Latest / MUBI Podcast / HOUSE — The Japanese psychedelic masterpiece

Transcript

HOUSE — The Japanese psychedelic masterpiece · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  Heads up, this episode includes some scary sounds, a house that tries to eat you, adult language and spoilers, but not me.
• 0:08
  Your regular host, Rico Gagliano.
• 0:10
  For this horror themed season, I've handed over the hosting reins to a horror expert.
• 0:14
  You will be in good spooky hands with her.
• 0:14
  Enjoy! Let me tell you a little podcasting secret.
• 0:24
  I've asked every single person I've interviewed for this series the same question to break the ice.
• 0:31
  What do you think of when you think of a haunted house?
• 0:34
  The best answer has come from this week's guest, Chigumi Ôbayashi.
• 0:39
  She said.
• 0:43
  Screams.
• 0:47
  That sounds intense, but if you know the film that she helped write when she was just ten years old, her answer makes a lot of sense.
• 1:01
  You see, Chigumi's dad was a filmmaker.
• 1:07
  I come from a very unique family.
• 1:09
  My father's a director.
• 1:09
  My mother was a producer.
• 1:13
  I've been around film ever since I can remember.
• 1:16
  When I was in kindergarten, playing with the other children and things didn't go the way I wanted I just start yelling, "Cut, cut, cut!" Because that's what I heard when my mom and dad were making films.
• 1:28
  And when her dad was tasked to direct his first feature film, he asked his ten year old daughter what she wanted to see.
• 1:38
  My father was making films, all kinds of films.
• 1:41
  8mm, 16mm, dozens of films.
• 1:45
  And his first commercial film that was House.
• 1:50
  A few of her ideas ended up becoming some of the wildest images ever put to film A piano, eating a woman's hands.
• 1:59
  A head floating out of a well and biting someone on the ass.
• 2:02
  A disembodied mouth...
• 2:02
  and that's just a taste.
• 2:06
  The things that scared her as a little girl became part of one of the most remarkable, unclassifiable, and batshit haunted house movies ever made.
• 2:27
  Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast.
• 2:29
  MUBI is the streaming service that champions great cinema, and on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 2:37
  I'm Anna Bogutskaya and I'll be your host for this season.
• 2:41
  I'm a film critic and host of the Final Girls podcast, and the author of the new book,
• 2:45
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A Deep Dive Into Why We Love Watching Horror Films, which I've made a career out of doing.
• 2:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I'm guest hosting this spooky edition of the MUBI Podcast, but your trusty host, Rico Gagliano, will be back in November for the next season.
• 3:01
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This is season six.
• 3:01
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We're calling it 'Haunted Homes'.
• 3:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Leading up to Halloween, I'm diving into the stories behind some of the most terrifying and impactful haunted house movies ever made.
• 3:21
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In this episode, we look at the unlikely set of circumstances that set up the young Japanese experimental filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi to make this wild haunted house fantasy.
• 3:33
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A psychedelic schoolgirl nightmare that brought back young folks to Japanese cinemas.
• 3:39
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Avoid any white cats and join me as we pay a visit to House.
• 3:50
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Nobuhiko Obayashi was meant to be a doctor.
• 3:53
  <i: Feeding the Monster>His family were doctors.
• 3:58
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In that era, when a boy was born in the family, it was expected that he would follow the same career as the father.
• 4:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Obayashi's family grew up in a poor town outside of Hiroshima called Onomichi.
• 4:13
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Many exotic items from everywhere around the world would come into our town through the port.
• 4:18
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So whenever people needed the services of, say, the doctor but didn't have money to pay for it, instead they were offered one of those items.
• 4:28
  <i: Feeding the Monster>One of those things was an 8mm camera.
• 4:31
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That was the first time the would-be director would hold a camera in his hands.
• 4:35
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But being a professional filmmaker was too farfetched a dream.
• 4:41
  <i: Feeding the Monster>When my father was of age, he went to Tokyo to apply to the university to become a doctor, as he was expected to do.
• 4:48
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It was a two day test, and the first day he took the test as normal.
• 4:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But then on the second day, something strange happened.
• 4:56
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He said he suddenly realized, if I finish this test and I become a doctor, that's it.
• 5:03
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There's no turning back for me.
• 5:03
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So he just walked out.
• 5:09
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Obayashi went back to his hometown, to Onomichi, to tell his father what he'd done.
• 5:14
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But instead of getting mad, his dad recalled how in his youth.
