Introduction: Discovering Ôbayashi from the Outside In
There is a peculiar embarrassment that comes with cinephilia: the realization that one has built a seemingly vast map of world cinema while leaving entire continents unexplored. For years, my relationship with Japanese cinema followed a familiar Western pattern. Kurosawa stood as the monumental gateway, Ozu the master of restraint, Mizoguchi the poet of suffering. When curiosity drifted toward the avant-garde, Hiroshi Teshigahara—through Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another—appeared as the singular bridge between modernist experimentation in the West and Japan’s own artistic revolutions. Beyond him, the terrain felt opaque.
That gap remained largely unchallenged until my first encounter with Hausu. Like many Western viewers, I arrived through reputation rather than context: whispered claims of insanity, cult status, midnight screenings, incredulous screenshots shared online. Expecting irony, I was unprepared for sincerity. What unfolded was not merely a barrage of visual tricks, but a strangely moving experience—one that felt closer to childhood memory than to parody. The laughter it provoked was genuine, but so was the unease, and eventually, the melancholy.
Encountering Nobuhiko Ôbayashi through this film was therefore not just an act of discovery but of recalibration. Here was a filmmaker whose work absorbed pop art, French New Wave irreverence, underground cinema, advertising aesthetics, children’s imagination, and the deep scars of Japanese history—especially Hiroshima—into a body of work that was at once playful and devastating. Most startling of all was the realization that this radical experimentation had emerged from within the studio system, aimed not at an elite audience but at young moviegoers.
This essay is written from the perspective of a cinephile trained on Western experimental traditions—Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Godard, Warhol, the New American Cinema—who arrived late to Japanese experimental and avant-garde film. Through that lens, Ôbayashi emerges not as an exotic anomaly but as a missing link: a filmmaker who proves that formal experimentation can coexist with emotional directness, popular appeal, and lasting cultural impact.
Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema: A Brief Context for Outsiders
Before returning to Ôbayashi himself, it is necessary to pause and situate him within the broader landscape of Japanese avant-garde cinema—particularly for readers approaching this tradition from a Western perspective.
To understand Ôbayashi’s significance, one must first confront how differently avant-garde cinema developed in Japan compared to the West. Western experimental film often positioned itself in explicit opposition to commercial cinema, embracing marginality as a virtue. In Japan, the boundaries between underground experimentation, pop culture, television, and studio filmmaking were more porous.
The postwar period saw the emergence of experimental collectives, art happenings, and radical theater movements such as Angura. Filmmakers like Shūji Terayama blurred poetry, performance, and cinema; Kōji Wakamatsu fused political extremity with exploitation aesthetics; Toshio Matsumoto expanded documentary into psychedelic abstraction. Experimental cinema was not confined to museums—it bled into youth culture, advertising, and popular media.
Ôbayashi belongs to this ecosystem, but with a crucial distinction: he never rejected accessibility. His avant-garde instincts were filtered through an affection for pop imagery, nostalgia, and emotional storytelling. Where Terayama often confronted the audience with provocation, Ôbayashi invited them into a dream.
Early Life and the Hiroshima Shadow
Born in 1938 in Onomichi, a coastal town near Hiroshima, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi grew up under the long shadow of atomic trauma. Although not a direct survivor of the bombing, Hiroshima’s presence—physical, psychological, moral—haunts his work. Unlike filmmakers who addressed the atomic bomb through realism or solemn tragedy, Ôbayashi approached it obliquely, through fantasy, memory, and temporal dislocation.
This approach aligns him with experimental traditions more than classical narrative cinema. Like Alain Resnais in Hiroshima mon amour, Ôbayashi understood that certain historical wounds resist direct representation. Yet where Resnais pursued intellectual abstraction, Ôbayashi leaned into emotional subjectivity, childhood memory, and pop surrealism.
From 8mm Experiments to Commercial Imagery
Ôbayashi began making films in the early 1960s using 8mm cameras, producing short experimental works that circulated in underground film festivals. These early films reveal his fascination with:
- Nonlinear time
- Visual collage
- Stop-motion and optical effects
- Performance and theatricality
- The artificiality of cinema itself
At the same time, he worked extensively in television commercials. This dual career is essential to understanding his style. Advertising taught Ôbayashi how to communicate ideas quickly, vividly, and memorably. It also freed him from the false binary between art and commerce that often constrains Western experimental filmmakers.
In retrospect, Hausu feels unimaginable without this background. It is an experimental film conceived with the instincts of a commercial director—and that is precisely its genius.
Ôbayashi’s Experimental Style: Cinema as Child’s Play
Ôbayashi’s cinema is often described as naïve, but this naïveté is strategic. His films deliberately reject realism in favor of a handmade, visibly artificial aesthetic. Matte paintings, exaggerated color grading, theatrical acting, abrupt tonal shifts—all are presented without apology.
In Western experimental cinema, similar techniques often signal alienation or critique. In Ôbayashi’s hands, they express wonder.
Key elements of his style include:
- Visible Artifice: Effects are not hidden but flaunted, reminding the viewer that cinema is an illusion.
- Emotional Directness: Despite visual absurdity, emotions are sincere, even sentimental.
- Temporal Fluidity: Past, present, fantasy, and memory coexist without hierarchy.
- Pop Sensibility: Influences from manga, television, and youth culture are embraced rather than ironized.
This combination places Ôbayashi closer to filmmakers like Jacques Demy or early Godard than to the asceticism of structural film.
