2066 – Hausu (1977 movie)

House (Japanese: ハウス, HepburnHausu) is a 1977 Japanese experimental comedy horror film directed and produced by Nobuhiko Obayashi. It stars mostly amateur actors, with only Kimiko Ikegami and Yōko Minamida having any notable previous acting experience. It is about a schoolgirl traveling with her six classmates to her ailing aunt’s country home, where they come face to face with supernatural events as the girls are, one by one, devoured by the home.”(wiki)

After writing about Josephine Decker’s last movie – The Sky is Everywhere and mentioning in passing the Japanese horror cult movie House – known as Hausu for all its fans (i feel indebted here to the artist-in-residence at Utopiana/Geneva that introduced me to this wonderful and delightful movie a few years ago). If you did not see it yet, watch it, it is a must! Needless to say I feel a lot of welcome aesthetic kinship here (to Decker’s recent movie), including hints of visual virtuosity and lack of inhibitions about employing varied animation techniques.

I am happy to recommend this piece of utter playfulness and I cannot express my sincere appreciation to everyone who participates in such cinematic transmedia explorations, especially weirdly horrific ones.

Without giving too much away, this is not a very ‘Japanese’ horror, none of the spirits, none of the yokai appear, or at least when they appear they seem perfectly Europeanized. That being said there is a lot of animation – parts frolicking around and objects having an agency of their own. As I have recently started reading an important new book by Sonam Kachru about other lives and different modes of being (including dreaming one) – inspired by a well-known Buddhist philosophy text from the V century (the Twenty Verses of Vasubandhu), I find a certain sensitivity here or disponibility to include more than just the waking life or just the ‘normative’ mindedness or normal touch/feel of what is considered typical of (human) lives and recognize the importance of thinking with very different and alongside less-than or more-than human creatures from very different (habitats) worlds than ours (such as the Buddhist hell worlds or the hungry ghosts – in Vasubandhu’s key thought experiments). I find this 1977 movie very helpful in imagining or including the life of quite different creatures (than ourselves) that stray from ‘our’ world and get housed in this delightful movie using these varied techniques.

On one side it is an anti-horror movie and on the other it shows how stuck we are in adopting the same settings or horror aestethics . The experimental wacky way in which it treats horror even body horror is unique – there is something both cartoonish, schematic, a touch of anime and also avantgarde and even ill-mannered dark psychedelia to it. After beheading human heads bite you in the ass, cats are fierce growling spirits with laser eyes, pianos are slaughterhouse machines. Overall it is a genre-defying movie in a category all of its own.

It is both colorful, baroque, gory, wonderfully kitschy and completely exaggerated screwball and gruesome at the same time. It is like a Grand Guignol turn of the 1900 decadent spectacle transformed into a movie. It goes to the origins of cinema in freak shows and gore theatres and also points to its future as a bastardized FX carnival of souls.

imdb Hausu

2018 – Brand New Cherry Flavor (2021)

Brand New Cherry Flavor is an American horror drama streaming television limited series created by Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion, based on the novel of the same name by Todd Grimson. 

dark, zany and shape shifting

Probably my favorite series of the last few years and one of the best Netflix experiences of the early 21 century. It might come as no surprise that this is not the usual science fiction pean – nor a radically new expression of our times, but a more modest retro tribute to 1990s body genre cinema. Not many horrors nowadays can provide such an enticing mix of grotesqueries, artificiality, comedy, x-ploitation with such panache!

It also stars what might turn out to be one of the most amazing young actresses of these end-times: Canadian-American Rosa Salazar. Salazar channels both bare knuckles, no frills, to the bitter end attitude with everything that we might regard as going-down-the-drain/doomer/crap-I-did-it-again black hole we find ourselves in.

Plenty of good, recent lists of movies take on the celeb path to destruction-perdition (or monstrous transformation into something else). The nascent, young female horror movie director turns out to be the worst nightmare of its sleazeball, libidinous, profiteering male producers or hapless boyfriends and arrogant actors. Hollywood/LA is since (1950) Sunset Boulevard the festering noir Babylon of cinematography, but also a vice-den full of vengeful aging yet still respledent and haunting superstars. Recent horrors have been turning a lot of these powerful early examples on their head somehow. In Starry Eyes – directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, a young starlet (Alexandra Essoe) gets targeted by the (unsurprisingly demonic) Hollywood elite and suffers the most horrific and non-beatific shapeshifting.

