DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Halloween is one of my favorite times of year, cinematically speaking, as it gives me an excuse to watch lots of great old horror flicks at home, as well as plenty of options for big screen frights as well. While the AFI is getting its annual Halloween series started up this week, the best (and by far weirdest) option for this week is at E Street, where they’ll be showing this 1977 festival of psychedelic frights as this week’s entry in their midnight movie series.
House was the first feature from Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, a former commercial director who launched a prolific career with this film, making 37 features in the 31 years that followed. Yet none of those subsequent films has made quite the mark that House has, a semi-obscure cult mainstay that has had a sudden resurgence in screenings of late, in advance of a forthcoming Criterion DVD release.
Going just by the plot summary, this sounds like fairly standard horror fare. A teenage girl has a fight with her father about his intention to bring the woman he’s just introduced to her as her soon-to-be new stepmother with them on their summer vacation, so she writes a letter to a mysterious aunt she’s only met once, asking if her and her friends can come stay with her for the summer instead. After traveling to the middle of nowhere, and a walk through a creepy forest, they find that she lives in a run-down mansion. One girl finds a severed head down a well, and we’re off and running with murder and mayhem. But that simple summary really can’t prepare you for the psychedelic trippiness of this film, which shows the director’s background in Japanese commercials via comically breakneck pacing and eye-popping Technicolor visuals. Obayashi incorporates blatantly artificial matte backdrops, as well as soap-opera acting laughably bad effects: you can practically see the hoses spurting blood that looks more like red-dyed water than any actual bodily fluid. The whole thing is just so jaw-droppingly weird that you’re likely to walk out wondering if any of it even happened.
View the trailer.
Friday and Saturday at midnight at E Street.
