YOKAI WALK WITH ME

Daiei Film's third and final film centered around yokai, 1969's Along with Ghosts (a very unlovely title, but the literal translation isn't much better), is certainly the weakest of the three. And the least centered around yokai. In fact, while 100 Monsters would be hollowed out to almost nothing without having the paranormal entities covered by the highly nonspecific umbrella of the word yokai, and Spook Warfare wouldn't exist at all, it would be fairly easy to rewrite Along with Ghosts to lack any specific kind of haunting at all; just a sense of creepy dread in an old forest in one scene, and the monster mash in the final 10 minutes of the film could be snipped out entirely, offering as it does very little other than the sense that the filmmakers forgot that they were making a yokai film until it was to late to do anything but arbitrarily throw ghosts at the finale.

None of which means that Along with Ghosts doesn't have its strengths, nor that it isn't effectively creepy - which it is, perhaps surprisingly, given how little actual creepy material exists, and how much ghastly-ass comic relief does. This is not a movie as overtly For Children as Spook Warfare, but it has a lengthy scene dropped right into the middle that finds two bumbling henchmen hunting for kids in a slapstick sequence that would barely pass muster in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, hard to defend on any level other than "you know... for kids!", and an angry dwarf lady who is hard to defend on any level whatsoever. In the lowest depths of these passages -which I take to be unquestionably the bit where the henchmen are chasing a barrel zipping back and forth, thinking it has the children when in fact it is a dog - it's difficult to conceive of Along with Ghosts being any damn good on any level. And then the rest of the movie happens, and while it's not great by any means, it's still a pretty good ghost story even when the ghosts are conspicuously absent.

The feudal politics in this one get dense to the point that the film can be hard to follow, so what follows is more the impression of the plot than the actual plot: a yakuza band led by Kanzo (Tamaki Kazue, I think; the credits are incomplete in English, and information online is dubious) has stolen an incriminating document, killing the messengers carrying it in the middle of a sacred spot. When they are warned against this by the old man caring for that shrine (Hidari Bokuzen), Kanzo kills him too, though he survives long enough to pass word to his 7-year-old granddaughter Miyo (Burukido Masami) that she must take the document and flee to an inn some way down the Tokaido, the great sea road. She is assisted in this quest by Shinta (Hozumi Pepe), a slightly older and much more world-wise boy, and Hyakasuro (Hongo Kojiro), a samurai who had till lately been in the employ of the man Kanzo killed. Also ghosts - spooky, zombie-like ghosts who are pissed as all get-out at Kanzo and his men's initial and persistent violations of their sacred spaces, and do their own little bit to stop the yakuza, though it is very little indeed.

I'm inclined to a certain feeling of generosity towards Along with Ghosts that it probably doesn't earn. The thing is, for all its many lapses, it gets one key thing right: it paces out its most explicitly haunted scenes with great canniness, so even though there is virtually no yokai action and only a little bit more paranormal activity of any sort, there's never a long enough break that it feels like we've abandoned the universe of a lightly creepy bedtime story, where the promise of ghosts and monsters hiding just around the next bend is omnipresent, regardless of whether they actually prove to show up or not. And in fact, arguably the two best scenes in the film - the initial attack at the shrine, and Kanzo's torment of Miyo in a fixed dice game - are both eerie and ghostly without actually having ghosts. That's a tone that suits the film comfortably, and directors Yasuda Kimiyoshi and Kuroda Yoshiyuki (individually, the directors of the two preceding yokai films) did well to sustain it more or less, even though there's a pretty rough patch towards the center where too much daylight and too much kiddie frolicking and too many cartoon bad guys threaten to knock the entire film off the rails.

