A teenager's disembodied floating head leaps out of a water well and bites another teenager directly on her buttocks, with the camera holding for at least three full seconds on the whole frames image, like appreciating a work of art.
This is a Criterion Collection film.
With script assistance by an eleven year old girl (just adding to my theory that all children are soft psychos until social rules get a hold of them), HAUSU is literally unlike any other movie you have or will ever see. So much so in fact that attempting to use human typed words to convey the utter experience of it all is a quest in futility, but that’s really the fun part for me, so we’ll go ahead and wing it for the best try I’ve got in me.
The plot itself is not much. Seven teenage girls (Gorgeous, Prof, Melody, Kung Fu, Mac, Sweet, and Fantasy - yup) travel to the country to stay at Main Girl’s Aunt’s home, so Main Girl can avoid her new step-mom. Like every other horror movie ever made, going to any new house is obviously a guaranteed death sentence (also, ironically, leaving the house in every horror movie is also a death sentence - those subtextual genre themes get you no matter where you turn, huh?), so I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to let you know that things go very poorly for our heroines. My job in this essay though is to try and convince you of my personal belief, that this movie rules so hard that it borderline justifies the very medium of film as a whole. That Tarkovsky’s quote that “films are a mosaic made of time” is especially true in this visual tale where a piano eats a girls hands, a fat schlub turns into a pile of bananas, a house fills to the brim with menstrual blood, and it’s all some of the funniest things you’ve ever seen in one of the creepiest movies you will ever watch. A friend once described it as “a Japanese Evil Dead,” and I’ll admit that’s the quickest elevator pitch definition I’ve found so far. And Evil Dead is good, but we’re not talking about Evil Dead right now, we’re talking about Hausu.
And I think Hausu is also very good. But those two cinematic measurements are mere subjectivity - I think Hausu rules, you might want to beat me up after wasting 90 minutes of your night and visiting you with a lifetime of watermelon eyeball teeth nightmares. But it’s more than just the pure organized queued up assault of One Weird Thing After Another, as Evil Dead & Hausu do have in spades. There are aspects of the horror here that are only able to be conveyed by the act of film, and editing. This enters into the actual point I began - what is it about Hausu that not only lends itself to film, but in fact would be lost if it were not a film?
First and foremost, is the challenge of the Viewer’s Imagination. That old chestnut - “leave the monster off the screen, we’ll just let the audience’s imagination do the work for us” - does in fact work like gangbusters most of the time, if we’re dealing with one monster. A shark, a xenomorph, a dream murderer, a drowned kid who can’t die, a werewolf, dracula, whatever. What do you do when the monster is the house? You have nowhere to hide, but also the director can’t hide anything. But here you have the caveat, perhaps the asterisk, to the “Hidden Monster” trick - what you might call The Carpenter Thing Clause - “what if we made a monster that was so goddamn gnarly that we came up with something the audience never could? That’s our job, let’s act like we’re getting paid for it.” Hausu is that in spades, co-written by an 11 year old girl who doesn’t yet know what you “can’t do” in a movie. It is a visual feast, and you will leave the theater disappointed by other horror movies that don’t try half as hard. I’m sorry, I know, I’m cursing you. Like Nicole Kidman always says, “We come to the movies to get absolutely blown-out diaper-dump scared while a piano eats a screaming teenage girl alive.”
The question, again, though, is why is it a movie? I would submit that it has to be a movie, in order to get everything out of it. In order to squeeze every ounce of creativity that is being visited upon you.
Horror is obviously a thing in novel form (shoutout to my main man Poe) but not this story. You could not merely read about the spindly handicapped woman climbing the rafters and breaking the 4th wall to threaten you with eye contact before she destroyed these children - if she is in the book, she is in the book. The characters may not be safe, but you always are. You could threaten an audience in a play, sure! You could even come out of the stage and enter the seats - horrifying in any context! Even Oklahoma! - but you still could not edit a play, it is only forward motion. Movies are rewound, sound is rewound, your eyes are not your eyes, the camera owns those eyes. “I don’t want to look at that” - too bad you are looking at it! It is a full package.
Furthermore, the act of layering audio and visual over each other, which is purely a cinematic tool. And the montage of the old woman’s life before the war, done play-by-play commentary style with the girls doing voiceover - to convey how absolutely creepy this women’s life was that she’s fiendishly and horrifically preserving, voiced over by 7 girls who mention that the nuclear bomb mushroom cloud “looks like cotton candy” (which would be like saying 47 9/11 buildings “looked like a banana peeling itself”) which only just reinforces how these girls are oblivious and out of their depth. You can do both of these things simultaneously. You cannot simultaneously read things that are happening simultaneously. I know, because I’ve read the books that have tried (I read William Faulkner, and Ulysses & Finnegans Wake, so you don’t have to - you’re welcome, you’re right, I am a hero).
There are, of course, innumerous movie & non-movie examples of the horrors that this film uses as its horrors. Greatest hits, like “cultural (and personal) preservation is inherently creepy,” the difference between love & obsession, the fear of aging, the fear of maturing from girlhood into womanhood - but none of those other lesser mediums can do that with the tools of cinema - the act of footage being played in reverse to add to the nausea of her delusion of the youth she lost, to have a character be eaten alive by a grandfather clock full of teeth, or the visual metaphor of the floating legs of a woman who’s been chopped in half still kung-fu-ing across the room to karate kick a painting of an evil white cat & the house fills to the roof with menstrual blood. Such subtle subtext. You can convey all that in words (in fact, I just did, high five me), but the passage of time, which passes through each verb or adjective or adverb or whatever, that only elongates the experience of the horror, which is a factual matter of diminishing returns. If every word to describe a scene takes another tenth of a second, it will be surpassed when 6 frames give you the most unhinged and hilarious visual fever dream you’ve ever seen in 6/24ths of a second running in reverse. It’s not like you can’t make a novelization of Hausu, but why would you? It already existed first in its greatest and final Akira form.
There are books that must be books (good luck making a good TV or movie version of Gravity’s Rainbow), there are shows that must be shows, but there are also movies that can only be movies. And in fact we are a better world for having movies, and Hausu is my Exhibit B for that fact, for the entire medium of films as a whole (behind only Godzilla, which is literally the reason 60 foot theater screens were ever invented - there is no “book version” of Godzilla, except Moby Dick, the only novel about fighting a Kaiju in the Canon of Western Literature there will ever be, because there will never be another Melville, don’t @ me). The same is to be said with Hausu. There are visual gags & horrors that would be lost if it was not filmed. Editing and color bleaching and images that you could describe in a book, but why would you?
There are many other worlds where HAUSU still exists - as any form, a poem, a screenplay, a painting, a post-it note flip book - but the best of all possible worlds is ours, this one, where this film exists, as a film.
