History Film / Hausu

* AndIMustScream: When a possessed Gorgeous pretends to call the police, voices screaming for help can be heard on the line. Later, when [[spoiler: 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.

* TheBigGuy: Kung-Fu is the only character who's physically capable, and her main role in the movie is kicking down doors when needed.

* BreakTheCutie: Friendly daydreamer Fantasy takes the horror the hardest of the group, and [[spoiler: 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.]]

* TheCavalry: Subverted at the end. [[spoiler: As things get weirder and weirder, Fanta prays that Togo will arrive to save them all, even comparing him to a KnightInShiningArmor 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.]]

* DownerEnding: [[spoiler: Gorgeous is seemingly possessed either by the spirit of her aunt or the house [[TakeAThirdOption 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.]]

* EtherealWhiteDress: When the other girls see Gorgeous lurking in the closet in a white wedding kimono, they assume she is a ghost and are terrified. [[spoiler: 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]].

* FinalGirl: 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. [[spoiler: 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.]]

* GainaxEnding: The deeply strange ending to this deeply strange movie has [[spoiler: 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 ThePowerOfLove that comes out of nowhere.]] Then, roll credits.

** 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...[[spoiler: but the audience knows Gorgeous is possessed and embodies Auntie and the house, and that Fantasy is doomed. She is not seen again.]]

* ItMakesJustAsMuchSenseInContext: 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 [[labelnote:i.e.]]"A watermelon turns into a head and flies up and bites a girl's butt", "A girl gets replaced by her aunt in the mirror and falls apart with fire under her skin", "The aunt cheerfully shuts herself in a fridge and teleports to wink to the audience", "The heroic teacher argues about bananas and then turns into them after seeing the fruit seller become a cartoon skeleton", "The martial arts girl gets sucked into a lamp but her legs break free to karate-kick the evil cat painting"[[/labelnote]] run the risk of sounding like a Mad Libs sentence, and the scenes don't receive much explanation.
* KilledOffscreen: Implied with [[spoiler: Fantasy, who encounters the possessed Gorgeous and is not seen thereafter in the movie's final scene.]]

* LoveMakesYouCrazy: Why does the house kill all the girls? [[spoiler: 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.]]

* MirrorScare: 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 [[spoiler: Gorgeous and Auntie merge into the same person]].

* ShootTheShaggyDog: Sort of. [[spoiler: 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 HopeSpot. 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.''

* WhiteHairBlackHeart: 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 [[MysticalWhiteHair spirit]] [[spoiler: who eats all the unmarried girls]].

* IAmAHumanitarian: After Fanta finds Mac's head, the girls eat the melon from the well, with Auntie showing Fanta 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 laughs 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.

* DeathBySex: Inverted. Had the girls ''had'' sex, or been married, they wouldn't have been in danger. They are preyed upon for being innocent and unwed.

* SurrealHorror / SurrealHumor: The two tropes blend together, really. They even affect one another: it could be simultaneously argued that the humor and the general light-hearted tone makes the horror scenes all the more unnerving, and that the horror itself is framed as genuinely funny by the whimsical film style.

"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 KillEmAll. It can be best described as a drug-addled Creator/DavidLynch's version of a more colourful (if that's even possible) ''Film/Suspiria1977'' remake. Creator/TheCriterionCollection memorably described the film as both "a psychedelic ghost tale" and "an episode of ''[[WesternAnimation/ScoobyDooWhereAreYou Scooby-Doo]]'' as directed by Creator/MarioBava"

* KillEmAll: And in the most ''bizarre'' ways ever. None of the characters who end up in the vicinity of the house leave the film unscathed, and none are present enough to really be considered alive.

* DownerEnding: [[spoiler: Gorgeous is seemingly possessed either by the spirit of her aunt or the house [[TakeAThirdOption or both]]. All her friends are dead, including their teacher who never even got to the house in the first place. Ryuko 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.]]

* EvilStepmother: Subverted with Ryuko, 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.

** Fantasy spends the movie struggling to get people to believe her, and for all her struggles to warn people, end up the last untouched survivor before she meets an uncertain end.

* DemBones: There's a doctor's skeleton hanging around; it occasionally dances for some reason. It's there because Auntie's dad/Gorgeous's grandpa used to treat patients there. So the house is technically also an AbandonedHospital. That's...that's super.

* MajorInjuryUnderreaction: 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 eats the rest of her.

* ThemeNaming: All the girls have weird names 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 is--uh, the BigEater.