House

House is a 1977 Japanese horror fantasy film directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. It centres on a teenage girl whose widowed father has remarried, leaving her unhappy at home. She and six schoolfriends travel to the countryside to stay at the house of her aunt, a woman she has not seen since childhood and who now uses a wheelchair. The aunt welcomes the girls warmly enough, but the isolated old house soon proves to have a life of its own, and the visit turns dangerous in increasingly strange and comic ways. The film was Obayashi's first feature, arriving before I Are You, You Am Me and the later titles in his filmography. It was produced by Toho Eizo Co., with Tomoyuki Tanaka among the producers and a screenplay by Chiho Katsura. Kimiko Ikegami plays Gorgeous, alongside Kumiko Ohba, Ai Matsubara, Miki Jinbo, Eriko Tanaka and Masayo Miyako among a credited cast of thirty-two. Running eighty-eight minutes, it mixes comedy and fantasy with horror rather than playing the material straight. On IMDb it holds 7.2 out of 10 from around 39,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.3 out of 10 from over 800 votes. A critics' rating of 7.4 out of 10 from forty-two reviews places it slightly above both audience scores.