• 5:19
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Any opportunity that he might have had of doing something else with his life was taken away from him because he had to serve during the war.
• 5:28
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And he gave his son the 8 mm camera as a present.
• 5:33
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Obayashi started making short experimental films with his pals.
• 5:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Like this arty vampire one from 1966 called Emotion.
• 5:46
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In fact, he's very much a crucial member of the coterie of filmmakers who especially appeared in the late 1950s, early 1960s.
• 5:57
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And they're showing their films not at regular theaters, but at art galleries or at museums.
• 6:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That's Aaron Gerow, professor of East Asian languages and literatures and film and media studies at Yale University.
• 6:13
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And he says, even though Obayashi and his artist friends were constantly shooting and showing films, it wasn't enough to jump from amateur to official filmmaker.
• 6:23
  <i: Feeding the Monster>At least not in Japan at that time.
• 6:28
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He said, I really feel my age.
• 6:31
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In many ways, professional filmmaking in postwar Japan was defined by a studio system.
• 6:38
  <i: Feeding the Monster>You became a film director by taking an exam and gaining entrance to the studio, where you'd spend ten years as an apprentice before you became a film director.
• 6:50
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There was no such thing as indies, at least not in the way that we understand them today.
• 6:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Obayashi would circumvent all of that thanks to his talent and skills, of course, but also to a crisis that was unfolding in the Japanese film industry.
• 7:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>When we look at Japanese cinema, we often talk about this golden age of the 1950s, when you had the big directors like Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.
• 7:14
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That's the voice of Jasper Sharp, author of the Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema and critic specialized in Japanese film.
• 7:22
  <i: Feeding the Monster>During this time, the film industry was dominated by five major studios, that's Daiei, Shochiku, Toei, Nikkatsu, and Toho, and of these, Toho was probably the biggest.
• 7:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The biggest because they had two major assets the films of Akira Kurosawa and Godzilla.
• 7:45
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Godzilla, King of the Monsters.Alive, surging up from the depths of the sea on a tidal wave of terror. But audiences were declining.
• 7:54
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Young people had stopped going to the cinema.
• 7:57
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The industry reached a crisis point in the 70s when television became the norm.
• 8:03
  <i: Feeding the Monster>As did another kind of movie, the American blockbuster...
• 8:09
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Jaws.I just found out that a girl got killed here last week.And you knew it.
• 8:16
  <i: Feeding the Monster>You knew there was a shark out there. The mid 1970s was a sort of watermark period in Japan because prior to this, Japanese audiences always preferred to see Japanese films.
• 8:30
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So the bulk of the overall box office share went to Japanese movies.
• 8:34
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And this changed in the mid 70s.
• 8:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And Japanese audiences, you know, preferred, went, started going to see more foreign films.
• 8:41
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And invariably when I say more foreign films, I mean more American films.
• 8:46
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In 1975, Jaws, The Towering Inferno, The Man with the Golden Gun, were all the rage, and only a few years later everyone was watching a little thing called Star Wars.
• 8:58
  <i: Feeding the Monster>The one thing about the blockbuster movie is the idea of the high concept, that you can sum up exactly what the film is about in a single sentence.
• 9:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So Jaws, obviously a shark under the water, terrorizing the natives of a small beach town.
• 9:12
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This gave Toho an idea.
• 9:14
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They would commission their own blockbuster, their very own Jaws.
• 9:19
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And they asked the guy who'd never made a studio film before.
• 9:23
  <i: Feeding the Monster>At this point, Obayashi was a hugely prolific commercials director.
• 9:28
  <i: Feeding the Monster>By some counts, he made over 2000 TV commercials.
• 9:32
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Including some iconic ones like the Mandom aftershave ad starring Charles Bronson.
• 9:40
  <i: Feeding the Monster>All the world loves a lover.All the world loves you. Obayashi did a lot of work at Toho filming these.
• 9:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They knew him well.
• 9:54
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So one day they just asked him.
• 9:58
  <i: Feeding the Monster>If you were to shoot a movie, what kind of movie would you make?
• 10:01
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So he took that question home.
• 10:03
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He brought it to us, his wife, my mom and me, and he said,"Chigumi, what kind of film would you like to watch?" Chigumi was 10 or 11 at this point.
• 10:14
  <i: Feeding the Monster>All the kids were watching Jaws.
• 10:18
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And, you know, big animals attacking people.
• 10:20
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But that's... that's pretty common and ordinary.
• 10:25
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Instead, her mind turned to the empty house where she spent half of the year while her mom and dad were off making films.
