Although the undercurrent of incredible sadness that surges through House ages us just a bit, Obayashi still sends us out on one final swell of fantasy, forgiving us our naïve need to believe in beauty even as it walks hand in hand with his damning excoriation of humanity. There’s joy amidst fear, and there will be loss in our future, and from the cinematic overlap of these truths emerges Obayashi’s “story of love.” Like a leitmotif, no matter what form it takes, we all eventually hear the same melody. The decapitated noggin also flies through the air, but that’s getting, um, ahead of the story, which opens with two uniformed teenage girls putting on a little photo shoot, prettily posing and laughing. You quickly discover that one, who’s known as Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami), a moniker used by both her friends and father (Saho Sasazawa), is the center from which all the other chaotic parts flow and twist.
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The reading is interrupted by the giant-sized head of Gorgeous, who reveals that her aunt died many years ago while waiting for her fiancé to return from World War II. Her spirit remains, eating unmarried girls who arrive at her home. As Kung Fu lunges into a flying kick, she is eaten by a possessed light fixture. Kung Fu's legs manage to escape and damage the painting of Blanche on the wall, which in turn kills Blanche physically. The attacked Blanche portrait spurts blood, causing the room to flood. Prof tries to read the diary, but a jar with teeth pulls her into the blood, where she dissolves.
JASON HOUSE Obituary (1977 - 2023) - POTTSBORO, TX - The Herald Democrat - Legacy.com
JASON HOUSE Obituary (1977 - - POTTSBORO, TX - The Herald Democrat.
Posted: Thu, 10 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Love, Lies, and Leitmotifs
If Obayashi’s “younger generation” is as musically inclined as he claims, the message must be as unequivocal to them as it is to us, especially when communicated through melodies crafted by their own cohort. With this in mind, House’s popularity with Japanese youth comes into focus. Although Obayashi is quick to textualize his observations about the differences in perception between younger and older Japanese moviegoers—“it’s like a cotton candy! ” one of the girls coos early in the film at footage of an atomic detonation—his intentions in doing so aren’t initially clear. Are the girls simply callous, or is 32 years of distance from unprecedented horror enough to justify their lighthearted attitudes?
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Much like the house (and House) itself, the leitmotif’s externally inviting character has been subsumed by its new association with a haunted, heartbroken past—for us, for the actresses, and for Gorgeous, whose dreams of eternal love are destroyed by her new stepmother and the vision in the mirror. The presence of the leitmotif acts, one more time, as our guiding star here. But reality itself is subject to distortion; those things once thought unreal often come storming into our lives without a moment’s notice, like an atomic cotton-candy bloom turning hundreds of thousands of lives into dust. Within the span of human existence, everything is permissible, and the incomprehensible often comes to haunt us, just as an incomprehensible horde of monsters haunts Gorgeous and her friends. House tells the story of high school ingenue Gorgeous, who embarks on an ill-fated summer vacation with her six friends to her aunt’s lonely house in the countryside. Auntie, a retired piano teacher who lost her betrothed to World War II, works in tandem with the house to possess Gorgeous and systematically devour her friends, so that they might both feed on the joyous youth that the war stole from her so many years before.
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Delirious, deranged, gonzo or just gone, baby, gone — no single adjective or even a pileup does justice to “House,” a 1977 Japanese haunted-house freakout. Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, this energetic exemplar of pulp surrealism began surfacing in the United States last year, playing at events like the New York Asian Film Festival. Now, in advance of the Criterion DVD, which will be released later this year, it is receiving its first, must-see-now domestic theatrical run at the IFC Center in New York. A midnight movie in lysergic spirit and vibe, this was a film made for late-night screening and screaming.
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She finds a powder compact music box which, when opened, plays the now-familiar House leitmotif. At the same time, a piano downstairs calls out to her musically-oriented friend Melody. After briefly studying the sheet music, Melody begins to play the leitmotif as well. Gorgeous, music box still open, watches as her reflection turns into her aunt’s, whose face twists into a terrified scream before the mirror shatters.
Gorgeous enlists six of her friends as accompaniment, a giggling retinue of nymphs fancifully named Sweet, Melody, Fantasy, Prof, Mac and Kung Fu. Traveling by train, wheels and foot, they arrive at an isolated house, where the aunt, who’s in a wheelchair (if not for long!), lives with her white cat, whose eyes beam out ominous green sparks and who has been immortalized in artwork throughout the house. Upstairs in the house, Kung Fu and Prof find Gorgeous wearing a bridal gown, who then reveals her aunt's diary to them.
The film, which received generally negative reviews, was a box office hit in Japan. After being widely released in North America in 2009 and 2010, it was met with more favorable response and has since gained a cult following. “This is my great grandmother, Maggie Hundley Garrigus Porter, when she was 80," said Smith as she pointed to a photo from a book in the forum's collection. Enjoy large covered patio with mature trees in this one story 3 bedrooms/2 bathrooms home on 0.43 acres with a flex room that has a full bath that can be used an a study/office, mother in law suite or a maid’s quarters.
House was filmed on one of Toho’s largest sets, where Obayashi shot the film without a storyboard over a period of about two months. Snaps to reader Deanna, who tipped me off this this house — our first time capsule of 2014. It has been with the original owners since they built it — and it appears to have been impeccably maintained… clearly, it was carefully decorated, totally beloved. Deanna wrote, “This house looks like it hasn’t been touched since it was built in 1971. Mega thanks to listing agent Diana Gonzalez and real estate marketing firm CirclePix and photographer Matthew Wingate for permission to feature the photos.
Despite the protestations of the old guard, though, the movie was a hit, and in the ensuing decades, Obayashi’s esteem has only grown. It’s no coincidence that the music is so closely tied to the moods of the girls. House’s soundtrack had been finished a year before Obayashi shot the film, and when he found himself struggling to give effective verbal direction to the novice actresses, he played the soundtrack for them as they acted out the scenes. In “Constructing a House,” Obayashi mentions that the actresses “belonged to a younger generation that found it easier to express emotion through chords, melodies, and rhythms than through words.
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