Halloween Guide Highbrow Horror: J-horror

Being a serious fan of horror films these days isn’t easy. We’re annually presented with lowest-common-denominator sex ’n’ gore fests, cheap jump scares, and an endless piss stream of remakes and reboots of ’70s and ’80s flicks. Surely there’s a way to reconcile high cinematic standards with a notoriously lowbrow genre. Luckily, The A.V. Club has done the work for you, and just in time: Every week until Halloween, we’ll be offering a selection of films from various horror subgenres, with suggestions on where to start and the next steps to take from there. This week we’re exploring Japanese horror, going beyond the Ringus and Ju-Ons that inspired so many unnecessary American remakes to instead focus on cult classics and lesser-known films.

Where to start: House (1977)
Americans are often guilty of exoticizing Japan, perhaps unavoidably: We are often presented with only a small fraction of the country’s popular culture, out of the context of its social milieu at large, and are left to fill in the blanks ourselves. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House isn’t going to do those preconceptions any favors—it’s really fucking weird—but as a starting point for alternative viewing choices this Halloween, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more lysergic, or more entertaining film.

House centers around a young schoolgirl, Gorgeous, and her six similarly nicknamed friends. (Prof is the brains of the group, Melody is the musician, etc.) Gorgeous invites the gang to spend summer vacation at her spinster aunt’s mansion in the country, unaware that the house is alive and her relative is actually an evil spirit hellbent on using it to capture and eat unmarried girls.

It’s a simple premise, sure, except that the finished product plays like a fever dream a Japanese schoolgirl might have if she confused LSD for cough syrup. Having only previously worked on television commercials and short films, Obayashi—possibly because he was used to an audience with an attention span of no more than a few minutes—throws every camera trick and post-production effect imaginable at viewers. The result is a film filled with oddly timed transitions and dissolves, strange superimpositions, and a host of matte and collage effects. There’s always something happening in House, whether it’s a flashback sequence ending in a colorful, blossoming atomic mushroom cloud or a melon salesman turning into a skeleton for no discernible reason, causing another man to literally “go bananas” and transform into a pile of fruit.

The supernatural occurrences inside the mansion are no less surreal. Obayashi consulted his 10-year-old daughter for ideas, giving an already strange film its most bizarre moments: a disembodied head emerges from a well to chow down on one of the girls; a cannibalistic piano eats another whole; and a painting of a demonic cat vomits up enough blood to give Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive a run for its money. And yet, the film is never really “scary.” Its intentionally childish and over-the-top special effects give it an absurd charm more akin to a hallucinogenic fairy tale, albeit one involving dancing skeletons and murderous futons. It’s hard to talk about House without evoking the same cliches already used countless times before and mentioning how it’s “psychedelic,” or “Evil Dead meets Scooby-Doo meets Japan.” But after a while, that all becomes meaningless, and the only thing left to do is experience it for yourself. 

Next steps: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
A Japanese salaryman and his girlfriend hit a metal fetishist (what, you’ve never heard of metal fetishists?) with their car, dump him in a ditch, and proceed to have sex in front of the corpse. So begins the bizarre journey of physical and sexual transformation that is Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Haunted by the memory of the accident, the salaryman notices strange metal growths emerging from his skin, and soon realizes that he is being followed by the deceased metal fetishist, whose consciousness manages to live on by taking control of other bodies and turning them into half-human, half-metal abominations. Eventually succumbing entirely to his new metal exoskeleton, the salaryman faces off against the fetishist in a battle before the two join forces and bodies, determined to corrode away the Earth until nothing remains.

Wearing its low-budget indie credentials on its sleeve, Tetsuo makes the most of its limited funds by combing a barrage of stop-motion effects, a pounding industrial soundtrack, and stark black and white cinematography into a disturbing techno-nightmare where flesh mutates into metal and body parts become weapons, fulfilling the trailer’s promise of “METAL PSYCHIC WARS!” A word of warning: There are two ways to look at power drills: before you’ve borne witness to Tetsuo, and after...

Matango/Attack Of The Mushroom People (1963)
A curious outlier from Toho Studios and director Ishiro Honda, who was perhaps best known for his kaiju (literally, “strange beast,” but we just call ’em “giant monster”) films such as Godzilla and Mothra, Matango is an atmospheric and creepily effective film about a group of castaways stranded on an undiscovered island. While exploring for food, they discover an abandoned ship containing a journal warning against eating the strange mushrooms found on the island.

As isolation begins to weigh heavy on nerves and desperation sets in, the temptation of the mushrooms proves too strong, turning those foolish enough to ingest them into shambling fungus monsters. While it lacks the visceral kinetic energy of House or Tetsuo, Matango is a sometimes cheesy, often moody, and surprisingly rewarding film, the perfect comedown once the beer buzz has worn off, your friends have long since passed out, and it's just you and the glow of the TV screen filling the dark corners of the room.

Next Week: “We are going to eat you!”: Zombie films beyond Romero.