Part of Milestones of the Last Quarter Century
Sat, May 30 at 9:55pm: Press Play Video mobile video store set up in parking lot before the film | BUY TICKETS
The path of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s journey from relative obscurity to a rediscovered candy-coated midnight classic ran right through the Belcourt. Let’s see if we remember this right: To wit, a VHS tape rescued from Kim’s Video and fan-subtitled to an underground website went above board, found one of its first legit screenings in 2010 as part of the Belcourt’s Midnight Movies program — for which a hand-designed screenprint was printed and sold as a bonus, its design picked up by Janus Films/Criterion Collection for its ensuing theatrical and BluRay releases — and HOUSE was reborn, continuing to pack in audiences to this day. The Criterion Collection describes HOUSE as such:
How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie HOUSE (HAUSU)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip about a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home and comes face-to-face with evil spirits, a demonic house cat, a bloodthirsty piano, and other ghoulish visions, all realized by Obayashi via mattes, animation, and collage effects. Equally absurd and nightmarish, HOUSE might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. Never before available on home video in the United States, it’s one of the most exciting cult discoveries in years.
“Set to a disconcerting pop score that’s like the aural equivalent of shag carpeting…. HOUSE shifts from crazy to batshit, piling up horror-comic setpieces that marry the wacky and surreal with a manic style that’s perpetually reinventing itself.” —Scott Tobias, A.V. Club (Oct 28, 2010) “Movies are rarely, if ever, as whirringly rich and strange as HOUSE…. HOUSE suggests that the nitrous-oxide hyperdrive of Japanese pop culture…is a brilliantly imagined, if not in fact transcendental brand of therapy.” —Steve Dollar, Paste Magazine (Jan 18, 2010)
