One senses watching the 1977 Japanese cult horror film House that the sushi might have been spiked with a liberal amount of LSD and magic mushrooms during the creative process and production, which gets a debut this year on Blu-Ray as part of Eureka’s ‘Masters of Cinema’ label. It won the 1978 Blue Ribbon Award for Best New Director (Nobuhiko Obayashi)

It certainly will attract cultists and the generation who made it a hit originally in Japan, despite a host of negative reviews from their critical circle.

In recent years, the US has embraced the film a lot more with two sold-out shows – through a distribution company called Janus – in the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival and – given that this film was produced before the likes of the 1979 Amityville Horror and – more significantly – Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead (with which this film shares more than a passing resemblance) there is a peculiar attraction inherent here to Western horror fans.

Troubled teenage girl Angel (Kimiko Ikegami) is upset at her widowed father’s desire to marry his new woman and her potential stepmother Ryoko. Shunning a planned summer vacation with her father, Angel opts to write a letter to her aunt asking if she can stay with her instead. She takes along a group of her school pals and they arrive at the house, but it isn’t long before things become a little screwy for these ‘pesky kids’…

Seen today, the film is a botched hotchpotch of visual ideas and imagination that feels somewhat odd in an age when more assured movies like Evil Dead and Paranormal Activity have covered the same ground with more effectiveness. Part of the problem is that the confusing mix of cross-dimensional existence and spiritual ideas throws the viewer off and you lose interest and sympathy for Angel and the other characters.

That said, the effects and overall style of the film, which resembles a psychedelic homage to Scooby-Doo, are worth a look and – from a historic point of view – will interest fans of physically-based horror and gore.

It’s interesting to note that Toho, the production company who backed House, had little faith in the film, to the extent of putting it in turnaround for two years as no director wanted to do it before Obayashi put it together, with script input and ideas from his own daughter.

Its original success does confirm its place in Japanese film history and in the end, it did speak volumes to the youth crowd who turned out in droves at the time. However, this writer suspects that the passage of time and age of the film, coupled with the deliberately bizarre world created here, will distance old and new fans who may expect something more stimulatingly scary in the realm of more recent cult classics like Ring or Audition.

HOUSE (HAUSU 1977) / DIRECTOR: NOBUHIKO ÔBAYASHI / SCREENPLAY: CHIHO KATSURA / STARRING: KIMIKO IKEGAMI, MIKI JINBO, KUMIKO OHBA / RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 12TH