House

Seven schoolgirls visit an aunt's country house. The house eats them.

Nobuhiko Obayashi came from television commercials and had no interest in continuity, physics or tone. A piano bites. A severed head flies out of a well and bites somebody. A girl is eaten by a futon. The techniques are chroma key, animation, painted backdrops and in-camera tricks, all deployed at once and none of them convincing on purpose.

Toho sat on it for two years because nobody could work out what it was.

It is truly a film about the war. The aunt has been waiting since 1945 for a fiancé who never came back, and the film says so directly, in the middle of the chaos, and then returns to the chaos.

There is nothing else like it and there never will be.