The flipside is that, while the tone is mostly enjoyably insinuating in its storytelling atmosphere, it leaves things a little abstract, and that hurts this as a yokai film even more than the lack of yokai does. When we think of the first two movies, we think, like as not, in terms of the great creatures: the karakasa, umbrella ghost, and the snake-necked lady, and the kappa, and that rock-headed thing from Spook Warfare who led the yokai, and my Japanese mythology is nowhere near strong enough to guess what he was supposed to be. All of them have interesting screen presence and well-defined personalities as morally neutral monsters. The phantoms in Along with Ghosts, in contrast, are totally generic and impersonal. They make an impact, I suppose, with the slow way they fade in, and the overtly threatening nature of their appearances, staged in ritualistic ways that feel far more deliberate and angry than anything in the previous movies. But they're just ugly creatures with decaying faces, and absolutely no energy. It's terribly disappointing, mostly only in reference to the first two. Though even if we just take this as a film unto itself, the relatively anonymous character of the yokai here only underscores the impression that this could just as easily have none of them, making it through on its implicit paranormal elements and leaving the outright haunting out of it.

And that would leave us with a satisfactory but not at all special samuarai adventure with a perfectly charming little girl for a protagonist, suitably threatening villains for a movie that keeps just pulling back from committing to being a kids' film, too many scenes that make their point three or four times before wrapping up, and lots of subdued, atmospheric imagery. It's a pleasing yarn, but certainly no more, and it's easily the least memorable film of the trilogy. There's a genuine sleepy pleasure to it, though, and if it's a fairly empty conclusion to a likable little horror series, I can't honestly declare it to be an obviously insufficient one.

Reviews in this series
100 Monsters (Yasuda, 1968)
Spook Warfare (Kuroda, 1968)
Along with Ghosts (Yasuda & Kuroda, 1969)

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OUT OF THE WEST

Daiei's second yokai film in 1968, which is most readily found in English under the title Spook Warfare, and with the implication that it came out first (the actual title is much closer to "great yokai war", which would eventually be used in the Western distribution of a different film 37 years later), is a marked improvement of its predecessor, 100 Monsters, in some ways, and a distinctly more slapdash, tossed-off affair in others. Which sounds like it turns out to be a push, but for one key thing: absolutely everything about Spook Warfare makes it considerably more fun than the first movie. It's so much goofier in every respect, and more aware that it's kind of actually a children's movie, and while the stakes are higher, the sense of danger is barely present at all. All of which sounds like I'm describing an absolute piece of shit, so let me back up a little bit.

The first and most obvious thing about Spook Warfare is that unlike all of Daiei's other "samurai movie with monsters" films - 100 Monsters, but also Daimajin and its sequels in 1966 - it's not at all a stock jidaigeki: it's not a tale of villagers fending off a wicked warlord until along come people in a suit to save the day. Which is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; Daimajin is a wonderful film after all. But it does shift the way the film functions quite a lot, and I think for the better. In effect, Spook Warfare isn't a film into which yokai arrive; it is a film about a band of yokai fighting... a wicked warlord. But he's a wicked demon warlord, so it still fits. The point being, by focusing from the onset on the spirits and monsters, and letting the humans serve as the side characters for most of the running time, the film acknowledges that we're pretty much all there for the effects, the creepy characters, and not so much the drama. But even setting that aside as a vote in favor of instant gratification and empty spectacle, the streamlined narrative of Spook Warriors and focused deployment of the yokai gives it a storybook feeling that's far stronger than anything in 100 Monsters; it has a direct progression of events that's fare clearer and more engaging, even if it ultimately burns down to "the funny and scary monsters do things".

And having talked about focus and clarity and all, I shall look like a fool for pointing out the other really apparent thing here, which is the film's wildly unconventional opening: I can't name any other Japanese movie that starts off in Mesopotamia. Here, two greedy treasure hunters accidentally unsealing a millennia-old Babylonian demon named Daimon (Hashimoto Chikara). I will assume that "Daimon the demon" doesn't sound so flippant and dumb in Japanese. Daimon is a being of obvious malice, from his rotten green features on down to the way he kills the treasure hunters without a second glance, and he's been pent up for long enough that he can't wait to start doing something evil, which involves him immediately transporting himself to feudal Japan. The reason why feudal Japan is, of course, because Spook Warfare is the second film in a series made in Japan on standing sets from jidaigeki, but in the context of the film it's the most random damn thing. But we have to push through this part to get to the actual movie, so even though the opening sequence is the exact opposite of streamlined narrative cohesion, it has to be dealt with.

