House

Who could resist a comic horror fantasy in which schoolgirls are consumed by a haunted House? The 1977 Japanese smash hit was recently reissued in a Criterion DVD set, its informative extras including comments from director Nobuhiko Obayashi (now 72 and working on his 43rd film). House was his first feature-length work, and its wildly experimental style helped win him the Blue Ribbon Best New Director award the following year.

The DVD's 45-minute set of subtitled, well-edited interviews mixes interesting production notes from Obayashi, his screenplay writer Chiho Katsura, and his daughter Chigumi, who provided her father with the movie's original story ideas when she was a 12-year-old.

Her commercial-making father had been asked by the Toho studio to write a Jaws-style film. His daughter told him she'd enjoy seeing a house that consumed schoolgirls, suggesting such lethal weapons as a grandfather clock, piano, well, futons and mirrors. Obayashi chose to create a standard Japanese group of seven (a practice in reality as well as in Disney and The Seven Samurai), while Katsura's development of the idea was inspired by a Walter de La Mare short story. Other influences included the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Obayashi's home city) and grieving post-Pacific War lovers.

Many factors illustrate the creators' determination to make a new type of movie, one designed to please young audiences and not high-brow critics, one that would look and sound uniquely fresh, be exciting cinema to watch and hear. Most amazing, Toho let Obayashi keep his English-language title, after a two-year media campaign had transformed it into a radio production, musical album, graphic magazine and marketing stunt. When none of the studio's own contract directors would touch the populist project, it was finally given to Obayashi himself, to be made in Toho studios.

The story was simple: young Gorgeous, distressed by her widower father's intention to marry a beautiful woman, invites herself and six schoolfriends to stay at the Western-style country house of an aunt she'd only seen once before. A snow-white blue-eyed Persian cat arrives at her home, at the same time as her aunt's written invitation. The girl, the cat and her friends (epitomising their given names of Fantasy, Kung Fu, Mac (for Stomach), Melody, Prof and Sweet) reach the house, are welcomed by the love-lorn cat-loving wheelchaired aunt, and then disappear one by one in grisly (and bizarrely comic) ways.

Every shot and frame is innovative (Obayashi acknowledging that his team mischievously filmed typically artistic scenes in ways that would most infuriate directors such as Ozu and Kurasawa). Self-conscious alienation effects pop up constantly, with inappropriately raucous pop music, luridly colourful painted backdrops and gaudy set props, a dancing skeleton, delicate compositions to accompany the cannibalistic piano, fast jump cuts, glossy imagery, animation and cartoon effects. The three lead actresses are credibly beautiful and bewitched, while the six novice teenage actresses - models the director had worked with on commercials - sport airs of joyous fun and terror.

Audacious and joyful itself, the movie is memorably entertaining cinematic art.

[One similarly OTT fantasy that now needs re-viewing is the wonderfully exuberant Thai homage of 2000 to cowboy movies and romances, Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger. Like Obayashi's movie, it belongs in a genre of its own: pastiches to celebrate the art of cinema.]