31 Days of Feminist Horror Films: HOUSE
A feminine phantasmagoria, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s HOUSE uses meta-narrative, fairytale allusion, and surreal imagery alongside the classic horror trope of a bunch of teenage girls left alone in an old dark house to create a truly singular cinematic experience. Using the homestead as the ultimate symbol of female power and dominance, HOUSE explores female desire through the lens of increasingly bizarre supernatural happenings, but also never loses its light, effervescent touch — even when the blood starts flowing, there’s a pervasive playful spirit in this movie that’s absent from most other horror films. Through this juxtaposition of girlish glee with unexplainable, gory phenomena, HOUSE ends up commenting on the ways we craft female narratives and female characters throughout the entire genre of horror.
Like SUSPIRIA, also released in 1977, HOUSE is the rare horror film that features almost exclusively women — and the men that are present in the film are constant disappointments, their failures often played for comedic effect as the women in the story take care of business entirely on their own. HOUSE begins like a classic fairytale: Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) is devastated when her father (Saho Sasazaw) brings home a new stepmother (Haruko Wanibuch) he’s been secretly romancing and married — not only does this ruin their plans for a summer vacation, but it feels like a betrayal of their (perhaps too close) relationship since the death of Gorgeous’ mother. She’s definitely channeling Electra when she talks to a photo of her dead mother, seeking guidance and coursing with jealousy — this soul-searching eventually leads Gorgeous to write to her Auntie (Yōko Minamida) who agrees to let Gorgeous and her friends visit for summer vacation.
And what a crew it is: Gorgeous’ squad of seven beautiful besties includes the athletic Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo), hyper-intelligent Prof (Ai Matubara), the inexplicably reasonable Fantasy (Kumiko Oba), talented Melody (Eriko Tanaka), a very hungry Mac (Mieko Sato), and diminutive Sweet (Masayo Miyako.) The women of HOUSE adhere to their stereotyped roles throughout the film, but as the meta elements of the film’s construction suggest, HOUSE is also commenting on the roles we assign to women in horror — the slut, the virgin, the busybody, etc. By making these stereotypes an essential part of HOUSE’s story, the film is able to provide a comedic commentary on the how women transmute identities based on the situation they’re in — on a given Tuesday, you might be feeling very Mac with a little bit of Kung Fu, but on Thursday, you might be channeling Prof and Fantasy more fully. This squad of seven sisters is full of pep and joy as they set out for Auntie’s house, traveling through the woods together to find her decrepit home in the countryside, and all the women become Red Riding Hoods, destined to find danger even if they weren’t seeking it out.
Once the women arrive at Auntie’s old dark house (complete with an omnipresent white witch cat, Blanche!) they immediately fall into their designated roles, serving as industrious Cinderellas all trying to bring life back into Auntie’s isolated existence — and like Cinderella, they must contend with mice, a spooky old well, and a mountain of chores. But they’re certainly a lot more well dressed than that ol’ bag: throughout HOUSE, the aesthetic experience of being a woman is celebrated via a focus on fashion and styling, with the changing outfits of the girls making them superheroines of sorts, ready to fight anything that comes their way. And their shifting looks provide commentary on the way we fetishize female characters, dressing them up in new outfits to suit our fickle, prurient needs. But the clothing choices themselves — oversized pastel jumpers, high-waisted shorts with wide legs, blouses that combine florals and geometric patterns — are clearly what the women have chosen to wear, and feel comfortable in, not at all dictated by the male gaze.
Through this meta-awareness of how we’ve stereotype female characters via their names and clothing choices, HOUSE actually allows its leads to become empowered — because they’re existing within rigid stereotypes already, the film doesn’t have to establish their roles, and the girls are then able to find freedom within their characters to be playful. The meta elements throughout HOUSE draw attention to the fact that Obayashi is playing with the form of film overall: spectacular Technicolor matte paintings, motion and editing techniques that intentionally bring attention to themselves, and several montages of a film-within-a-film consistently remind the audience that they’re watching a film, not anything close to real life, and thus, HOUSE provides a sort of commentary on the classic idea of “little girls left alone in the woods” and what that represents within the horror genre on the whole.
HOUSE turns into an outright horror film when poor Mac becomes the first to die, her sentient severed head announcing its existence by biting Fantasy’s ass. This breaks up the static pleasure the women were finding in the mundanity of domestic tasks — through these household rituals, the girls bond, especially since every woman is contributing an equal amount of work, and there are no men around to not pull their weight. We learn of Auntie’s sinister background when she uses the refrigerator (an oft-used symbol of female oppression in genre film) as a portal to a supernatural dinner where she dines on a severed hand and potions poured into cocktail glasses — as Gorgeous later tells us, Auntie’s really been dead all along, but “she wanted to be married so badly, her body stayed alive after death.”
