HOUSE — The Japanese psychedelic masterpiece

Few films have garnered the rabid, cult following over the years is a sight to behold. Giant cats. Talking houses. Heads coming out of wells. The images might be familiar, but the story behind the film is less so. The debut feature from experimental filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi was done in collaboration with his 10-year-old daughter.

Season 6, titled Haunted Homes, explores how haunted house movies have mirrored our relationship with our homes. Each episode visits a horror movie that changed the way we imagine a haunted house, from the crumbling Gothic mansions to white picket fences, what it says about the people who live in the houses and what scares them the most.  

Guest written and hosted by Anna Bogutskaya. Find her book on horror films and feelings, FEEDING THE MONSTER, online and in all good bookshops. You can also listen to her horror film history podcast The Final Girls and subscribe to her movie newsletter Admit One.

A PLACE WITHOUT FEAR is now streaming exclusively on MUBI globally. 

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes some scary sounds, a house that tries to eat you, adult language and spoilers, but not me. Your regular host, Rico Gagliano. For this horror themed season, I've handed over the hosting reins to a horror expert. You will be in good spooky hands with her. Enjoy! Let me tell you a little podcasting secret. I've asked every single person I've interviewed for this series the same question to break the ice. What do you think of when you think of a haunted house? The best answer has come from this week's guest, Chigumi Ôbayashi. She said. Screams. That sounds intense, but if you know the film that she helped write when she was just ten years old, her answer makes a lot of sense. You see, Chigumi's dad was a filmmaker. I come from a very unique family. My father's a director. My mother was a producer. I've been around film ever since I can remember. When I was in kindergarten, playing with the other children and things didn't go the way I wanted I just start yelling, "Cut, cut, cut!" Because that's what I heard when my mom and dad were making films. And when her dad was tasked to direct his first feature film, he asked his ten year old daughter what she wanted to see. My father was making films, all kinds of films. 8mm, 16mm, dozens of films. And his first commercial film that was <i>House</i>. A few of her ideas ended up becoming some of the wildest images ever put to film A piano, eating a woman's hands. A head floating out of a well and biting someone on the ass. A disembodied mouth... and that's just a taste. The things that scared her as a little girl became part of one of the most remarkable, unclassifiable, and batshit haunted house movies ever made. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI is the streaming service that champions great cinema, and on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. I'm Anna Bogutskaya and I'll be your host for this season. I'm a film critic and host of the Final Girls podcast, and the author of the new book,

