Spooky season is upon us, and conventional horror movies like Bring Her Back (excellently ugly) or The Evil Dead (stone chilly basic) are apparent decisions for a comfortable film night time at dwelling. However, if you happen to’re searching for one thing that’s a bit extra bizarre than depraved to get you within the Halloween spirit, I extremely suggest the 1977 fantasy horror movie Home.
Describing Home is an train in futility. Right here’s the essential plot: A lady goes to spend the summer time together with her aunt after her widower father brings dwelling a creepily sedate lady and declares that he intends to marry her. When she arrives on the countryside dwelling, with six of her associates in tow, unusual supernatural issues instantly start to occur.
That’s the gist of it, however it fails to even come shut explaining absolutely the madness contained inside its 88 minute run time. The trailer beneath presents a small style.
Home is the imaginative and prescient of director Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose frantic hyper-stylized experimentation provides the movie its singular visible model. However a lot of the nightmare logic discovered inside it may be attributed to the movie’s co-writer, Chigumi Ôbayashi, Nobuhiko’s 10-year-old daughter.
In an interview discovered on the film’s Blu-ray release Nobuhiko defined his method saying that:
“Adults can solely take into consideration issues they perceive, so all the pieces stays on that boring human degree. However youngsters provide you with issues that may’t be defined. They just like the unusual and mysterious. The ability of cinema isn’t within the explainable, however within the unusual and inexplicable.”
The result’s a movie that abruptly and dramatically shifts tones from household melodrama with gauzy visuals, to slapstick music video, to proto J-horror. Circle wipes and clearly matte painted backgrounds brush up towards severed heads and gallons of shiny purple blood. Beneath all of it although is a story firmly rooted in folklore that confronts trauma by embracing morbid absurdity.
Home is not like some other movie you’ve seen. In reviewing it for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carrie Rickey referred to as it “too absurd to be genuinely terrifying, but too nightmarish to be merely comedian.” And that’s what makes it so compelling. Its affect on the slapstick horror of Sam Raimi’s Evil Lifeless 2 feels apparent, and it shares DNA with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks the place an undercurrent of malevolence is explored by a collection of seeming non sequiturs.
I’ve seen Home extra instances than I can probably rely, and I nonetheless stroll away from it questioning to myself “WTF did I simply watch?” — and I imply that in one of the simplest ways doable. It’s an simple cult basic that’s not possible to show away from and, if you happen to’ve by no means seen it, you owe it to your self to alter that instantly.