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[R.I.P.] ‘Hausu’ Filmmaker Nobuhiko Ôbayashi Has Passed Away at 82
We’ve learned the sad news this afternoon that Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, known to horror fans as the director of 1977’s Hausu, has passed away at the age of 82.
Ôbayashi had been battling lung cancer for the past several years.
Hausu (aka House) was Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s feature length debut as a director, and it was produced by Japanese company Toho. As explained on the film’s Wikipedia, “Toho approached Obayashi with the suggestion to make a film like Jaws. Influenced by ideas from his daughter Chigumi, Obayashi developed ideas for a script that was written by Chiho Katsura.”
The truly singular haunted house movie was released by the Criterion Collection in 2010.
Ôbayashi subsequently directed nearly 50 feature films throughout his career, including The Visitor in the Eye, Take Me Away!, The Little Girl Who Conquered Time, The Deserted City, Lonelyheart, The Drifting Classroom, The Discarnates, Turning Point, I Want to Hear the Wind’s Song, The Last Snow, The Reason, Seven Weeks and most recently, Labyrinth of Cinema.
“She’s mine, and I’m hers.”
The prison movie is a cornerstone of the cinematic landscape. Often adjacent to horror, there’s something inherently horrific about a building full of “convicts” jockeying for power. Criminal masterminds and the wrongfully convicted alike become pawns in a dehumanizing system and struggle to stay alive in the restrictive environment. Claire Denis pushes this genre to its outer limits with sci-fi and horror elements comparing incarceration to the prison of the human body. Her 2018 film High Life follows a group of prisoners turned astronauts who struggle to retain their humanity after the world has cast them out.
When we first meet Monte (Robert Pattinson), he’s raising a toddler on an isolated space station in the galaxy’s outer reaches. His daughter Willow was conceived through assault by fellow inmate Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche) as a part of her mission to reproduce in space. As Denis unpacks the story of this troubled crew, they slowly realize they have been discarded and forgotten. Some find freedom to enact their violent agendas while others try to retain a semblance of normalcy in the extreme environment. Essentially guinea pigs, Monte and his crewmates hurtle through space and grope for a reason to keep existing.
The Lady Killers continue Killer Moms Month with Claire Denis’ beautifully complex film. Co-hosts Jenn Adams, Mae Shults, Rocco T. Thompson, and Sammie Kuykendall chart the mysteries of the cosmos in their quest to understand the glacial plot. They’ll chat about screaming babies, space gardens, black holes and spaghetti along with heavier themes like reproduction and bodily autonomy. Why is Dr. Dibbs so obsessed with pregnancy? Why doesn’t Monte partake of the sex box? Does Mia Goth actually have a big booty and what really happened on that spaceship filled with dogs? They’ll approach the black hole and try to withstand spaghettification while zeroing in on the unpleasant themes of this exceptional film.
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