath; Kung-Fu spends the latter portion of the movie in nothing but a halter top and panties. Prof loses all her clothes in the water of the flooded house right before she disappears forever. Gorgeous (and Auntie) are semi-topless for her final scene with Fantasy.
  • Final Girl: Fantasy is meant to be this. She's the one that figures out what's going on first and ends up being the savviest of all the girls. Ultimately subverted. All the other girls get killed or disappear, while Fantasy escapes the upper floor and seemingly is on her way away from the place. However, she then encounters the possessed Gorgeous, and is implied to die offscreen.
  • Foreign Language Title: "House" is its name even in Japanese. Obayashi thought it would make the film sound "taboo".
  • Foreshadowing:
    • Auntie's letter inviting Gorgeous includes the phrasing "Your aunt has been waiting for your letter; come see me". It can be taken as third-person colloquialism by Auntie in reference to her relation to Gorgeous, but the mixing of persons can also be taken as a sign that the writer of the letter is not quite the Auntie that Gorgeous thought she was writing to—"Your aunt" and "me" can be taken as separate figures.
    • On the bus, the girls mention the idea that "a cat can open a door, but only a witch cat can close a door." Later, Sweet gets hypnotized by a doll and Shiro/Blanche is shown using its powers to close a door while the earlier dialogue echoes to remind the audience.
  • Gainax Ending: The deeply strange ending to this deeply strange movie has Gorgeous, who seems to have been completely possessed by Auntie's spirit, receiving her would-be stepmother Ryoko at the house—and apparently killing her. Then a little meditation from Auntie's voice about The Power of Love that comes out of nowhere. Then, roll credits.
  • Genius Loci: The house itself is haunted and conscious to some degree, and it's hungry.
  • Genre-Busting: The film has elements of slice-of-life stories, comedy, horror, fantasy, martial arts action, and surrealist and ironic arthouse cinema.
  • Ground by Gears: Sweet, or an apparition of her, appears inside a giant clock with prominent gears. As they turn, blood floods the clock and Sweet is no longer visible.
  • Half the Man He Used to Be: Kung Fu gets sucked into a hanging ceiling lamp, but her lower body manages to break free as disembodied legs to deliver a karate kick to the cat painting.
  • Haunted House: The titular House, a creepy, run-down and overgrown, isolated mansion in the countryside that is traditionally Japanese on the inside but looks like a cross between a Victorian mansion and castle on the outside. Home to animated skeletons, malevolent furniture, a witch cat, a ghost, and the whole house itself seems to be sentient and capable of eating people.
  • High-Pressure Blood: Comes from out of the painting of Blanche, and doesn't stop until Prof is dissolved.
  • Hope Spot:
    • Mr. Togo is shown progressing toward reaching the house in several cutaways, lending hope that the girls can be saved, but then he gets into an argument about fruit with the watermelon man, the watermelon man turns into a cartoon skeleton, and Togo is later seen turned into a pile of the bananas he was raving about.
    • Kung Fu's legs escape from, uh...f-from the house(?) long enough to kick the painting of Shiro in the face, apparently destroying Auntie. Unfortunately the house apparently just switches to using Gorgeous as its cat's-paw/vessel for Auntie.
    • For Fantasy toward the end—she's drifting on blood close to a landing where Gorgeous is waiting, and, while it's twisted, she even embraces her as a mother figure...but the audience knows Gorgeous is possessed and embodies Auntie and the house, and that Fantasy is doomed. She is not seen again.
  • Hot for Teacher: Fantasy has a crush on Mr. Togo, which the other girls constantly tease her for. She even has an Imagine Spot of him riding in on a white horse to save her.
  • Hot Wind: For some reason Ryouko is always surrounded by breezes that gently toss her many diaphanous scarves around her and highlight how beautiful she is.
  • I Am a Humanitarian: After Fantasy finds Mac's head, the girls eat the melon from the well, with Auntie showing Fantasy that she's chewing on an eyeball while the others can't see. After the girls leave the room, the melon starts to quake and laugh with Mac's voice, implying that Auntie fed all of them Mac's head by making it look like a melon. A more straightforward example is seen not long after where Auntie eats Mac's severed hand.
  • Impact Silhouette: Kung Fu creates one when she punches a possessed Gorgeous through a wall of the house.
  • It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context: The film was overall crafted with this tone in mind, as Obayashi wanted to hit a childlike nightmare tone after observing how children could come up with more compelling and unanswered horrors than adults who write things to fit into rules. As a result, many accurate scene descriptions i.e.,  run the risk of sounding like a Mad Libs sentence, and the scenes don't receive much explanation.
  • Killed Offscreen: Implied with Fantasy, who encounters the possessed Gorgeous and is not seen thereafter in the movie's final scene.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: As well as the aforementioned aside glances given by Auntie, there are a few other instances of this in the film. One is the flashback showing Auntie's history is apparently styled as a film-within-the-film, with the girls commenting on the action and the picture burning up at the end. Another is when the girls get off the bus-a wide shot shows a landscape but the bus is parked in front of a smaller, obvious, unnecessary matte backdrop, which the next close-up shot then focuses on rather than opting to use the real scenery, pointing out the artifice of the film.
  • Losing Your Head: Mac. Her detached head laughs, flies and bites Fantasy's butt.
  • Love Makes You Crazy: Why does the house kill all the girls? Because Auntie, who died there long ago, died alone while waiting for her lover to come back from war. She takes out her frustration on all unwed women who come along.