• 10:33
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It was her grandparents house in the poor town of Onomichi.
• 10:38
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This was a very old, very scary house with many, many rooms.
• 10:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So when my dad asked me about this movie, what kind of things specifically would be interesting for me to see in the movie, I actually started recalling my own memories of what I had experienced in that particular house.
• 10:59
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So I thought, what if a non-living thing would attack human beings, like a house?
• 11:09
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Stay with me to find out exactly how a girl's fears helped shape this unlikely blockbuster.
• 11:20
  <i: Feeding the Monster>MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can.
• 11:28
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters.
• 11:32
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs and brilliant first timers.
• 11:38
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We've always got something new for you to discover.
• 11:41
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And I'm discovering that the regular movie podcast host, Richard Galliano, is lurking in this recording as well.
• 11:47
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It didn't mean to scare you.
• 11:47
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Just hovering there behind your desk.
• 11:51
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But I'm here to tell you about a cool thing that is on mubi.com, if I may.
• 11:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>- Go ahead.
• 11:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>- It is a new short by the filmmaker Susanne Deeken that is going to be right up your alley, I think.
• 12:02
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's called A Place Without Fear, and it's kind of a haunted house movie.
• 12:08
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And I say kind of because it's also kind of a stop motion animation.
• 12:12
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It uses digital renderings, large scale paintings, live action.
• 12:16
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's kind of a psychodrama about a young woman trying to escape her home, but it's definitely got a sort of horror film vibe that I have a feeling you will dig.
• 12:26
  <i: Feeding the Monster>All of those things independently and merged together are precisely my jam.
• 12:31
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And I have not seen this film and I'm going to check it out.
• 12:34
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And especially justice for short films, which are so underrated, and I'm really glad that there's a place for them to stream online and be discovered by cinephiles as well.
• 12:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That's right, A Place Without Fear this short is called subscribe at mubi.com and check it out.
• 12:48
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And as always, you can find all the links and where to stream in your country in the show notes of this episode.
• 12:56
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And speaking of haunted james, back to hungry haunted houses.
• 13:02
  <i: Feeding the Monster>How to explain House.
• 13:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>House is pretty much indescribable to anyone that hasn't seen it.
• 13:09
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Okay, I will try.
• 13:11
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Here's the elevator pitch.
• 13:13
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A group of girls stay at a haunted house and get knocked off one by one.
• 13:17
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's a classic horror setup.
• 13:19
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But here's what actually happens.
• 13:22
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Teenage girl Gorgeous invites her friends over to her aunt's country house for summer vacation.
• 13:27
  <i: Feeding the Monster>As soon as they arrive, strange things start happening to them.
• 13:30
  <i: Feeding the Monster>One gets her fingers eaten by a piano, another gets attacked by possessed furniture.
• 13:34
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Another named Kung Fu, has a kung fu fight with a demonic light fixture and keeps fighting even after she's dismembered.
• 13:40
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A white cat spews a torrent of blood that floods the whole house.
• 13:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Gorgeous becomes possessed.
• 13:46
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Her aunt, who seemed like a cool older lady, turns out to have died years ago because her fiance never returned from the war.
• 13:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So now she eats the souls of unmarried girls so she can put on her bridal dress once more.
• 14:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This amount of out there images might be unique to House, but some of them were pulled from the traditions of Japanese horror.
• 14:15
  <i: Feeding the Monster>One place it comes from, or one genre it comes from, is the 'ghost cat' movie.
• 14:21
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Ghost cat movies were popular in the 50s and featured some sort of wrongful death, and either a possessed or demonic or otherwise otherworldly cat.
• 14:30
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And as anyone who's seen House knows, the white cat takes up a A prominent place in the narrative.
• 14:38
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But it's very definitely a conscious citation of earlier ghost cat films.
• 14:46
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And both Obayashi and the screenwriter Katsura Chiho, both of them were big fans of ghost cat movies when they were growing up, and this is kind of like a subgenre within Japanese cinema.
• 15:02
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Japanese horror didn't have the exact same kind of haunted house movies that western horror did, but it did appropriate the setting, creating a strange and intriguing hybrid.
• 15:13
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Western ideas of cobwebby mansions with candles and candelabras and ominous portraits of people on the walls.
• 15:22
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Still, a lot of these moments came straight from Chigumi's brain.
• 15:29
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So there's this girl who, after her bath, is brushing her hair in front of the mirror.
• 15:35
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And I thought, what if the person reflected in the mirror?
