Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (1977)—an experiment in surrealism, horror and camp—presents itself as a psychedelic ghost story and stream of consciousness children’s tale. Beneath the outrageousness is the weight of Japan’s postwar trauma. Following a schoolgirl called Gorgeous and her other aptly named friends (Kung Fu, Fantasy, Mac, Prof, Melody and Sweet) to her aunt’s country home, the innocent girls suffer dreadful fates and absurd horrors: a demonic cat, a ravenous piano, a watermelon devouring a disembodied head. It’s a phantasmagoria of violence expressed in the dream logic of children. Obayashi tells this story with an array of visual effects—painted backdrops, stop-motion animation and chroma-key effects—with the same candid curiosity of the film’s protagonists. Indeed, Obayashi conceived of House after hearing of the dreams of his young daughter. At this time, Japanese cinema was in a challenging position, struggling with the dominance of television and family-friendly films. Toho Studios—behind the production of House—wanted to replicate the success of Jaws (1975) and tasked Obayashi with creating something in a similar vein. What he delivered was far from a conventional horror. Not simply a ghost or haunted house story, Obayashi took his daughter’s bizarre dreams—images of savage grandfather clocks and ghost brides—and used them to tell a story about youth, loss, and the terrifying and beautiful ways in which memories can manifest themselves.

In a Japan still processing the horrors of war, the film takes a whimsical, almost naïve approach to the national trauma. From a technical perspective, Obayashi is like a kid in a toy shop, overwhelming the spectator with color, effects and transitions. The director’s background in avant garde shorts and commercials is evident as each set piece is almost a vignette in itself, with characters flying through the air and impossible landscapes with painted hands and floating torsos emerging from backgrounds. Such handmade artificiality gives the film a dreamlike, alien ambience; a carnival ride in a constant state of flux and distortion. A particular visual hallmark of the film is its use of the camera’s iris, a classic effect which closes a scene like an eye blinking. Such transitions contribute to the feeling of delirium, as though the narrative is constantly being refracted through different lenses, sometimes shifting from one bizarre set piece to another with little warning.

One final defining feature: the film’s extravagant embrace of camp. It delights in the absurd, turning mundane domestic spaces into sites of terror. Obayashi layers techniques from surrealism, pop art and animation with garish colors to create a world at once hallucinatory and playful. Having said that, the film is not just odd, it is deeply personal. Perhaps the lack of plot, chilling jump scares and suspense is done intentionally to present a world where we are forced to abandon our formal expectations of narrative and genre and instead embrace a world guided by the logic of a child’s imagination, one twisted to the creative whims of her eccentric father.

House, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. Not Rated. 1h28m.