House: 300 Words.

1977, Nobuhiko Obayashi

“Obayashi-san, please wreck our studio just this once.”

Was what a senior director told Nobuhiko Obayashi as he arrived at the studio to make his debut feature. Featuring a troupe of mostly untrained actors playing schoolgirls invited to a haunted house for a summer holiday, critically panned at the time but loved by audiences worldwide who like that sort of thing, the film is an insanely fun, bonkers, and self-consciously trashy experience. At its core, it harbours an excited infatuation with cinema. It is a juicy, silly, maximalist movie — a double quarter pounder with skittles of a film.

At points visually quite beautiful and others utterly absurd, it exists somewhere between horror, farce and genre satire, which enables it to tell a story about intense societal pressures on Japanese women to marry with some seriousness, whilst not expecting us to care too much about its characters as they are thrown around by what becomes a dizzying torrent of set pieces, visual jokes and montages.

It is a great example of how cinema can be passionate about itself without taking itself too seriously. Movies like this are a tonic to the minimalist, slow, often overly self-important cinema that European film has been so enamoured with for decades.

What House presents instead, is revelry, joy and almost an adolescent, masturbatory love for the potential of moving images to tell stories. It gushes with visual ideas, and I haven’t enjoyed a film this much in a while. For some it might, quite understandably, bring on the equivalent of a sugar-induced headache. I completely loved it. It’s high-flying, delirious kitsch.

Sadly, the prolific Obayashi passed away earlier this year. There’s never been a better time to dive in and enjoy his work. Here’s an introduction to him by the BFI if you fancy diving in.