• 15:38
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Suddenly attacked the person on this side?
• 15:38
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And I told my dad and he said"Oh that would be scary." Obayashi started taking notes as his daughter spoke.
• 15:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And then he said, do you have more?
• 15:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Inspired by that creepy house that she spent so much time in Chigumi came up with more scenes.
• 16:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There's an old well.
• 16:05
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's so deep that you would think it's bottomless.
• 16:09
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And in that well, actually we would chill watermelon because it's very cool down there in the summer, right?
• 16:15
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We would put the watermelon down there and then bring it up slowly from the well.
• 16:20
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I would always think, what if something other than a watermelon comes up?
• 16:24
  <i: Feeding the Monster>What comes up is a disembodied head, obviously.
• 16:31
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Chigumi was also learning piano at the time, and had a strict teacher who would get very annoyed if her fingers got stuck in the keys.
• 16:40
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So I thought, what if the piano suddenly started attacking you know, the person?
• 16:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And that's where the scene came from.
• 16:47
  <i: Feeding the Monster>When the piano's like a big mouth kind of going after someone.
• 16:53
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There is so much more.
• 16:57
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We don't use beds in Japan.
• 16:57
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We sleep on the floor.
• 17:00
  <i: Feeding the Monster>We use like a futon mat.
• 17:02
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Every morning when you wake up, you fold it up and you put it in the closet.
• 17:07
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But these futons are very heavy.
• 17:10
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And because I was very small as a kid, this futon, when I was trying to lift it up and put it back in the closet, it would fall back on me and I would almost asphyxiate.
• 17:20
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So I thought, oh, that's another episode.
• 17:25
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Chigumi imagined a house that was turning against its inhabitants.
• 17:30
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Closet doors that were trying to eat you.
• 17:33
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Getting caught inside the gears of a grandfather clock.
• 17:36
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Being electrocuted trying to change a light bulb.
• 17:39
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A phone cord trying to strangle you.
• 17:41
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Basically...
• 17:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>All those ideas from the old house I would just tell my dad one after another.
• 17:51
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Ohbayashi brought his daughter's ideas to a professional screenwriter, Chiho Katsura, but Toho wouldn't let him direct it, even though they had originally come to him.
• 18:03
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Undeterred, Obayashi started to build buzz for this film that didn't even exist yet.
• 18:09
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Obayashi was not stupid commercially.
• 18:13
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He made tons of commercials.
• 18:13
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He knows about advertising.
• 18:17
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Obayashi actually did a lot of different things to drum up interest in the film on his own.
• 18:26
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This was not the studio doing this.
• 18:28
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He launched a whole multimedia campaign to pressure Toho into giving him the gig.
• 18:32
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He wrote a radio drama, novelization of the script, a manga and a whole soundtrack before a single frame was shot.
• 18:41
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Finally, after two years of campaigning, he swayed the powers that be at Toho and House was ready to be filmed with Nobuhiko Obayashi as director.
• 18:52
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This was unprecedented.
• 18:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He really was one of the first filmmakers who comes out of this experimental, nonprofessional world who's directing a theatrically released major studio film.
• 19:27
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And nothing could have prepared Japanese audiences for House.
• 19:33
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I remember the reaction, especially from the kids.
• 19:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>"Oh, finally, this is a movie for us." The film, in its very form, represents that to many young people, especially people who are starting to make 8mm and 16mm films in the late 70s and early 80sHouse was their Bible.
• 19:59
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Not because they liked horror movies or ghost cat movies, but because this was a film that playfully thumbed its nose at professional filmmaking standards.
• 20:12
  <i: Feeding the Monster>House represented opportunity to do something wild and bold.
• 20:16
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It really was a film in the very way it was made that represented a certain kind of amateur-ness that was never amateurish, but rather represented a kind of other vision of cinema.
• 20:35
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Now listen, sometimes we can get snippy about old special effects.
• 20:39
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Of course, something made in the 70s isn't going to look as good as something made in 2024, but most films aim for being as seamless as possible.
• 20:49
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Not House.
• 20:50
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It glorifies the seems, it celebrates the seams it wants to show at every single moment that this is artificial.
• 21:00
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This is true play where cinema is being exposed.
• 21:06
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Because the funniest thing in the world for Obayashi is playing with cinema.
• 21:12
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And much like the films of the French New Wave, it wanted to blow up what was considered by critics and audiences to be 'a good film.' But underneath all that playfulness and the weirdness.
