House (1977) on Netflix
Gorgeous plans to spend the summer with her father until he comes home from Italy married. She asks her aunt in the country to take them in and brings six schoolmates along.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.2/1040,504 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Tokyo, a teenage girl everyone calls Gorgeous has planned to spend the summer with her widowed father, a composer who is away in Italy on business. He returns with a wife, Ryoko Ema, so Gorgeous, upset, writes to her aunt in the country and asks to come instead. The aunt says yes, and Gorgeous brings along six schoolmates: Prof, Melody, Kung Fu, Mac, Sweet and Fantasy. The aunt welcomes them and shows them through the house. Since the refrigerator no longer works, the girls lower their gift watermelon into the well to keep it cool. The visitors do not know that the house is haunted, and strange things soon begin.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about House (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Toho asked Nobuhiko Obayashi to develop a script like Jaws, and he built the story from ideas by his pre-teen daughter Chigumi, including a mirror reflection attacking the viewer, a watermelon pulled from a well that looks like a human head, and a house that eats girls.
- No directors at Toho wanted to make House because they felt it would end their careers, and Obayashi was turned down because he was not a Toho staff member; filming did not begin until two years after the script was finished.
- House was green-lit only after the success of a radio drama based on it, and a producer told Obayashi that Toho was tired of losing money on comprehensible films and was ready to let him direct the House script it judged incomprehensible.
SPOILER
Obayashi wove the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the script: born in Hiroshima, he lost all his childhood friends in the bombings, and used that bitterness for a woman's ghost waiting for her lover to return from World War II.- Kimiko Ikegami was uncomfortable about a nude scene, so Yoko Minamida, who had never done one before, also took off her clothes to put her at ease; after seeing Minamida nude, Obayashi added a topless scene for her that was not in the script.
- For the scene where Ai Matsubara's character vanishes under blood, Obayashi hung her nude and poured buckets of blue paint on her, creating a blue-screen chroma key effect so the blue-painted parts of her body would deteriorate on camera. He wanted the effects to look as if a child had made them.
- Obayashi shot House without a storyboard on one of Toho's largest sets, keeping the mood upbeat by skipping, singing and playing quiz games with the younger actresses, even though members of the Toho crew thought the film was nonsense.
- Obayashi found the seven girls' acting poor when he directed them verbally, so he began playing the film's soundtrack on set, which changed their performances as they got into the spirit of the music.