The film, anyway, starts to become immediately more delightful in Japan, where Lord Isobe (Kanda Takashi), a local magistrate, and his daughter, Lady Chie (Kawasaki Akane), are fishing. The arrival of the storm which contains Daimon sends the party scurrying, but Isobe stays behind just long enough for the demon to kill him, drink his blood, and possess his body. Because Daimon, you see, isn't just a big scary Babylonian monster: he's the intrusion into the world of Japanese yokai of a specifically European conception of a vampire. And no, Babylon and Europe nearly aren't the same thing (nor is Egypt, where all of the "Babylonian" architecture seems to have come from), but give the number of Western-made films and stories to cram Japan, China, Korea, and certain bits of southeast Asia into one big sack, I elect not to get huffy about it.

The arrival of a Western monster isn't just a conceit, it's the whole plot hook. Daimon, disguised as Isobe, starts to wreak havoc and freak everybody out; the first person to attempt to figure out what's going on is Saheiji (Kimura Gen), Isobe's most trusted adviser. Their struggle is quick and ends with a fragment of Daimon's essence possessing Saheiji as well, but during the fight, in a surprisingly comic bit of business, a projectile falls into the pond in the middle of Isobe's courtyard, falling right on the head of the local kappa (Kuroki Gen) sleeping there. Kappa being the turtle-like river creatures of Japanese folklore, you know. The kappa gets annoyed, and even more annoyed to see that a foreign demon is trying to take over his turf, but Daimon makes immensely short work of the little creature. With nowhere else to turn, the kappa heads to the local haunted ruins, where a whole army of yokai hang around, and though he fails to convince them that a monster unknown in Japan is terrorising the land, he's done enough to lay the groundwork so that when Daimon overplays his hand - gathering up local children to drink their blood, his favorite food - the yokai are at least a little ready to wage war. But it still will take a collaboration with the hopelessly outmatched human contingent fighting Daimon from inside Isobe's palace to stop the interloper.

The film's charms are perhaps shallow, but the are legitimate: we get to watch as a whole gallery of yokai, gross and cute and fanciful creatures from across the range of folklore, plot how to oust a Japanified vampire out, to preserve the honor of Japanese monsterdom. There's no way not to make that kind of narrative scenario sound odd, but it's awfully sweet and fun, anyway. And since Spook Warfare unashamedly announces itself as a trifle for an audience of children, "sweet" and "fun" are far less insulting than they might otherwise sound. It also excuses the remarkably apparent shortcomings of Spook Warfare's production: the seams show all over, whether it's the poorly-hidden cutting to make things appear and disappear, or the fact that the green makeup Kuroki wears on his arms and legs as the kappa keeps rubbing off, or how much none of the yokai look like anything but cloth and rubber. This might, indeed, be part of the point: we get to see all of the marvelous creatures, but they're so obviously artificial that none of it is ever actually scary. Mostly just charming and goofy.

Which isn't to say that it's devoid of any kind of meat on its bones. The climactic battle is impressively serious and elaborate in its action choreography for something targeting a young audience. And while the various yokai are always presented in a way that makes it clear that we have nothing to worry about, it's just pretend (and besides the yokai are generally treated as comic figures by director Koroda Yoshiyuki, focusing on the silliness and bumbling when he can, on top of being protectors, not a menace), there's still that little frisson of enjoyable creepiness when we see things like the lady with the snake neck (Mori Ikuko), grinning with malevolent delight, or the full form of Daimon as a batlike creature with his ribs on the outside. It's uncanny without being dangerous in any way, and that's enough to make it something of a perfect little children's horror movie/bedtime story. Its guileless sense of adventure and bouncy approach to saying "boo!" don't at all mean it's not okay for adults too - as I imagine has long since been clear, I found the film utterly bewitching in its playfulness and haunted house whimsy. But what I think doesn't matter, and that's just fine. It's not for people like me, and I'm just pleased that I got to find it so likable and inviting anyway.

