Editorials
All-Time Great ‘Hausu’ Remains One of Horror’s Weirdest Experiences
“The power of cinema is in the strange and inexplicable.” – Nobuhiko Obayashi
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws created a defining moment in cinematic history on a worldwide scale. It brought the advent of the summer blockbuster, and its massive success inspired countries all over the globe to chase similar success. That included Japan, where audiences had previously lost interest in theatrical releases. Film company Toho approached filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi to develop a film like Jaws. They had no idea what they were in for; the filmmaker found adult brains boring. Instead, bouncing ideas off his young daughter and working with screenwriter Chiho Katsura, the filmmaker created a ghost-and-fantasy film that confounded everyone, save for the young audience that contributed to the film becoming a major hit. As with most genre fare, critical and cultural appreciation has long since turned around on one of horror’s most exceptional, and weirdest offerings.
House, or Hausu, isn’t a film that’s easily explained. Distilled to its most basic premise, seven schoolgirls travel to an aunt’s country home, which turns out to be dangerously haunted. What plays out is unlike any other haunted house experience committed to celluloid. It’s as though Alice went through the looking glass and then tumbled into the nine circles of phantasmagoric hell. On acid. The girls deal with dancing skeletons, extreme blood pools, floating butt-biting heads, and a house that attempts to eat them at every opportunity. A film that begins as over-the-top as this one does could quickly lose momentum in a lesser visionary’s hands. Here, Nobuhiko Obayashi manages to escalate the crazy, topping every zany moment that came before with something even more jaw-dropping.
Save for the basic premise, not much about what transpires makes much sense. Not traditionally, anyway. It’s absurd for absurd’s sake. Of course, that’s what the filmmaker wanted to achieve. This was always meant to be a child’s fantasy film, despite drawing from grim history. Having grown up in Hiroshima Prefecture, Obayashi lost many close childhood friends to the atomic bombing of the Japanese city in 1945. This permeates throughout the film, thematically. Though it’s a narrative saturated in whimsy and surrealism, it’s defined by two generations pre and post-war. Auntie (Yoko Minamida) lived through the war and tragically lost her fiancé to it. Her grief and wrath fuel the haunting, triggered by a group of schoolgirls who have never endured or experienced the hardship of war. For the briefest moment, the mushroom cloud appears on-screen, and the girls giddily say, “it’s like cotton candy!”
It’s not just the symbolism and foray into the bizarre that makes Hausu such an enduring cult favorite, it’s that it’s a collage of techniques, one endless string of technical experiments for the filmmaker. Nobuhiko Obayashi played around with composite shots, fisheye lenses, freeze frames, superimposed imagery, fade-outs, and any other trick in the book. As for special effects, he didn’t allow Toho’s special effects director to film them; Nobuhiko Obayashi wanted the effects to look fake. He had a particular aesthetic in mind, and he went for it with gusto.
Upon release in Japan, critics had no clue how to process this film. In short, critics and studio executives hated it. Even crew members that enjoyed their time working on the film didn’t think highly of the end product. Youth, however, adored it and made it a commercial hit. Perhaps not so surprisingly, Hausu was influential on kids that grew up with the film. Many of which went on to become filmmakers and critics themselves, giving Hausu the reappraisal it deserved.
Visually and narratively, there’s nothing like Hausu, and there never will be again. Nobuhiko Obayashi was a visionary who eschewed traditional rules. A studio tapped him to develop something in the vein of Jaws, but he had no interest in creating another animal attack film. He wanted to make a fantasy for kids, inspired by his childhood. One he looked to his daughter Chigumi Obayashi, credited for the film’s original story, to help him create.
The recent passing of Nobuhiko Obayashi means there’s a good chance you’ve recently revisited the masterful charms of Hausu. If not, I highly recommend watching through the streaming platform Criterion Channel. Unlike most streaming services, Criterion curates their offerings and offers supplemental materials. There’s a 45-minute interview with Nobuhiko Obayashi on the platform that doesn’t just provide a ton of insight into the film’s road to creation but also gives touching anecdotes from the filmmaker on working with the actors and crew. He offers his thoughts on the importance of fantasy and the inner workings of a child’s imaginative brain.
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s spirit, tenacity, and innovation as a filmmaker will be tremendously missed, but at least he left us with one of the most significant entries in weird cinema. Bizarre, bloody, and delightfully surreal, Hausu is an experience…to say the least.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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