House – Q&A with Director Nobuhiko Obayashi

Hoping for something wild to electrify a Japanese cinema that had hit the doldrums, Toho gave newcomer Nobuhiko Obayashi free reign to make something no one had seen before. And he did. Ostensibly a horror film about a girl who brings her friends to her aunt’s house, only to see them killed, one by one, by possessed household furniture and appliances, House often plunges into parody, while also demonstrating all the tricks that were possible with celluloid which we in the digital age have forgotten. Obayashi’s debut film vigorously proclaimed his name at home and eventually abroad, but it was also a marvelous sign of what was to come.