Day 16

Hausu (1977)

Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Hausu is the immortal tale of a young woman, named Gorgeous, who takes her friends with her on a trip to visit her estranged Aunt in the countryside. While the girls are out on this trip, they encounter a number of strange situations as they learn that not everything about Gorgeous’ Aunt is as it appears. Those of you who have already seen this movie know that I am massively underselling what happens in this movie so let me make it clear: this is an intensely surreal film full of bizarre visuals, sound design, performances, and comedic interludes. I still think it has an understandable story structure, but nearly every scene includes something very very strange. Sometimes this is as innocent as having all the main characters have silly overly descriptive names: Prof is smart and reasonable, Mac is always eating, Kung Fu is good at Kung Fu, and this can give the movie a sort of fairy-tale quality at times. Other times there are flying heads and people dissolving into blood and pitched martial arts battles. If you can’t already tell, I love this movie.

What makes Hausu work for me is that it isn’t just nonsense for the sake of nonsense, the people who made the movie knew how narrative structure works and they knew how movies are supposed to behave, but took joy in turning every aspect of that on its head. What especially impressed me about the comedic sequences was how well they played into the horror sequences, something that a lot of other horror-comedies can’t seem to figure out. In Hausu, absurdity is funny AND scary at the same time, and when you feel both at once each feeling comes across much stronger, which I always prefer to movies where the horror and comedy feel like they’re locked in separate rooms, each waiting their turn to come out. However, whether or not you will enjoy this movie will have a lot to do with how you feel about surrealist cinema. If you don’t like absurd surrealist productions then you will not get anything out of this movie, except maybe a headache. If you do like really weird cinema then I would 100% recommend Hausu.