House

House (1977) follows seven schoolgirls who go to an aunt's house for the summer. The house eats them one by one. A piano tears one apart, a futon attacks with its own quilt, something comes out of a mirror. The film presents this not as horror but as a child's drawing coming to life. Nobuhiko Obayashi took the ideas from his daughter. He consulted Chigumi, then not yet a teenager, because he believed children come up with things that cannot be explained. Her suggestions went straight in: a reflection in a mirror attacking the viewer, a watermelon looking like a severed head, and the house consuming girls. Her own fears were used too, futons falling like monsters and getting fingers caught in piano keys. Toho approved the script quickly, but no director at the studio wanted to make it, fearing it would damage their careers. The project sat for two years. Obayashi, not on Toho's staff, kept pitching it by handing out business cards and trading on the reputation he had from his sixties shorts and commercials. After a radio adaptation succeeded, the studio finally approved him as director. He came from commercials and shot the film without a storyboard on one of Toho's largest stages in roughly two months. He made the effects deliberately childlike and unreal, using blue screen and chroma key as if they were toys. Japanese critics disliked it. It did not open in North America until 2009 and 2010, and became a cult film from there. It runs 88 minutes. Good for: experimental horror, visual play, and cult cinema. Less good for: the film obeys no rules of logic and is not looking for coherence. The effects are deliberately fake and some viewers mistake that for incompetence. Each character is defined by a single trait, and that trait is her name.