Today's Pick: House (1977)
I love the Japanese. Their brazen weirdness has given birth to a culture that is deeply entrenched in bizarre artistic expression. But, sometimes even the Japanese exceed the boundaries of their own strangeness and create something so otherworldly that it nearly defies description. Such is Nobuhiko Obayashi's House (or Hausu to help differentiate it from the 1986 horror/comedy of the same name), a fever dream horror/fantasy that has to be one of the closest attempts at actually capturing the cartoonish and hallucinatory nature of a child's nightmares. That's probably helped by the fact that Obayashi's pre-teen daughter has a story credit on the film. I'll say it again: I love the Japanese.
I love the Japanese. Their brazen weirdness has given birth to a culture that is deeply entrenched in bizarre artistic expression. But, sometimes even the Japanese exceed the boundaries of their own strangeness and create something so otherworldly that it nearly defies description. Such is Nobuhiko Obayashi's House (or Hausu to help differentiate it from the 1986 horror/comedy of the same name), a fever dream horror/fantasy that has to be one of the closest attempts at actually capturing the cartoonish and hallucinatory nature of a child's nightmares. That's probably helped by the fact that Obayashi's pre-teen daughter has a story credit on the film. I'll say it again: I love the Japanese.