<i>Feeding the Monster: 2:45

A Deep Dive Into Why We Love Watching Horror Films</i>, which I've made a career out of doing. I'm guest hosting this spooky edition of the MUBI Podcast, but your trusty host, Rico Gagliano, will be back in November for the next season. This is season six. We're calling it 'Haunted Homes'. Leading up to Halloween, I'm diving into the stories behind some of the most terrifying and impactful haunted house movies ever made. In this episode, we look at the unlikely set of circumstances that set up the young Japanese experimental filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi to make this wild haunted house fantasy. A psychedelic schoolgirl nightmare that brought back young folks to Japanese cinemas. Avoid any white cats and join me as we pay a visit to <i>House</i>. Nobuhiko Obayashi was meant to be a doctor. His family were doctors. In that era, when a boy was born in the family, it was expected that he would follow the same career as the father. Obayashi's family grew up in a poor town outside of Hiroshima called Onomichi. Many exotic items from everywhere around the world would come into our town through the port. So whenever people needed the services of, say, the doctor but didn't have money to pay for it, instead they were offered one of those items. One of those things was an 8mm camera. That was the first time the would-be director would hold a camera in his hands. But being a professional filmmaker was too farfetched a dream. When my father was of age, he went to Tokyo to apply to the university to become a doctor, as he was expected to do. It was a two day test, and the first day he took the test as normal. But then on the second day, something strange happened. He said he suddenly realized, if I finish this test and I become a doctor, that's it. There's no turning back for me. So he just walked out. Obayashi went back to his hometown, to Onomichi, to tell his father what he'd done. But instead of getting mad, his dad recalled how in his youth. Any opportunity that he might have had of doing something else with his life was taken away from him because he had to serve during the war. And he gave his son the 8 mm camera as a present. Obayashi started making short experimental films with his pals. Like this arty vampire one from 1966 called <i>Emotion</i>. In fact, he's very much a crucial member of the coterie of filmmakers who especially appeared in the late 1950s, early 1960s. And they're showing their films not at regular theaters, but at art galleries or at museums. That's Aaron Gerow, professor of East Asian languages and literatures and film and media studies at Yale University. And he says, even though Obayashi and his artist friends were constantly shooting and showing films, it wasn't enough to jump from amateur to official filmmaker. At least not in Japan at that time. He said, I really feel my age. In many ways, professional filmmaking in postwar Japan was defined by a studio system. You became a film director by taking an exam and gaining entrance to the studio, where you'd spend ten years as an apprentice before you became a film director. There was no such thing as indies, at least not in the way that we understand them today. Obayashi would circumvent all of that thanks to his talent and skills, of course, but also to a crisis that was unfolding in the Japanese film industry. When we look at Japanese cinema, we often talk about this golden age of the 1950s, when you had the big directors like Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. That's the voice of Jasper Sharp, author of the Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema and critic specialized in Japanese film. During this time, the film industry was dominated by five major studios, that's Daiei, Shochiku, Toei, Nikkatsu, and Toho, and of these, Toho was probably the biggest. The biggest because they had two major assets the films of Akira Kurosawa and Godzilla.<i>Godzilla, King of the Monsters.</i><i>Alive, surging up from the depths of the sea on a tidal wave of terror.</i> But audiences were declining. Young people had stopped going to the cinema. The industry reached a crisis point in the 70s when television became the norm. As did another kind of movie, the American blockbuster...<i>Jaws.</i><i>I just found out that a girl got killed here last week.</i><i>And you knew it. You knew there was a shark out there.</i> The mid 1970s was a sort of watermark period in Japan because prior to this, Japanese audiences always preferred to see Japanese films. So the bulk of the overall box office share went to Japanese movies. And this changed in the mid 70s. And Japanese audiences, you know, preferred, went, started going to see more foreign films. And invariably when I say more foreign films, I mean more American films. In 1975, <i>Jaws, The Towering Inferno, The Man with the Golden Gun,</i> were all the rage, and only a few years later everyone was watching a little thing called <i>Star Wars</i>. The one thing about the blockbuster movie is the idea of the high concept, that you can sum up exactly what the film is about in a single sentence. So <i>Jaws</i>, obviously a shark under the water, terrorizing the natives of a small beach town. This gave Toho an idea. They would commission their own blockbuster, their very own <i>Jaws</i>. And they asked the guy who'd never made a studio film before. At this point, Obayashi was a hugely prolific commercials director. By some counts, he made over 2000 TV commercials. Including some iconic ones like the Mandom aftershave ad starring Charles Bronson.<i>All the world loves a lover.</i><i>All the world loves you.