Hausu (1977): The Haunted House as a Sugar-Rush Fever Dream

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Every so often a studio spends real money on something it does not understand, and the result is a masterpiece nobody could have commissioned on purpose. Hausu — released in Japan in 1977, known in the West as House — is the cleanest example I know. Toho, still chasing the disaster that Jaws had done to the global box office two years earlier, wanted its own monster hit and handed the job to Nobuhiko Obayashi, a maker of glossy television commercials with no feature credits and a head full of ideas that had no business inside a mainstream horror picture. What came back is a haunted-house film that behaves like a sugar high, a nightmare, and a soft-drink advert all at once, and forty-odd years later there is still nothing else quite like it.

Nobuhiko Obayashi - vo.rs

Hausu (1977): The Haunted House as a Sugar-Rush Fever Dream