AndrewBloom
8/10 2 years ago
[8.0/10] I love *House* half-ironically and half-sincerely. The ironic half is a reaction to the campy and the comically bizarre choices at the center of the film. And the sincere half is the way the film uses that same element of the bizarre, and some other outre choices, to craft a genuinely frightening and unnerving ghost story. The parts are inextricable from one another, and in some ways, give the movie its power -- the way it steadily criss-crosses the line between the ridiculous and the terrifying.
Nothing represents the dichotomy better than the death of Melody, the most musically-inclined of the young girls trapped in the titular haunted house, all named after some key characteristic. In one of the film’s more poetic deaths, she is drawn to the family piano to play a haunting melody, the same one that repeats nigh-endlessly in the film’s score, until the compulsion leads to her doom.
The musical instrument gobbles her up. And on the one hand, it’s absurd. A skeleton boogies along to her entranced playing. Colorful, jagged lines frame the screen like an old comic book exclamation as she’s being chowed down upon. The young actress overemotes her distress. Chroma keyed snippets of her person float across the screen, laughing or dancing or otherwise going wild. There’s an inherent silliness to it, that can’t help but make you chuckle, or at least cock your head, at the goofiness of it all.
And yet, while she’s still in thrall to this malevolent spirit, Melody looks down at her hands after playing and realizes her fingers have been severed and giggles in amusement in a creepy fashion. She screams when the lid slams down and amputates her hand. There’s genuine terror when the keys lift up and sink their would-be teeth onto her torso, as her legs kick like defenseless prey caught in the mouth of a predator. Her limbs writhe and flail out of the guts of the instrument, crying for help in a cacophony of screams and discordant notes. It is downright disturbing, to see someone dismembered and mentally scrambled by this ghastly present.
The two parts of the sequence are inseparable. There’s no “just watching the goofy parts” or “just watching the scary parts”. The ridiculous turns into the terrifying and back into the ridiculous again, and so on and so on. It keeps the viewer on their back foot, never sure whether to laugh or recoil, ultimately making them more vulnerable to the movie’s aims than if it had tried to go straight in either direction.
Granted, some of the more goofy elements don’t lend quite as much to the film’s creative purposes. God help me with the scenes featuring Mr. Togo, the teacher at the young girls’ school whom Fantasy, the film’s secondary lead, harbors a crush on. While the schoolgirls are heading off to the countryside to this house or being tortured by its spirit, Togo proceeds through a comedy of errors that end with him falling down the stairs into a bucket, eating noodles in a traffic jam with a bear, and getting turned into bananas. The physical comedy and dada-ist nonsense isn’t particularly funny, mostly inducing head-scratches in the subplot’s distraction from the main event.
Even there, though, his flailing misadventures serve the movie’s themes. The core of the ghost story centers on Gorgeous, the protagonist girl known for her beauty and vanity, and the aunt who invited the young woman and her friends to stay at her abode for the summer. The big twist is that the aunt died years ago. But she’d remained solitary and lonely for years. Her fiance’s plane went down in World War II, but she was convinced that he would return someday. And in the long fruitless wait, she eventually became this ghastly spirit, preying on young girls who represent the hope and innocence she herself once harbored. As a friend pointed out, there’s a parallel between the Auntie’s futile wait for her betrothed to come home and Fantasy’s dream of her inept “knight in shining armor” coming to save them.
Even then, the comedy of those interludes is some mix of the strange and the downright dumb, and it’s far from the film’s only rootless peculiarity. The girls spend the bulk of the film’s first act calling their friend, Mac, a fat pig despite the fact that she’s a lithe young woman who mostly seems to want to eat a watermelon? Kung Fu, the most athletic and resourceful girl, uses martial arts kicks to defeat various supernatural obstacles like a cartoon character. Gorgeous’ prospective stepmom seems to have wind blowing in her face no matter what direction she faces, with a breeze that affects no one else. There’s an outsized, almost cartoonish quality to many parts of the film.
That extends to the more formal choices as well. The direction and editing veers into downright schizophrenic at times. There are dizzyingly rapid jumps between shots, questionable superimposed images that bounce across the main focus, a frantic fruit salad of every framing and composition choice imaginable tossed together all at once, and some hard cuts that give the audience no chance to transition from one moment to the next. In other contexts, it could be taken as *The Room*-level amateurism given the cacophony of approaches seemingly used at the same time.
Only, it serves the ends of a horror film. While some of these creative decisions elicit chuckles or confused looks, they constantly keep the audience off-balance. They put us in the same place as the girls, experiencing something bewildering and unknowable. So when the film’s best scares come into play -- a severed head belching fluids, a poor girl trapped in a clock as the blood fills the window, Gorgeous literally and figuratively shattered by visions of her aunt and deceased mother -- the horror can still overwhelm, still grab the audience in the dream logic of this phantasmagoria.
The surrealism fuels both the horror and the humor, blending the silliness of a group of young women goofing off and taking patently spooky things in stride, with the abject panic and gruesomeness as they gradually realize their predicament and are dragged down, one-by-one, into the maw of unspent youth and unfulfilled hope this haunted house represents. *House* is insane, a total trip, and worth it for the absurdity alone in some places. But it’s also an effective horror film because of the way it breaks all the rules for movie-making. The absurd joys and legitimate impact of the film are one and the same, a melange of tone and styles that results in something sui generis. It is a ghost story told like none other: silly, scary, and unhinged, finding its success in those pretzel logic spaces that film can deliver like nothing else.