Reviews in this series
100 Monsters (Yasuda, 1968)
Spook Warfare (Kuroda, 1968)
Along with Ghosts (Yasuda & Kuroda, 1969)

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DEFINITELY NOT 100 MONSTERS, BUT ENOUGH THAT I LOST COUNT

October at Antagony & Ecstasy means weekends dedicated to classic horror films. This year, rather than tackle a franchise, I've decided to have two little series running in tandem, one on Saturdays and one on Sundays. The Saturday series I've picked is thanks entirely to the fun I've had in the past year reviewing a whole crapload of daikaiju eiga, and after this month is over, I promise we're done with '60s and '70s Japanese genre films for a while.

In 1968, Daiei Film released a quickly-made trilogy of tokusatsu horror films, connected only that they featured broadly the same kind of creatures (the same model that they'd employed two years earlier, in their Daimajin daikaiju eiga). And I do mean broadly. For these films - usually referred to in English markets as the Yokai Monsters trilogy - aren't about one specific monster, like Daimajin the statue or Gamera the flying turtle, and they aren't even about one basic class of monster. They are about yokai, a type of being for which we don't have a word in English, or even really a concept - the word, as I understand it, is an umbrella term for all supernatural beings that aren't gods or demons, everything from trickster spirits living in the woods to hideous perversions of human beings. I'm not even entirely sure if the strictest use of the word yokai would demand that the beings in question are either malevolent or scary, though Daiei's first film in its trilogy (though marketed on DVD as the second) is predicated on that being more or less the case.

The film is known in America, at least, as 100 Monsters, which is almost, but crucially not quite, a fair translation of the original title, which is something like 100 Yokai Stories. And it's not just because "monsters" is a pretty crude attempt to render "yokai" in English. The thing is, 100 Monsters is in fact a horror movie about telling scary stories, one whose adoption of a certain distanced relationship from its own content very neatly reflects the way that spooky bedtime tales feel comfortably dissociated from our own present reality, either because they take place in some distant place or time, or because they are sketched out in only as much detail as it takes to move the plot from point to point (nobody ever wondered what kind of car the madman's hook was hanging from, after all). 100 Monsters certainly gets the distance and detachment right: it takes place somewhere centuries back into the past, and it's so unconcerned about filling in the details that I didn't really notice till over halfway through that I hadn't caught more than one or two character names. It's a film that exists strictly at the level of folktale: once upon a time, a village was attacked by an army of ghosts.

That doesn't actually happen till the end, though. First, we're introduced to the tradition of hyakumonogatari kaidankai, the telling of one-hundred stories of the supernatural. As each story was completed, a single candle would be extinguished, until the final story was told by the light of only one flame. Custom demands that the final story be followed by a cleansing ritual to prevent the yokai which had just been described and summoned by the stories from manifesting in the lives of the storytellers. We see one such event wrap up one night in a town suffering under the cruelty of its wealthiest inhabitant, the landowner Tajimaya (Kanda Takashi), who has been steadily strengthening his grip on the community, and makes his most bastardly move yet on the morning when he announces his intentions to seize and demolish an old temple. In order to do this, he needs the approval of the even more bastardly Lord Uzen (Gomi Ryutaro), a corrupt and repellent petty dictator.

On the night that Uzen arrives in town to railroad through his decision, Tajimaya endeavors to stage a hyakumonogatari kaidankai game just for his benefactor, which plays out as well as one could hope for. But Uzen, a bully with no patience for superstition, cuts the night off after the 100th story but before the benediction to banish the yokai, and this sure enough means that over the next couple of day, a whole host of of bizarre creature star to show up with the intention of causing all possible inconvenience and misery for the men who called them up. Which makes things a lot easier for Yasutaro (Fujimaki Jun), a stranger staying in town and expressing a rather focused fascination with the bad guys' plotting, and who now has the luxury of sitting back while the yokai take care of whatever corruption he'd been trying to ferret out.

