House

House (ハウス, 1977) is the gleefully unhinged Japanese horror-comedy you can watch online on iFILM. It marks the feature debut of Nobuhiko Obayashi, and it follows seven schoolgirls who travel to a relative's country mansion for the holidays. The house has been waiting. The house is hungry.

The group's ringleader, nicknamed Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami), flees her father and his new fiancée by inviting her friends to her aunt's home. Each girl is one trait turned up loud — one only eats, one only fights, one never lowers her camera. Then the place starts picking them off. A piano bites. A severed head sails out of a well laughing. A painted cat bleeds. Obayashi shot all of it like a child's daydream, with hand-drawn skies, cut-and-paste effects and matte tricks that wear their fakeness proudly — which somehow makes the whole thing creepier.

Toho asked for a Japanese answer to Jaws and got a fever dream instead, built from ideas Obayashi borrowed from his eleven-year-old daughter. Distributors had no idea how to sell it; decades on, it became a cult favorite quoted endlessly by lovers of strange cinema, scored by the rock band Godiego. If standard scares bore you and you want something balanced between nightmare and giggle, this is your screening. Stream House (1977) online on iFILM.