Gorgeous recognizes the spooky history of Auntie’s home when she begins applying orange lipstick in front of a vanity, becoming the story’s own sinister Snow White — Gorgeous transmutes through various feminine personas including her mother and Auntie in a rose-tinted fantasy sequence (there’s certainly no shortage of hot pink throughout the film) before becoming a pristine ghostly geisha, dressed in an ornate robe, its fabric a blinding shade of virginal white. Sweet is soon killed by toppling mattresses, and Melody is devoured by the home’s piano — with three girls consumed by HOUSE, it’s up to Fantasy, Kung Fu, and Prof to save themselves and hopefully Gorgeous too. A pink-tinged flashback silent film-themed flashback from Auntie’s diary (one of the essential symbols of female secret-keeping) reveals that she grew so lonely in waiting for her beloved to return from WWII that she died, and her spirit now possesses the house, eating any unwed young women who dare to enter. And that’s when things get really crazy.
HOUSE uses experimental techniques and bizarre imagery throughout to create a truly unique palette for a horror fairytale — we see giant female limbs float through space, a psychedelic look at the afterlife, and a brightly colored pop art approach to horror as the film builds towards its totally bananas climax. The house and its domestic objects begin hurling themselves at the surviving girls, who are naive to the fact that Gorgeous has been corrupted by its influence — how could their friend turn evil so easily? They fight back against Auntie’s spirit, and for a moment, seem victorious — especially as a mural of Blanche spews blood from its mouth after attacked by a now-dead Kung Fu’s sentient legs, and Gorgeous’ immaculate white robe/bridal gown is drenched in a fountain of fresh blood, with both images serving as symbolic destructions of female purity through blood. But the floor opens up (the House itself is of course full of vaginal openings throughout the film) and Prof falls into the amniotic abyss where she’s stripped nude and consumed by the house in a sort of reverse birth.
Meanwhile, men who would be saviors of the girls are instead so occupied with the slapstick of their own dumb lives that they fully fail in coming to the girls’ aid, and are instead literally turned into piles of bananas, a joke so on-the-nose that it comes back around to being brilliant. Fantasy, the lone survivor aside from Gorgeous, finds her friend, but she’s too far gone — Fantasy succumbs to the sinister influence of Gorgeous, who’s now presented like the holy virgin in a Renaissance painting, one breast exposed while Fantasy cowers at the other, her eyes glowing green with the madness the house carries. The house has become symbolic of Gorgeous’ new absolute power, and she ultimately uses it for revenge against her wicked stepmother, turning the woman into flames just after telling her that the spirits of the other girls “wake up when they’re hungry.” Gorgeous’ obsession with being the only woman in her father’s life has turned her into a cruel angel of death, and now, she’ll be the one devouring any unmarried girls who dare invade her domain.
HOUSE is an incredible feminine nightmare, and its particular brand of orgiastic horror lunacy demands to be experienced firsthand. Through its exclusive focus on women, it explores the inherent witchiness of female intuition, storytelling, and styling, and how these things are passed from one generation of women to the next. The women of HOUSE strive to make a sacred feminine space out of Auntie’s house, but problems created by men — one who never came back from WWII and another who had the audacity to marry a younger woman — prevent them from doing so. Through vivid primary colors, lithe camera movement, and soft lighting, HOUSE becomes an immersive experience, one that celebrates traditionally feminine aesthetic values like well-made clothing, arresting florals, and the mysteries of a house filled with only women and their belongings. And HOUSE too glorifies female friendship with tons of love shared between the core six girls — even though Gorgeous eventually betrays her best gals due to jealousy over her father’s new marriage, she’s also doomed to spend eternity alone with their spirits, missing all of the laughter and joie de vivre that their actual presences brought.
HOUSE is a horror film that delights in the specifics of the female experience, merging the madcap mise-en-scene of its scenarios with larger thematic ideas that recall classic fairytales, Japanese folklore, and the legacy of trauma that’s carried in the blood. HOUSE has a high body count, but it’s still a remarkably light horror film, one revels in the natural charm of observing women allowed to do their thing, free from the influence of men. By embracing and playing with stereotypes and tropes regarding “women in horror” head-on, HOUSE ends up providing a smart counterpoint to the lazy writing that affects the genre to this day. But most of all, HOUSE pays tribute to the power of female friendship: warts, witch cats, and all.