That doesn't sound like enough to fill up even the modest 80 minutes to which 100 Monsters runs, and it's not hard to argue that it's a film with more than its share of padding. Like the first Daimajin, with which it shares director Yasuda Kimiyoshi and screenwriter Yoshida Tetsuro, the film is first and foremost a period drama, a jidaigeki, about the torments suffered by poor villagers at the hands of an unscrupulous and cruel warlord, into which some fantasy film elements insert themselves near the climax; unlike Daimajin, 100 Monsters isn't a tremendously good version of that. Yasuda, his cinematographer Takemura Yasukazu, and his art directors Kato Shigeru and Nishioka Yoshinobu do a fine enough job of crafting an Edo period setting that looks believable as a physical place, but not fussily realistic, and in particular, Yasuda pulls out some really interesting, almost startling unexpected camera angles (mostly from surprisingly high angles) to to lift us from the setting and keep alive the feeling that we're watching a storybook fable, not a dramatic narrative. Even in the depressingly faded print that made its way to DVD, 100 Monsters is a handsome looking movie.

But it is also a lumpy movie with no clear sense of how it wants its story to play out - it is very difficult to imagine how it would have continued developing if the yokai hadn't shown up, making it awfully convenient for the characters that they did. It's much too short to be boring, but it does feel like it's repeating itself without purpose, leaving the human story in the middle part of the film awfully sluggish. The film does have the decency to know this, and to hand out yokai scenes with unanticipated frequency: the opening (in the form of a story being told), and right about the one-third mark (another story, and most unnervingly creeepy part of the film, a little gut punch of obvious but effective paranormal nastiness, with one particular yokai effect that I found most impossibly successful, and I will not look to spoil it now) are both ghostly setpieces; a bit later, the film introduces its most famous yokai, the one-legged, two-armed, one-eyed moving umbrella called karakasa, in a scene that's just the most damn delightful thing I can imagine. Herein, Tajimaya's childlike son (Shinichi Rookie) paints karakasa on a blank canvas, only to find his drawing come alive in a really terrific animated effect, and then to suddenly burst into three dimensions in the form of an implausible but still deeply enjoyable puppet.

All really solid moments, and they help considerably in propping up 100 Monsters at exactly the points it threatens to sag. Which helps us get to the excellent final sequence, in which the yokai attack Lord Uzen in dreamy slow-motion, and later file out of the town in a gauzy, semi-translucent parade that's uncanny and beautiful equally. There's a real strain of visual poetry going on here, surprisingly so given the film's cheapness and generic requirements (and yet, not at all surprising in the light of the tremendously good final sequence of Daimajin, which was also poetic but in a different way); and even more surprisingly, it augments the otherworldliness an horrifying quality of the scenes, rather than robbing them of their spooky effect by making them beautiful instead.

The parts of 100 Monsters that work are absolutely terrific; they also stand out badly in the context of the parts that are... just fine. I would love a more consistent 100 Monsters: if not more consistently full of yokai (on the contrary, I think they are judiciously and craftily used), at least more consistently clear and purposeful. There can be a vagueness and overly simplified sense of narrative conflict in a some places within the movie, and yet it also feels overstuffed: the clear mark of a film that would naturally be a clever little ghost story anecdote around 45 minutes, if 45 minutes was a running time that people knew what to do with. 80 minutes starts to feel bloated.

But forget my criticisms: it's a lovely movie, with some terrific haunting setpieces, and a real sense of not knowing what's happening or what to expect (which may very well just be the result of U.S. parochialism, but the film's inalienable weirdness is absolutely its most salient characteristic to an American viewer, and I couldn't possible fail to mention it). When it clicks, and it frequently clicks, it's a captivating tale of straightforward, winningly simple ghost story impulses. If I am disappointed in its sagginess and wandering screenplay, it's only because I like the good parts so much that I wish the whole movie could be at that level.

Reviews in this series
100 Monsters (Yasuda, 1968)
Spook Warfare (Kuroda, 1968)
Along with Ghosts (Yasuda & Kuroda, 1969)

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE

The best thing to do with complex topics, I have found, is to ease into them simply. So: House. This is, apparently, what you get when an experimental filmmaker, Obayashi Nobuhiko, who turned to making TV commercials to make ends meet, was given the chance by a big studio to direct what it hoped would be a valid homegrown competitor to Jaws. Though what, exactly, Toho saw in the scenario for this film that indicated on any level "will appeal to the Jaws crowd" is beyond me, and that's before we get to the finished project, which goes so far beyond anything that could possibly have been implied by a scenario...

