About twenty minutes into Hausu – which translates, fairly obviously, as House, but which I’m going to refer to Hausu throughout this review purely to piss off autocorrect – seven friends hop off a train at a rural station and make for the middle-of-nowhere residence belonging to a relative. It’s so out-of-the-way that the montage depicting their journey vibes less weirdo horror movie than nymphet version of Deliverance. At one point they go happily skipping across a rickety bridge that’s about one woodworm banquet away from collapse and director, at which point director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi hits pause on the narrative and superimposes close-ups of each of them, accompanied by their respective names: Melody, Fantasy, Prof, Sweetie, Kung Fu, Mac and Angel. And I doubt you’ll ever see another film whose protagonists are lumbered with that set of monikers – not without it being a porno, anyway.
Cheap sarcasm apart, this scene is actually quite helpful as up until then I’d been thinking of as, respectively, The Winsome One Who Plays Piano, The One Who’s BFF To The One With Daddy Issues, The Nerdy One In Glasses Who’s Actually A Total Girl Crush, The Squeaky Perky One, The Sporty One Who Busts Unconvincing Martial Arts Moves, The One Who’s Always Eating And Is Supposed To Be Fat, and the aforementioned One With Daddy Issues.
How we’ve got to this death trap bridge in the woods is on account of Little Miss Daddy Issues, who takes umbrage at her widower father meeting a woman who isn’t the ghost of his wife, and basically kidnaps a bunch of her friends to spend the school holidays at her Aunt’s. Fair dues, she has the common courtesy to check with Auntie first and the old lady writes back by return to say – and I’m paraphrasing only a little bit here – “yes please come and stay at my creepy and isolated old house”. Twenty minutes is an awfully long time, in a movie that runs less than an hour and half, to spend on this kind of soft-focus soap opera noodling, no matter how much Ôbayashi loads it with unsubtle foreshadowing.
Anyway, arrive at Auntie’s pad they do, and the basic requirements of what follows click into place:
- septet of face-palmingly naive nymphets
- elderly relative with something slightly off about them
- creepy house, the dimensions and layout of which make the Overlook seem like a two-room flat
- the fluffiest cat in Japan, which is possessed of supernatural abilities
What happens next can broadly be summed up in three words:
What. The. Fuck?
No, that doesn’t do it justice. Four words:
What. The. Actual. Fuck?
Still doesn’t quite cover it. Seventeen words:
What. The. Eyeball. Melting. Brain. Goes. Into. Shutdown. Jaw. On. The. Floor. Actual. Ever. Loving. Unholy. Fuck?
Better.
There’s no easy way to synopsise the, ahem, “plot”. It’d take a more accomplished writer than me to even delineate the general order of things that happen. Just glancing at the notes I made while watching, I’m not sure if I could flesh out “demonic lamp shade, bad kung-fu, shit graphics” into anything more coherent. Or “psychedelic piano goes nom, naked body parts have a boogie”. The best I can do, I guess, is present a sampling of some of the, er, “delights” Hausu has in store and then cautiously recommend you go and watch it. Not because it’s any good – it’s frequently fuck-awful – but because you just wouldn’t believe me otherwise.
There’s a sequence where a watermelon lowered into a well defies gravity and the fact that it’s meant to be inanimate and comes zooming back up only to turn into a severed head (the unscariest severed head in the history of the horror genre, it has to be said) and bites someone on the ass.
There’s a sequence where Auntie teleports into a fridge to give one of the girls a scare, then teleports onto a rafter where she does a showy little dance with a skeleton after which she repairs to her chamber for a light supper of wine and a disembodied hand. Meanwhile, the girls shake their heads and agree that the fridge business was probably a trick of the imagination.
There’s a sequence where Angel combs her hair at a dressing table, her reflection in the mirror morphing into the younger Auntie, the younger Auntie as a vampire and then Angel herself as a vampire. At which point most filmmakers would have reckoned they’d fucked with the viewer’s head quite nicely and cut to the next scene. But, oh no, the creative team behind Hausu are only just getting started. I can imagine that the script conference went something like this:
“And then after she sees herself as a vampire, the cat flashes green light out of its eyes and the mirror spiderwebs.”
“Cool! And then her reflection bleeds from the eye and the drop of blood oozes onto the opposite side of the mirror.”
“Awesome! And then all of the cracks in the mirror start bleeding.”
“Guys! Guys! Guys! How about then we cut back to the real Angel and a piece of her face falls away like a piece of broken glass?”
“Dude, you’re a genius. And then the rest of her face falls away.”
“And then there’s fire behind her face.”
“And then the whole of her turns into flames.”
“Er, fellas, do we have the budget for the broken face and burning effects?”
“No, but screw it. We’ll make it work.”
The effects in Hausu are dreadful and nowhere more so than in a scene involving a piano and a goldfish bowl, the imagery of which I hinted at earlier and which I won’t go into in any more detail except to say that (a) I fear for the mental health of all involved, and (b) it makes the demonic lampshade scene look like boss-level CGI. Indeed, there are several moments where the visual craziness demanded by the script outstrips the film’s budget (it was made in 1977 and perhaps only Industrial Light & Magic could have made the effects work at that period in time) and some pretty shonky 2D pencil animation is drafted in to do the heavy lifting. Or try to.
Hausu is one of a kind in the way that Jodorowsky’s El Topo is one of a kind, or Lynch’s Eraserhead, or Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts. But whereas those films are deadly serious in their execution, Hausu spends half its time laughing at you. It throws in an extended bit of slapstick featuring a cat, a flight of steps, a tin pan and a set of drum sticks; a grotesque watermelon seller who fulfils that inexplicably popular back-in-the-day trope that morbidly obese male = comic relief; a cluster of supposedly spooky scenes that can only have been conceived as comedic; and a choice of needle-drops on the soundtrack so inappropriate to the visuals that you’d have to replace ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in Apocalyse Now with the Benny Hill music to come anywhere close.
Think of the weirdest horror film you’ve ever seen. The Devil’s Rain? Messiah of Evil? Suspiria? Xtro? I’ll see you and I’ll raise you. In fact, I’ll bet the house.
Lucy Bellingham
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