  • Maiden Aunt: Auntie was left this way after her betrothed was killed in the war. She is very very pissed off about being a maiden aunt.
  • Major Injury Underreaction: Melody smiles cheerfully and says "My fingers are gone" when she sees that the piano has eaten her fingers. She reacts more strongly when the piano begins to eat the rest of her.
  • Mate or Die: Had the girls had sex, or been married, they wouldn't have been in danger. They are preyed upon for being innocent and unwed.
  • Medium Blending: Animation is used throughout the film in place of a lot of special effects, due to it being the 70s and all. In one scene, a train ride is represented by a trip through a moving, brightly colored matte painting.
  • Mind Screw: The film is full of bizarre and outlandish visual events and strange behaviors, and some of the editing and storytelling makes it difficult to discern how much of it even happened in reality.
  • Mirror Scare: Gorgeous sits in the mirror, combing her hair, but the reflection in the mirror switches back and forth between her face and Auntie's face. Then the mirror cracks and flashes menacingly and supernaturally, and Gorgeous and Auntie merge into the same person.
  • Monochrome Past: The flashback to Auntie's romance before the war is presented not just in monochrome, but in silent-movie style, complete with intertitles.
  • Nightmare Face: Provided by the cat painting in two stages as it transforms. Its tattered form seen in a few shots also counts due to the higher level of detail it seems to have.
  • Offscreen Teleportation: Both the cat and Auntie demonstrate this to raise tension. The cat manages to get to the bus before Gorgeous and her friends do, and then to the house, and Auntie at one point scuttles into the fridge and appears in the rafters in front of the camera, out of view of the concerned girls.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: Every major character in this movie has a nickname and their real names are not heard.
    • According to Japanese wikipedia, Gorgeous' real name is Miyuki Koga and Auntie's real name is Karei Hausu. The names can apparently be seen in their correspondence early in the film.
  • Red Herring: Ryoko is introduced as weird and spooky, with an oddly detached manner, and a wind effect that always has her clothes blowing around her. She proceeds to take no part in the story until she pops up again at the end, only for Gorgeous to kill her.
  • The Resenter: Auntie has twisted into a hungry evil spirit out of resentment rooted in losing her fiancĂ© in the war. She preys upon unmarried girls as a result of her own lost chance at happiness making her unable to tolerate youthful optimism. There's also subtext of this resentment being based in a generational divide, as the girls are depicted as blissfully ignorant of the horrors of World War II, which Auntie's generation lived and suffered through, adding a layer of resentment to the discussion—resenting the happiness of those untouched by a generational tragedy.
  • Right-Hand Cat: Shiro/Blanche, to Auntie; Really, people should have known something was up when the cat that walked in on Gorgeous when she was writing to her aunt turned out to belong to said aunt.
  • Shave And A Haircut: A ticking sound in this rhythm plays just before the piano lid slams on the final remains of Melody (her disembodied fingers).
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Sort of. All through the movie the girls expect Mr. Togo to meet with them, and when the bodies start piling up, his arrival is still a Hope Spot. Not only does he make it too late to save anyone... he gets turned into a big pile of bananas. Mr. Togo is certainly not being paid enough for that.
  • Slice of Life: Bizarrely, most of the movie ends up being this as the characters spend quite a while before actually noticing that the house is trying to kill them.
  • Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror: Sliding crazily all through the movie and often blended together to unique effect.
  • The Smart Guy: Prof., a nerdy bookworm, puts this talents to good use to help them survive. She finds Auntie's diary and uses it to figure out what's going on with them and how to defeat the house.
  • Smart People Wear Glasses: Prof has a pair to go with the typical image of the nerdy "professor" friend. Her losing the glasses directly precedes her death when she tries to recover them and ends up attacked.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: The incredibly cheery and happy soundtrack, provided by the Japanese-American Power Pop band Godiego.
  • Splash of Color: The Monochrome Past flashback to Auntie and her boyfriend shows his draft notice in color, and also shows the flower Auntie's clutching in color as she gets the bad news telegram.
  • Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious: Virgins. They're yummy.
  • Stylistic Suck: Obayashi wanted the special effects to look as if a child had done them.
    • Many of the strangest sequences in the film came from Obayashi's young daughter Chigumi, who even has a story credit on the final film.
  • Theme Naming: All the girls have nicknames that match their stock character personalities. Gorgeous is the prettiest one, Kung Fu is the martial arts heroine, Fantasy is given to flights of fancy, Prof is the smart one, Melody is the musician, Sweet is the nicest one, and Mac (derived from "stomach") is the Big Eater.
  • Theme Music Power-Up: Kung Fu has an instrumental theme song that plays during all of her feats of skill and/or asskicking.
  • Title Drop: The watermelon seller points to Auntie's house and calls it "House" in English; in fact that soundbite is the same deep voice that says the movie's title in the trailer!
  • Too Dumb to Live: All the surviving girls when they meet a possessed Gorgeous and fail to notice it despite the glaring clues.
  • Video Credits: An apparently out-of-character sequence showing the actresses skipping about a field as the credits roll.
  • White Hair, Black Heart: Despite otherwise looking like a well-preserved middle-aged woman, Auntie's appearance has changed from how the flashbacks showed her, as her neat bob is now completely white, an unsettling contrast which foreshadows the fact that she is an evil spirit who eats all the unmarried girls.

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