Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi

There are movies for which advance word in the newspaper seems like insufficient notice. In the case of this thoroughly insane feature—a 1977 Japanese horror film now making erratic stops across the country, like a spaceship crashing in your backyard—it's hard to imagine what method could conceivably herald its contents: a three-story gong, maybe, or an army of acid-crazed Brownies shrieking through the streets. For now, this'll have to do: Run. Wake your neighbor. Slap your children. Eye your cat with suspicion. Every once in a blue-screen moon, a movie will remind even the most jaded of cult-film aficionados that, no, in fact, they have not seen everything. Here, director Nobuhiko Obayashi dispatches six schoolgirls to spend their summer vacation with classmate Oshare at her ailing aunt's remote estate. A friend described the movie's first half as an experimental film made by an 11-year-old girl, and that fits: Avant-garde devices such as screens within screens may be underscored with pancake-syrupy pop, or framed with the kind of gauzy borders a kid might sketch around a doodled unicorn. Obayashis body of work extends from experimental shorts to apocalyptic teenage sci-fi (1987's The Drifting Classroom) to those notorious 1970s Charles Bronson "Mandom" perfume ads—and in House, he manages to compress them all into one brain-boiling spew of psychotropic, psychedelic, sense-deranging WTF imagery. It's scary not in any conventional sense, but because a viewer feels so utterly without bearings—as if whatever glue holds the universe together had suddenly turned to Jell-O.

9:30pm Nightly Thursday - Saturday

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