House, anyway, certainly drew a lot more from the "experimental filmmaker" side of the equation than any studio would ever hope for, and I'd be inclined to call what resulted to be one of the purest horror movies I could even imagine, let alone that I've seen, if only I was totally comfortable with the inclination that "horror" is the box House fits in most comfortably. It's genuinely unclassifiable, resembling something like a particularly florid Dario Argento movie with all the interstitials removed that more or less explain the rudimentary plot, and that cross-cut with a meta-movie whose mercilessly insincere staging is basically a parody of the act of filmmaking itself. But any comparison, even one as convoluted as that, implies that House exists on some kind of continuum where you can really compare it to other movies as a means of clarifying what it is and what it does, and that's just not the case at all.

Still, the film does have a plot, so let's go through it, just to have something we can hang our hat on later. And there's a certain fact about this plot that's absolutely revelatory, explaining just about everything of why the film works in the particular way it does: while the final script was written by Katsura Chiho, he was just fleshing out a story written by Obayashi's 11-year-old daughter Chigumi. We're going to return to that. In the meanwhile, let's meet some 16-year-old schoolgirls, beginning with Gorgeous (Ikegami Kimiko) - there's no indication that it's not her actual, given name - whose father (Sasazawa Saho) has just returned from a job scoring a movie in Italy (Sergio Leone, he brags, thinks he's better than Ennio Morricone, a random aside that I loved about as much as I loved anything else in this supremely lovable movie). And they're all set to go on vacation, but her father wants to bring along a surprise guest: his new fiancée, Ema Ryoko (Wanibuchi Hariko). This feels like a betrayal of the worst sort to the memory of Gorgeous's mother, so she writes off a passionate letter to her aunt, begging for permission to come visit with six of her friends. Despite the fact that they've only met once, ten years prior, a letter comes back enthusiastically agreeing with the suggestion.

So out to the country travels Gorgeous, along with her aunt's white Persian cat Blanche, and six friends: Fantasy (Ohba Kumiko), Kung Fu (Jinbo Miki), Prof (Matsubara Ai), Mac (Sato Mieko), Melody (Tanaka Eriko), and Sweet (Miyako Masayo). Armed with their seven dwarfish names and personalities to match (Mac, incidentally, is short for "stomach", because she's fat - and fucking hell, but if hers is the kind of body type that the Japanese regard as fat in a teenage girl, it's a more messed up country than I would have ever guessed), the girls tromp off to find Auntie (Minamida Yoko), a striking but frail white-haired woman in a wheelchair, with a large and somewhat cobwebby but still inviting house. And also an uncommented-upon tendency to talk to her young guests in language that would be hard pressed to communicate "I'm going to kill you and drain your essence to restore my own vitality" without stating it outright.

Things get really weird once the house starts to work its evil will on the girls, and I wouldn't want to give away what happens even if I thought I could, because House has a level of gonzo invention and absurdist ingenuity that's unworthy of being spoiled and also, honestly, impossible to spoil. And even at almost four decades old, the film remains sufficiently unknown in the English-speaking world (where it's only been available in any systematic way since 2009) that it remains far more obscure than its level of achievement deserves.

And besides, it's long before this point that makes the movie such a one-of-a-kind experience has made itself manifest. That happens from the beginning, really, with the film announcing itself (in English text) as "A Movie", before the title comes up (also in English), as a gutturally low male voice utters the Japanese interpretation of that word, generally rendered as hausu, while a pair of animated lips replace the "O" and act generally carnivorous and menacing. Also, it's in the boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio of old movies, which in 1977 stands out as a pretty unyieldingly ballsy choice, letting us know right off that this is going to be a very different movie with visuals that are going to call a lot of attention to themselves.