</i> Obayashi did a lot of work at Toho filming these. They knew him well. So one day they just asked him. If you were to shoot a movie, what kind of movie would you make? So he took that question home. He brought it to us, his wife, my mom and me, and he said,"Chigumi, what kind of film would you like to watch?" Chigumi was 10 or 11 at this point. All the kids were watching <i>Jaws</i>. And, you know, big animals attacking people. But that's... that's pretty common and ordinary. Instead, her mind turned to the empty house where she spent half of the year while her mom and dad were off making films. It was her grandparents house in the poor town of Onomichi. This was a very old, very scary house with many, many rooms. So when my dad asked me about this movie, what kind of things specifically would be interesting for me to see in the movie, I actually started recalling my own memories of what I had experienced in that particular house. So I thought, what if a non-living thing would attack human beings, like a house? Stay with me to find out exactly how a girl's fears helped shape this unlikely blockbuster. MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs and brilliant first timers. We've always got something new for you to discover. And I'm discovering that the regular movie podcast host, Richard Galliano, is lurking in this recording as well. It didn't mean to scare you. Just hovering there behind your desk. But I'm here to tell you about a cool thing that is on mubi.com, if I may.- Go ahead.- It is a new short by the filmmaker Susanne Deeken that is going to be right up your alley, I think. It's called <i>A Place Without Fear</i>, and it's kind of a haunted house movie. And I say kind of because it's also kind of a stop motion animation. It uses digital renderings, large scale paintings, live action. It's kind of a psychodrama about a young woman trying to escape her home, but it's definitely got a sort of horror film vibe that I have a feeling you will dig. All of those things independently and merged together are precisely my jam. And I have not seen this film and I'm going to check it out. And especially justice for short films, which are so underrated, and I'm really glad that there's a place for them to stream online and be discovered by cinephiles as well. That's right, <i>A Place Without Fear</i> this short is called subscribe at mubi.com and check it out. And as always, you can find all the links and where to stream in your country in the show notes of this episode. And speaking of haunted james, back to hungry haunted houses. How to explain <i>House</i>.<i>House</i> is pretty much indescribable to anyone that hasn't seen it. Okay, I will try. Here's the elevator pitch. A group of girls stay at a haunted house and get knocked off one by one. It's a classic horror setup. But here's what actually happens. Teenage girl Gorgeous invites her friends over to her aunt's country house for summer vacation. As soon as they arrive, strange things start happening to them. One gets her fingers eaten by a piano, another gets attacked by possessed furniture. Another named Kung Fu, has a kung fu fight with a demonic light fixture and keeps fighting even after she's dismembered. A white cat spews a torrent of blood that floods the whole house. Gorgeous becomes possessed. Her aunt, who seemed like a cool older lady, turns out to have died years ago because her fiance never returned from the war. So now she eats the souls of unmarried girls so she can put on her bridal dress once more. This amount of out there images might be unique to <i>House</i>, but some of them were pulled from the traditions of Japanese horror. One place it comes from, or one genre it comes from, is the 'ghost cat' movie. Ghost cat movies were popular in the 50s and featured some sort of wrongful death, and either a possessed or demonic or otherwise otherworldly cat. And as anyone who's seen <i>House</i> knows, the white cat takes up a A prominent place in the narrative. But it's very definitely a conscious citation of earlier ghost cat films. And both Obayashi and the screenwriter Katsura Chiho, both of them were big fans of ghost cat movies when they were growing up, and this is kind of like a subgenre within Japanese cinema. Japanese horror didn't have the exact same kind of haunted house movies that western horror did, but it did appropriate the setting, creating a strange and intriguing hybrid. Western ideas of cobwebby mansions with candles and candelabras and ominous portraits of people on the walls. Still, a lot of these moments came straight from Chigumi's brain. So there's this girl who, after her bath, is brushing her hair in front of the mirror. And I thought, what if the person reflected in the mirror? Suddenly attacked the person on this side? And I told my dad and he said"Oh that would be scary." Obayashi started taking notes as his daughter spoke. And then he said, do you have more? Inspired by that creepy house that she spent so much time in Chigumi came up with more scenes. There's an old well. It's so deep that you would think it's bottomless. And in that well, actually we would chill watermelon because it's very cool down there in the summer, right? We would put the watermelon down there and then bring it up slowly from the well. I would always think, what if something other than a watermelon comes up? What comes up is a disembodied head, obviously. Chigumi was also learning piano at the time, and had a strict teacher who would get very annoyed if her fingers got stuck in the keys. So I thought, what if the piano suddenly started attacking you know, the person? And that's where the scene came from. When the piano's like a big mouth kind of going after someone. There is so much more. We don't use beds in Japan. We sleep on the floor. We use like a futon mat. Every morning when you wake up, you fold it up and you put it in the closet. But these futons are very heavy. And because I was very small as a kid, this futon, when I was trying to lift it up and put it back in the closet, it would fall back on me and I would almost asphyxiate. So I thought, oh, that's another episode. Chigumi imagined a house that was turning against its inhabitants. Closet doors that were trying to eat you. Getting caught inside the gears of a grandfather clock. Being electrocuted trying to change a light bulb. A phone cord trying to strangle you. Basically... All those ideas from the old house I would just tell my dad one after another. Ohbayashi brought his daughter's ideas to a professional screenwriter, Chiho Katsura, but Toho wouldn't let him direct it, even though they had originally come to him. Undeterred, Obayashi started to build buzz for this film that didn't even exist yet. Obayashi was not