spooky capsule reviews

house, lovecraft reanimated

House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)

There are a few films my dog has physically tried to prevent me from watching and House is one of them. I assume that he views it as a form of feline propaganda. Joke’s on him as the cat in this movie definitely seems to be evil, but I guess maybe he envies it its witchy powers. But I took advantage of his fear of thunderstorms to get through the first third of this and when I finished it he seemed to have given up the fight.

Anyway. House is a movie about a girl named Gorgeous who, enraged by her father’s decision to remarry, goes to stay with her aunt in the country and brings six of her friends with her. Then the aunt’s house starts to eat them because the aunt, whose fiance died before they married, is now a vengeful ghost. That does not really even slightly describe what it is like to watch House, a movie that is well and truly wall-to-wall insanity.¹ I’m not really sure House is a movie you can “review.”² (A brief Google investigation indicates Roger Ebert didn’t even try.) You are either going to be charmed into rolling with it or you will experience one of the worst ninety-plus minute stretches of your life. My own track record with this kind of anarchic film is very spotty; I believe people when they go on about what a good time Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1977) is, but I, personally, did not have a good time watching it.

House is another story. It is very fun, mostly,³ and while its chaos level is high, there are emotional qualities that mean the movie hangs together if you are watching it sympathetically. There’s an emotional resonance between Gorgeous’s anger at her father’s ability to move on and her aunt’s choice to become a ghost that devours young girls so that she can continue to wait for her fiancé, who died in World War II. But the movie doesn’t overplay this connection, except to show that the scene in which Gorgeous is “eaten” by the house feels less like her being overcome by something and more like her giving in. This deeper emotional quality, like the ways in which this movie is clearly commenting on Japan’s role in World War II and on the atomic bomb, keeps House from feeling like it’s just craziness for the sake of being crazy. This stuff is all there if you want it and if you don’t want it, a pair of disembodied legs kicking a painting of an evil cat is also there.

House does feel like watching a movie made by a child, with its goofy editing, its deliberately unconvincing special effects, and also the specific kinds of fears that this movie taps into⁴ such as “what if a piano ate my fingers” or “what if somebody became bananas.” What if there were a magic cat… and it was not on my side?⁵

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The Call of the Friend (JaeHoon Choi, tr. Janet Hong, 2025)
Alien Gods (Lee Suhyeon, tr. Anton Hur, 2025)
Come Down to a Lower Place (Yi Seoyoung, tr. Janet Hong, 2025)

These three books make up a series called “Lovecraft Reanimated”; as the title suggests, they are all riffs on the Lovecraft mythos from different Korean writers. To skip to the takeaway—they didn’t quite work for me, but if you like reading Lovecraft-inspired writing, I think they are worth a look. The most truly “Lovecraft” in feel is The Call of the Friend, a graphic novel about a boy whose sister dies and who then retreats into darkness. The boy keeps visiting the friend, out of what seems like loyalty but is perhaps something else. It is “Lovecraft” to me in a way the others are not primarily because the most basic relationship here is friendship, not romantic love.

Come Down to a Lower Place is genuinely somewhat nauseating, taking the vague gynecological qualities inherent in an idea like “evil cosmic squid-type thing” and bringing it all the way to the front. A woman has some kind of gynecological problem that means her vagina smells very bad, but doctors have done the requisite tests and nothing is wrong with her. She is doing work on a building that has some kind of a problem that means the basement smells bad. The problem with the building is below the foundation, but the building management stresses to her, repeatedly, that all they want her to do is add another layer of concrete to the floor. Under no circumstances is she to drill through the floor and try to figure out the underlying problem. But that offends the woman’s professional sensibilities. Shouldn’t she just… drill a hole in the floor and find out what is actually going on? Even if she’s not supposed to?

Also, why is the bad smell in the basement so… familiar?

(You can probably guess what happens from here.)

Alien Gods is the story that left the least impression on me: an anthropologist who is researching mudangs (Korean shamans, usually women) gets in over her head when she attends an exorcism of a haunted house. In many ways this story had the most ambitious concept, by trying to marry Lovecraft’s “cosmic horror” to Korean shamanistic practices, and it’s also the one where the overt similarities to Lovecraft are clearest, with its scientist main character who hears rats crawling around in her walls. But I felt like I spent most of this story’s duration crawling toward a foregone conclusion. You could say that this statement is also true of many Lovecraft stories, but in those, I think the conclusion is often literally foregone—in “The Thing on the Doorstep” we know the narrator has killed his friend, for instance:

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman—madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror—that thing on the doorstep.

We spend the rest of “The Thing on the Doorstep” reaching this point. The equivalent to this device in Alien Gods is this section of the opening five paragraphs:

So I guess it was pretty cynical of me to be attending goot rituals in the name of research toward my degree, but as for all the weird things that happened to me after … well, I found that even cynicism couldn’t protect me in the end.

But in the garbage dump of what are now my memories, the scene I do recall with the most fondness is one of myself standing dramatically in front of a ruined house as the sun slinks down to the horizon, and there stands an old woman next to me, armed with a fan and bells and disinfectant and a gas torch, the flaps of her hanbok robes fluttering in the wind.

That’s not really specific enough, I think.

Ultimately I don’t think these stories really stand on their own, not because they’re dependent on knowledge of Lovecraftian lore—they aren’t—but because they are not compelling enough stories unless you’re reading them because you’re into Lovecraft. But they’re all fun experiments if you take them as they are.

1. May we all deal with financial backers who have this energy:

In the late 1970s, after a string of hit commercials, producers from Toho urged him to try his hand at a feature. As Obayashi recalls, his producer told him that the studio was tired of losing money on completely comprehensible films, and was ready to let Obayashi produce his own completely incomprehensible script.

2. It is definitely the kind of movie that attracts people who like to write one-liners on Letterboxd.

3. I doooOOOoooOOO have a small problem with the (in)famous scene where the girl gets eaten by the piano, which at a certain point is very clearly a parody of a rape-y sex scene (see when the girl’s disembodied head says it’s “naughty”). This left a bad taste in my mouth, partly because it threw into relief how un-eroticized the rest of the movie’s horrors are.

For this reason, I also don’t love the Criterion essay on the movie, with its comment on “the obvious glee Obayashi takes in pushing the roricon (Lolita complex) richness of his subjects.” I don’t get that vibe from the movie and would find it unwatchable if I did.

4. mostly—see footnote three

5. NB: there’s a fun perfume named for this movie: “Only a Witch Cat,” from Pearfat. It is a seasonal scent and only available in October, and specifically only through the end of this week, but you can get decants from this place (or possibly you can get the scent from one of these places), so there is no need to rush things here. Pearfat also has a Cronenberg perfume I have not tried and cannot comment on.