Oh, do they ever. Within about the first five seconds of the movie proper, we've already been introduced to heavy tinting and an editing technique that I don't think has a name, where the frame freezes and dissolves at the same time, so the movement stops in a ghostly way and yet moves on underneath its ghostly self. It's so disorienting that it doesn't even register as being cheesy and low-rent, which is true of a great deal of the imagery in House. The visual effects are at a level of aggressive crudeness that's doubly jarring when we note that the film premiered the same year as Star Wars: where that film represented astounding new leaps in how effects work could create new realities, House is basically an experiment in seeing how transparently chintzy you can make things before it breaks the film entirely.

But it works! This is a movie that's not going to be broken by things like fakery or discontinuity or inexplicable character logic, all of which are present in abundance - heck, the omnipresent use of beautifully painted but thoroughly unpersuasive backdrops is so complete that the movie's even able to make a visual joke at its own expense about it, when one such backdrop turns out to just be the painted wall of a train depot. It is, rather a movie in which fakery and confused artifice are precisely the point of the thing. Like avant-gardists given the keys to a real studio picture before and after himself, one of Obayashi's guiding interests was in ripping apart all of the rules and aesthetic framework of normal moviemaking to craft something that works in a completely foreign idiom.

There are, I presume, socio-cultural and political reasons why Obayashi might have wanted to do this, but I don't think we really even need to go that far. What House does immensely well is to create a pervasive, non-stop impression of a completely deranged and inexplicable world from the very beginning, long before the titular location makes its presence known. It's not, then, like the contemporaneous Suspiria, in that its narrative discohesion and madcap visual style are specifically justified within the story by a setting in which the rules of reality and sanity are bent. In House, it's the whole damn world that's insane, and the impression one gets is that Obayashi wasn't just thinking of the world within the movie, either.

But again, let's keep it simple. The non-stop bizarre gestures in House, with every scene just about feeling like it's operating according to a completely new set of rules for how to construct and combine images (it's a great film to watch if you're easily bored: ten minutes never go by without it feeling like an entirely new movie has started), and the horrifying moments so outré and purposefully cheap that it's honestly impossible to tell half the time if laughing or screaming is the more appropriate response, are part of the more basic requirement that the film sets for itself and fully achieves: make a movie about a haunting and a demon who drives her victims mad before killing them, and make sure that its entire fabric of being is as chaotic and inexplicable and anti-normal as the haunting and the madness are themselves. House torments us as comprehensively as Auntie torments the girls; and they, like we, are apparently split in half between whether to find it fascinating and enjoyable or creepy and terrifying.

Because it's not just a bombastically surreal movie, it's a frequently hilarious one. Partially because of the randomness of it all, where every new visual trick Obayashi pulls out is so weird that it's hard not to giggle, partially because of the well-timed reliance on comically reiterated motifs in the visuals and the audio (the soundtrack is dominated by a handful of character themes that lurch in and out dramatically, like the film itself only realises after a few frames which character it's paying attention to now), partially from things so outright absurd that just from the concept they're a little bit hysterical.

So anyway, I'd like to bring things back to little Obayashi Chigumi, from whose mind all of this glorious weirdness sprung. And that, I think, is why House creates that feeling of having the bottom fall out over and over again, reality crumbling, cinema itself broken into fragments of ideas that jam against each other instead of setting each other up. It's a stream-of-consciousness piece conceived by a kid, one whose capacity to imagine strange, disconnected nonsense hadn't been tamed by discipline, maturity, and a fully-developed brain. I think that's why House is so flawlessly able to create a truly deranged sense of what happens when the paranormal assaults the rational, above and beyond even the very great horror films by folks like Argento and Fulci working in the same vein: those filmmakers were using adult calculation to create an impression of what madness looks like. Obayashi fille had not adult logic to unlearn, and could simply roll out a story of ghosts and monster cats and aggressive killer houses that followed the arbitrary flow of a dream or a nightmare or just a childish sense of an eternal Now with no recourse to past or present, and even though House in its complete state has the feel of a film in which the writing was a complete afterthought, I'm convinced that it's only because it started from a scenario that came from such a source that it was freed up to achieve everything it did as a work of visual surrealist horror and structural chaos.

Body Count: ...ten?

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