House, The Beauty of Broken Things (Patreon)

House (1977) is a phantasmagoria of broken things. Actors who never acted, an experimental Writer/Director tasked to clone Jaws, and a menagerie of incomplete special effects all come together in one kaleidoscopic collage that shows off the beauty of the walking wounded. 

We are all broken. Scarred, incomplete, and damaged beyond repair all of us look out unto the world through the shattered glass that is our eyes. But shattered glass doesn't have to be a sign of disrepair. The pieces can be lifted, meticulously affixed to one another, formed into something greater, something beautiful. House, like us, is less like a movie and more like a work stained glass art.

Director Nobuhiko Obayashi was approached by Film Studio Toho, of Godzilla fame, to write a script that would clone the success of animal attack movies like Jaws and Tentacle. Obayashi handed a script to Toho so out there that no director at the studio would touch it for fear of ending their careers. Obayashi was eventually given permission to make the movie after Toho execs felt the need to branch out into more experimental film. The team behind House was largely made up of Obayashi’s contacts from his days as a television commercial director and friends and family of the crew. House has that perfect mixture of an absolutely bizarre script mixed with a ragtag production. Very Evil Dead. 

As is the fate of horror movies more generally, House was received poorly in Japan by critics, but loved commercial audiences. It would be decades before the film would see a wider release. House was picked up by Janus Films for a 2010 DVD release in the States. This marked a turning point for the film. American critics loved the movie and that success pushed it to become an international cult hit. 

House is a lot like us. We are at our best when we are open with ourselves as animate collages of injuries. House wasn’t a great movie in spite of these small fractures, it was because of them. Just as you and I are greater than the sum of each awkward memory and failed attempt. House, like the golden joinery of Kintsugi, is something beautiful because of its deeply flawed and broken history. A more polished, “HD Remaster” would spoil the effect of this cinematic Frankenstein. 

House looks at a world soaked with invisible, subsurface tensions. Children laugh and play while the ghosts of the atomic bomb boil up from the surface. Each character in House portrays an aspect of a whole. Our protagonists, Gorgeous, Kung-fu, Prof, Fantasy, Mac, Melody, and Sweet are each slivers of a whole person. The titular house is embodied by an agony that no atomized human slice could ever hold. Like a single human soul split into its constituent pieces, House reacts and reassembles a whole in the form of a monstrous Gorgeous. 

And isn’t that each of us? A monstrous Gorgeous waiting, aching to become whole again.