Seeing 'House' in 35mm!

A poster for House (1977) at the Shin Bungeiza. Photo by Brett Homenick.

On Friday, March 6, I returned to the Shin Bungeiza theater for a screening of House (1977), the infamous pseudo-horror movie directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. The screening was in 35mm, and it was my second time to see it this way. Even though it is well-regarded in the West, largely due to the fact that it's been available through the Criterion Collection for years, I have my own thoughts.

I first saw House long before it had any kind of reputation outside Japan. I bought an unsubtitled bootleg in 2002, which I ordered just because I knew it was a "Toho horror movie" from the '70s. I watched maybe a third of it, but it was giving me none of what I was looking for in such a flick, so I remember turning it off after a while, figuring I'd finish it later. (I never did.)

At the end of 2010, I picked up the Criterion DVD and gave it a proper viewing for the first time. At the time, I thought of it as weirdness for its own sake and not much else. I also found the experience a bit depressing, as it really seemed to end the production of Showa-era genre films with a whimper. Then, in July 2016, I caught a screening of it in Japan and liked it a bit better than I had before, I guess. Even though I no longer despised it the way I used to, I still didn't think its reputation in the West was deserved.

With Prof in July 2016.

So that's where things stood when I went into screening. I more or less expected to have a repeat of my 2016 experience, in other words, thinking the movie was OK but overrated. Unfortunately, my opinion is a bit closer to where it was in 2010 but perhaps not quite as negative.

I was more or less onboard with the movie in the first half, but the directionless chaos of the second half wore me out. Absurdity is fine in movies, but, when it just meanders about in random ways, I lose interest after a while. I also got the sense the filmmakers thought they were being much more clever than they actually were, which is always annoying.

Believe it or not, my favorite parts of the movie had nothing to do with its overhyped weirdness. There were wistful shots in the film that, for lack of a better word, evoked a sense of nostalgia. I found myself wishing I were watching that movie instead of this one. Sometimes you don't need singing cats or dancing skeletons to make a good movie.

After the screening, there was a Q&A with a film critic, but, as we have learned from the positive reviews of this movie in the West, "one has to dismiss everything they know about film criticism" when reviewing House, and "the 'rules' of film criticism are almost impossible to apply to it," so I'm not sure what they were going for there.