there is no exit only the kitchen sink

Becoming a female star or a female director is almost like a satanist ritual or a serial killer praxis. In I blame society (2020) writer/director Gillian Wallace Horvat, uses furious irony to lacerate an omnipresent and condescending patriarchal ‘bro’ culture, too secure (and dumb) to notice how it is producing its own nemesis. A male world full of obnoxious fantasies that keeps denying female authors/directors all due recognition, respect etc. +authorship. This is not rotten to the core, it is just insufferable and blind. That is why it is swallowing the allergic sandwich, the poisoned hook, or gets butchered or ritually maimed on its own self-congratulating altar. Most of the time you will learn to root for the female director no matter what – since the situation as we know and knew even before MeeToo is pretty dire. Method acting in a male-dominated cinematic world imposes more and more bizarre contortions and transformations that never end well or with a tadah- a happy ending.

the sweltering apartment jungle

Back to Brand New Cherry Flavor – where Lisa N. Nova (Rosa Salazar) – a young horror film director enters a netherworld of sex magick, ruthless body snatching, ancient Amazonian lore, witchcraft infused transformative vendetta with plenty of unsuspected zombie voodoo/hoodoo spells. There are newborn kittens everywhere getting vomited and there is a vine growing from the ceiling of a building and hallucinatory brain worms are harvested from its pollen. All this and more awaits the unsuspecting traveler. The horrific – in Linda William’s 1991 body genre’s critical essay (melodrama, porn, horror) usually gets the ‘gross’ label attached, where blamed bodily excess on-screen somehow lets viewers be affected in the most sensationalistic and visceral ways, making detachment impossible and affects hard to deny or to refuse. One of the repeating patterns is Lisa N. Nova’s both horrific and completely ridiculous vomiting live blind kittens that usually get snatched right away. There is this sensation that everything averted might turn out to be even more horrific. When she tries to rewrite the kitten-birthing pact, her body manages to reroute the process. Processes (magical or not) have a life of their own. Kittens start exiting other parts of her body – this is all happening under the most plausible, bodily exhausting, and sticky embarrassing situations.

the debt of kittens

The movie is both eerie, both dark and colorful (cherry flavored?!) at the same time. There is this boring cliche of horror wearing its awfully drab garment proudly – full of dry red, black blood, dressed in mourning colors and hues. Brand New Cherry Flavor is anything but monochrome. In fact, it is best described as being luxuriant. It luxuriates (plot-wise also) with jungle entanglements plants and animals.

patching and changing skins

Although tarantulas and orchids have a long history in noir movies and horror trash, they did not get joined as a related (imported) ecosystem of horrors. This I find the greatest addition of BNCF to the Sunset Boulevard haunted decaying canon of silent star era mansions. It is the undeniable fact that that there might be a hothouse out there, full of exotics and a spirit world in the basement. A tropical taxonomy of non-typical growth amidst perfect preened lawns and green acres. The whole series and its characters are almost like generating their own tendrils, acting out their darkly vitalistic nature, like infesting, seductive invasive species brought onboard some crates of lingering, unwatched movie copies that got buried under production hell. Suffice to say music is also right on top.

another kind of spa

imdb

1926 – No Longer Human manga by Junji Ito based on Osamu Dazai novel (+ Black Illumination by Eugene Thacker)

No Longer Human manga (Goodreads)

Hardcover, 616 pages

Published December 17th 2019 by VIZ Media

Philosopher Eugene Thacker (In the Dust of this Planet, The Global Genome, After Life, Biomedia, Tentacles Longer Than Night and many more) wrote in 2016 for The Japan Times a series of Black Illumination introductory (5 min) texts. They are behind a paywall, but saving them in Pocket you can actually read them all. His investigation of Japanese modernist estrangement, inhumanism and existential & cosmic (both somehow gazing into each other) pessimism is both brief, synthetic without spoiling the potential of these Japanese authors mangakas, philosophers, mad suicidal writers (Junji Ito, Keiji Nishitani, Osamu Dazai, Haruo Sato) for limitless collapse and vacuousness. In the words of my friend Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu – Junji Ito won’t probably topple this one manga, it goes into regions far darker than those populated by Spirals and ambling arthropod sharks.

Black Illumination: the disqualified life of Osamu Dazai

Black illumination: the unhuman world of Junji Ito

Black Illumination: Haruo Sato’s lush, gloomy landscapes

Black Illumination: the abyss of Keiji Nishitani