• 21:26
  <i: Feeding the Monster>There is Obayashi's lifelong anti-war stance.
• 21:34
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That's Gorgeous talking about the film's ostensible villain, her undead aunt who lost her fiance in the war.
• 21:42
  <i: Feeding the Monster>She wanted to be married so badly, says Gorgeous, that her body remained alive after she died.
• 22:02
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And she eats all the unmarried girls who come here, Gorgeous says.
• 22:07
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That's the only time she can wear a bridal gown.
• 22:15
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Seeing it today, and with the context of how the world is now, I can see the perspective on war that my dad had even at the time, how it's embedded in the film.
• 22:26
  <i: Feeding the Monster>That makes it timeless.
• 22:36
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It's a kind of scary that doesn't age.
• 22:39
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Victimhood is one of the central narratives of postwar Japan, as Japan kind of avoided recognizing its own responsibility for the war by repainting itself as the victim of the war.
• 22:57
  <i: Feeding the Monster>This film consciously avoids that by making the aunt not your perfect victim.
• 23:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>She's, she's enjoying this too much to be a victim.
• 23:08
  <i: Feeding the Monster>So that reworks not only the postwar narrative, but this gendered narrative of the postwar female victim.
• 23:18
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In fact, after House, Obayashi made more than 40 movies.
• 23:23
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Most of them were war related.
• 23:25
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He actually makes a good number of films in the 80s and 90s, which have none of this kind of playful special effects, which can seem much more realistic.
• 23:37
  <i: Feeding the Monster>They can seem quite romantic and lyrical and quite serious.
• 23:42
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He became a very well known director, beloved and revered in his country, if not as well known outside of Japan.
• 23:50
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Obayashi did not stop making films until the very end of his life.
• 23:55
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Towards the end, he made a film called Hanagatami.
• 23:59
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A beautiful experimental story about youth in the pre-war era.
• 24:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>At this time, when he was making it, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and there were ideas that possibly he wouldn't live to see his film being completed yet alone released.
• 24:18
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But he did, he struggled through, and it's an epic film.
• 24:21
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And yet he's still known for this fantastical, wild take on the haunted house movie.
• 24:27
  <i: Feeding the Monster>A film half brewed in the imagination of a girl and processed into unforgettable images.
• 24:36
  <i: Feeding the Monster>House might not be the scariest haunted house movie ever.
• 24:40
  <i: Feeding the Monster>It might not even be the scariest haunted house movie we cover in this series.
• 24:44
  <i: Feeding the Monster>But it's a one of a kind haunting.
• 24:46
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Obayashi had a motto, which he repeated endlessly.
• 24:51
  <i: Feeding the Monster>In Japanese it's "嘘 から の 真" or "The truth that comes from a lie." He loves artifice, but he really did believe that through artifice, through this lie, one can engage in more basic truths about the human condition, or about war, or about postwar history.
• 25:16
  <i: Feeding the Monster>He does believe he's engaging with the truth, even as he's showing a woman enjoying an eyeball in her mouth.
• 25:27
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Couldn't have said it better myself.
• 25:38
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week.
• 25:41
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Follow us to hear more stories about houses and how they haunt us at the movies.
• 25:45
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Next week we explore Skinamarink, the internet's haunted house movie.
• 25:50
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I watched Skinamarink in the pitch black on my computer screen with my noise canceling headphones, and I was lulled into this trance to when a character says, "Are you awake?" I almost peed my pants.
• 26:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Follow us so you don't get lost in the infinite podcast feeds.
• 26:07
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Until then, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was hosted and written by me, Anna Bogutskaya.
• 26:13
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Ciara McEniff is our producer.
• 26:13
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Christian Coons is our editor.
• 26:17
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick.
• 26:20
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Shoko Plambeck played the voice of Chigumi Obayashi.
• 26:23
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Thanks this week to Masanari Sasaki and Nico Rivers.
• 26:28
  <i: Feeding the Monster>If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen.
• 26:33
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Every single review helps keep the poltergeists away.
• 26:36
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And if you've got questions, comments or just want to tell us about how your house is haunted, I'd love to hear it.
• 26:43
  <i: Feeding the Monster>I really, really would.
• 26:43
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Email us at podcast@mubi.com This show is executive produced by Rico Gagliano, John Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca.
• 26:54
  <i: Feeding the Monster>And of course, to watch the best in cinema, including some of the films we mentioned on this very podcast subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com.
• 27:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Thanks for listening.
• 27:04
  <i: Feeding the Monster>Stay haunted.