stupid commercially. He made tons of commercials. He knows about advertising. Obayashi actually did a lot of different things to drum up interest in the film on his own. This was not the studio doing this. He launched a whole multimedia campaign to pressure Toho into giving him the gig. He wrote a radio drama, novelization of the script, a manga and a whole soundtrack before a single frame was shot. Finally, after two years of campaigning, he swayed the powers that be at Toho and <i>House</i> was ready to be filmed with Nobuhiko Obayashi as director. This was unprecedented. He really was one of the first filmmakers who comes out of this experimental, nonprofessional world who's directing a theatrically released major studio film. And nothing could have prepared Japanese audiences for <i>House</i>. I remember the reaction, especially from the kids."Oh, finally, this is a movie for us." The film, in its very form, represents that to many young people, especially people who are starting to make 8mm and 16mm films in the late 70s and early 80s<i>House</i> was their Bible. Not because they liked horror movies or ghost cat movies, but because this was a film that playfully thumbed its nose at professional filmmaking standards.<i>House</i> represented opportunity to do something wild and bold. It really was a film in the very way it was made that represented a certain kind of amateur-ness that was never amateurish, but rather represented a kind of other vision of cinema. Now listen, sometimes we can get snippy about old special effects. Of course, something made in the 70s isn't going to look as good as something made in 2024, but most films aim for being as seamless as possible. Not <i>House</i>. It glorifies the seems, it celebrates the seams it wants to show at every single moment that this is artificial. This is true play where cinema is being exposed. Because the funniest thing in the world for Obayashi is playing with cinema. And much like the films of the French New Wave, it wanted to blow up what was considered by critics and audiences to be 'a good film.' But underneath all that playfulness and the weirdness. There is Obayashi's lifelong anti-war stance. That's Gorgeous talking about the film's ostensible villain, her undead aunt who lost her fiance in the war. She wanted to be married so badly, says Gorgeous, that her body remained alive after she died. And she eats all the unmarried girls who come here, Gorgeous says. That's the only time she can wear a bridal gown. Seeing it today, and with the context of how the world is now, I can see the perspective on war that my dad had even at the time, how it's embedded in the film. That makes it timeless. It's a kind of scary that doesn't age. Victimhood is one of the central narratives of postwar Japan, as Japan kind of avoided recognizing its own responsibility for the war by repainting itself as the victim of the war. This film consciously avoids that by making the aunt not your perfect victim. She's, she's enjoying this too much to be a victim. So that reworks not only the postwar narrative, but this gendered narrative of the postwar female victim. In fact, after <i>House</i>, Obayashi made more than 40 movies. Most of them were war related. He actually makes a good number of films in the 80s and 90s, which have none of this kind of playful special effects, which can seem much more realistic. They can seem quite romantic and lyrical and quite serious. He became a very well known director, beloved and revered in his country, if not as well known outside of Japan. Obayashi did not stop making films until the very end of his life. Towards the end, he made a film called <i>Hanagatami</i>. A beautiful experimental story about youth in the pre-war era. At this time, when he was making it, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and there were ideas that possibly he wouldn't live to see his film being completed yet alone released. But he did, he struggled through, and it's an epic film. And yet he's still known for this fantastical, wild take on the haunted house movie. A film half brewed in the imagination of a girl and processed into unforgettable images.<i>House</i> might not be the scariest haunted house movie ever. It might not even be the scariest haunted house movie we cover in this series. But it's a one of a kind haunting. Obayashi had a motto, which he repeated endlessly. In Japanese it's "嘘 から の 真" or "The truth that comes from a lie." He loves artifice, but he really did believe that through artifice, through this lie, one can engage in more basic truths about the human condition, or about war, or about postwar history. He does believe he's engaging with the truth, even as he's showing a woman enjoying an eyeball in her mouth. Couldn't have said it better myself. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us to hear more stories about houses and how they haunt us at the movies. Next week we explore <i>Skinamarink</i>, the internet's haunted house movie. I watched <i>Skinamarink</i> in the pitch black on my computer screen with my noise canceling headphones, and I was lulled into this trance to when a character says, "Are you awake?" I almost peed my pants. Follow us so you don't get lost in the infinite podcast feeds. Until then, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was hosted and written by me, Anna Bogutskaya. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Christian Coons is our editor. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick. Shoko Plambeck played the voice of Chigumi Obayashi. Thanks this week to Masanari Sasaki and Nico Rivers. If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen. Every single review helps keep the poltergeists away. And if you've got questions, comments or just want to tell us about how your house is haunted, I'd love to hear it. I really, really would. Email us at podcast@mubi.com This show is executive produced by Rico Gagliano, John Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca. And of course, to watch the best in cinema, including some of the films we mentioned on this very podcast subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com. Thanks for listening. Stay haunted.