Wow. Whoa. Wow. Whoa. Wow. Whoa. Before we begin, I'm going to be upfront. I am not going to do this movie justice with words. I don't have them. I do not have the words. I'm going to say something about it, but it won't scratch the surface of what in the holy fuck I put in front of my eyeballs (with great difficulty and generosity from others), not by a fraction. I've wanted to cover this one for years. James Rolfe (remember him?) covered it for his Monster Madness marathon one year and it stuck in my mind. "That one Japanese horror movie from the 70's that's totally bonkers or something, I should do that for 31 Screams.". Well. Here we fucking are. The hand on the monkey's paw curls. I have watched House, and I don't know what the fuck. It's not that this movie is bad. It's not even that it's absurd. I'll make a bold claim, but it's a true one. This is the single most surreal thing I have ever seen in my life. I use that word in its literal sense. Surrealism. A bizarre mix of elements, often jarring and nonsensical. House is as fitting a definition for this as I've ever laid eyes on.I use both surrealism and the phrase "laid eyes on" in their literal senses. House's plot, as James Rolfe notes in that handy video I linked (which gives you a visual idea of how wild this thing is, but more on that in a second), is pretty standard. Teenage girls visit an old house and a bunch of supernatural shit happens. Okay, I'm oversimplifying. Even the girls are strange and surreal, only referred to by nicknames for their traits. So we've got Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Kung Fu, et cetera. It's an odd choice, but it works. Somehow. Right, let's get to it. Let's just say it. The cinematography and editing of House is fucking surreal as almighty fuck. Like it might as well be on the fucking moon for how unconventional and gonzo it is. I am literally ill-equipped to talk about all the tricks it does, but let me try and rattle a few off the top of my head. Lush backdrops and matte paintings. Flawless edits without cuts from one scene to another. Characters from a totally different scene popping into frame at the end of the preceding one. The frame rate dropping randomly for an entire scene. A flashback done in old film reel style that the girls riff over as we watch. That's barely scratching the surface. If you can handle a spooky film, please for the love of God just look at this thing. It's incredible and I am simultaneously blown away and completely baffled at what I just saw. Still, I have to make a stab at analysis.
I didn't even get to the horror of House yet. Make no mistake, despite the never-ending cinematic trickery making it feel like some kind of lucid dream, this is a horror movie. It keeps your interest for its first half-hour with its surrealism, but you also know it's a horror movie so you're wondering just how horrific it can be on top of that. WELL. Let me tell you some tricks. A girl's severed head laughing before biting another girl's ass. A piano eating a girl's fingers before eating the whole girl as she comments on her own devouring and her fingers continue playing. MORE WILD SHIT INVOLVING MIRRORS AND FIRE. There's a lot of very specific Japanese symbolism and thematic resonance at play too, like the nature of generational passing of the torch and spirituality. Well, that first one is corrupted because the old guard in this movie is Gorgeous's aunt, who is literally a ghost that eats young unmarried girls and remains alive because of a promise made to her husband who died in World War 2. The resentment and bitter feelings of a ghost from the turbulent years of the war, literally eating the next generation who grew up without such horrors. Holy shit. It's a grim story, amidst all the absolutely surreal stuff, but it's one worth looking at. That's... that's really all I have, I think. My words can't do it justice. Maybe the words of others can, but it has to be seen to be believed. See it. Believe it. God, what a thing.
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