Hausu
Hausu
Hausu
Hausu
Hausu

Hausu

Regular price $35.00
Please allow 7 working days to process before shipping

House is a 1977 Japanese horror comedy film directed and produced by Nobuhiko Obayashi. The film stars mostly amateur actors with only Kimiko Ikegami and Yōko Minamida having any notable previous acting experience. The film is about a schoolgirl traveling with her six classmates to her ailing aunt's country home, where they come face to face with supernatural events as the girls are, one by one, devoured by the home.


The film company Toho approached Obayashi with the suggestion to make a film like Jaws. To find inspiration for the story, Obayashi discussed ideas with his pre-teen daughter Chigumi Obayashi. Nobuhiko sought her ideas, believing that adults "only think about things they understand ... everything stays on that boring human level" while "children can come up with things that can't be explained".


Several of Chigumi's ideas were included in House such as a reflection in a mirror attacking the viewer, a watermelon being pulled out of a well appearing like a human head, and a house that eats girls. Other themes Chigumi suggested drew upon her own childhood fears. These fears included a pile of futons falling on her that felt like a monster attacking her, a large loud clock at her grandparents home, and getting her fingers caught in between her piano keys. Influenced by ideas from his daughter, Obayashi developed ideas for a script that was written by Chiho Katsura.


After the script was green-lit, the film was put on hold for two years as no director at Toho wanted to direct it. Obayashi promoted the film during this time period until the studio allowed him to direct it himself.


There is a lot going on in Hausu, and two of its many possible readings present themselves to us from the outset. In some respects, Hausu is a coming-of-age film; when we meet its young protagonists, we find them balanced on the precarious knife-edge between childhood and adulthood. More specifically, however, this is a film about the generation gap, both superficially and in the most serious of ways.


Made in the mid-seventies, when young Japanese women were breaking away from traditional female roles, Hausu reflects the resulting social conflict in a variety of ways. The girls here are, so to speak, part of a transitional generation: while love and marriage still dominate their thinking of their futures, it is clear that they are approaching this from a new and more independent perspective; making their own choices.


Hausu is a film that addresses the bombing of Hiroshima without ever engaging with it directly. To the girls, the war is just “a story”, something that happened “a long time ago”; as indeed is Auntie’s personal tragedy, which has no more substance for them than something they might have seen sometime in a movie, and which evokes no deeper response than the inevitable sighed, “How romantic!” But the girls’ obliviousness is counterpointed by constant in-film allusions to a world over which the shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still hang, and to the generation that grew up in those shadows.

White Short Sleeve Tee
100% Combed Ring Spun Cotton