The Birth of Hausu: A Studio Experiment Gone Rogue
If Ôbayashi’s early career establishes his experimental instincts, Hausu is the moment when those instincts collide—violently and joyfully—with the expectations of commercial cinema.
Hausu was produced by Toho, the legendary studio behind Godzilla. In the mid-1970s, Toho sought to capitalize on the popularity of Western horror films such as Jaws and The Exorcist. Ôbayashi was offered the project after more conventional directors failed to develop a suitable script.
What followed is one of cinema history’s great accidents.
Ôbayashi reportedly developed the story with input from his young daughter, whose fears and fantasies shaped the film’s episodic structure. This origin story is often repeated as trivia, but it is crucial. Hausu operates according to a child’s logic: associative, emotional, indifferent to coherence.
Toho executives expected a youth-oriented horror film. What they received was a psychedelic pop nightmare that defied genre conventions.
Hausu as Anti-Horror
At a surface level, Hausu follows seven schoolgirls who visit a haunted house and are consumed one by one. But to approach the film as horror is to misunderstand it. Hausu is less interested in fear than in sensation.
The film replaces suspense with spectacle. Death scenes unfold like musical numbers or slapstick routines. A girl is eaten by a piano. Another is dismembered by animated futons. Blood gushes in cartoonish fountains.
This approach recalls the anarchic energy of early cinema and silent-era trick films. Georges Méliès feels like a closer ancestor than Romero.
Formal Radicalism: Editing, Color, and Rhythm
What struck me most, as someone versed in Western experimental film, was Hausu’s editing. The film employs:
- Abrupt jump cuts
- Layered superimpositions
- Painted backgrounds
- Sudden shifts in film stock and texture
Rather than smoothing transitions, Ôbayashi accentuates them. Scenes crash into each other with the logic of dreams or channel surfing.
Color is used aggressively. Bright primaries dominate, creating an almost edible visual palette. Unlike the desaturated horror aesthetics that would dominate later decades, Hausu is luminous—cheerful even.
Sound, Music, and Tonal Whiplash
The soundtrack oscillates between pop melodies, classical motifs, and jarring sound effects. Silence is rare. Music often undercuts rather than supports emotion, creating a Brechtian distance that paradoxically enhances immersion.
This tonal instability mirrors the experience of childhood: joy and terror exist side by side, unmediated by irony.
The House as Memory Machine
As the film progresses, the haunted house reveals itself not merely as a monster but as a repository of memory. The figure of the aunt—frozen in time, waiting for a lost lover—introduces themes that resonate throughout Ôbayashi’s later work.
Here, Hausu unexpectedly aligns with European modernism. The house becomes a space where time collapses, where the past consumes the present. What begins as absurd comedy ends in melancholy.
This shift is subtle but profound. Beneath the film’s manic surface lies a meditation on loss, stasis, and the dangers of living inside memory.
Cult Reception and Western Rediscovery
Given how aggressively Hausu resists conventional categorization, its initial reception—and eventual resurrection—feels almost inevitable.
Upon its release, Hausu was commercially successful with Japanese youth but critically dismissed. Its reevaluation began decades later, largely through international film festivals and home video releases.
Western audiences initially embraced Hausu as camp. Yet repeated viewings reveal that its emotional core resists ironic consumption. Unlike many cult films, Hausu does not collapse under serious scrutiny—it deepens.
Beyond Hausu: Ôbayashi’s Wider Filmography
Reducing Ôbayashi to Hausu would be a mistake. His later career includes:
- The Onomichi Trilogy (I Are You, You Am Me, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Lonely Heart)
- Anti-war epics such as Casting Blossoms to the Sky and Hanagatami
These films retain experimental elements while adopting more conventional narrative forms. They reveal Ôbayashi as a humanist filmmaker obsessed with youth, memory, and the moral failures of adults.
Hiroshima Revisited: Experimental Humanism
In his late works, Ôbayashi confronted war and nationalism directly. Yet even here, he refused realism. Stylization becomes an ethical choice: a refusal to aestheticize violence through spectacle.
This approach distinguishes him from both mainstream war cinema and austere art films. Ôbayashi insists that imagination—not realism—is the appropriate response to historical trauma.
Ôbayashi’s Place in Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema
Within Japanese cinema, Ôbayashi occupies a liminal position. He is neither fully underground nor fully mainstream. This ambiguity has perhaps delayed his canonization.
Ôbayashi’s work represents a unique bridge between the radical formal experimentation of Japan’s 1960s–70s avant-garde film scene and mainstream cinematic accessibility. His background in television commercials and experimental film allowed him to develop a distinctive “commercial avant-garde” style, utilizing aggressive editing, graphic match cuts, and layered visual tricks not to reject popular culture but to exuberantly deconstruct it from within.
Consequently, his cinema is often seen as less overtly ideological, instead focusing on the subconscious, memory, and the technological manipulation of image and sound, which aligns him with a more lyrical and personal strand of the avant-garde. This idiosyncratic position meant he was sometimes viewed as a peripheral, more eccentric figure compared to the politically committed vanguard, yet his influence profoundly permeates later generations of filmmakers and video artists who blend commercial and experimental modes.
Ultimately, Ôbayashi carved a singular niche by proving that avant-garde techniques could be deployed not solely for alienation but also for a form of exhilarating, subversive entertainment that questions the nature of cinema itself.