Hausu (House), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, is the kind of movie that sends a writer scrambling for adjectives in an attempt to christen a new film genre. You pound your frontal lobes in the hope that you’ll dislodge some electrifying catchphrase that will be absorbed into film geekdom’s lexicon. I’ve been trying to come up with something hooky to describe the virtually indescribable mindbender that is Hausu. It’s not a J-horror film, it’s not a head film, it’s not some avant-garde psychological torture test, it’s not a cult film with an ironic smirk, it’s not…Well, I’m telling you what it is not. Let me try to wrap my brain around this and tell you what I think it is: Hausu is to cinema what a dream is to reality. It’s not just a simple record of events, it is the event itself. Hausu refers to nothing outside itself.

Though a mashup of pop memes, Hausu exists in a world of its own, devouring “reality”  and puking it back up in glorious Technicolor. It’s a mixtape compiled by a demented Carl Jung -  immersive, repellent, hysterical and visionary - forging a new consciousness composed of scraps of dead worlds.

Hard as it is to believe, Hausu was made in 1977. It feels as fresh and looks as startling experimental as anything being made by David Lynch or Guy Madden…except wilder.
 

 
Oh, the plot is about a demon possessed house, but that’s not important.
 
As for my new catchphrase, it’s a play on hypnagogic, that state between being awake and falling asleep. Hausu is hipnagogic.
 
Hausu will be released by Criterion in August on DVD.