With Mike Flanagan’s
new Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House causing
quite the stir this Halloween, it seems inevitable that plenty of its
newfound fans will find themselves looking back at the past screen
versions of Shirley Jackson’s iconic horror novel. One of the
finest haunted house tales ever written, it is no surprise that
Jackson’s masterpiece has long been a subject of fascination in the
world of cinema, and has been adapted several times with varying
levels of success. Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation, The Haunting,
is a masterpiece in its own right, with potent atmosphere and
slow-burn psychological horror that still packs a punch. Jan de
Bont’s 1999 version, on the other hand, is terrible: a gaudy and
overdone pile of mediocre CGI that jettisons the book’s
intelligence and subtlety and is exactly what you would expect from
an adaptation by the director of Speed. But what most people
don’t know is that there is a third film which, though uncredited,
draws heavily enough from Jackson and Wise’s work that it may as
well be an unofficial loose adaptation or remake. The details of the
story are substantially different, but the structure and spirit are
very similar indeed, and the result is a very good film in its own
right which effortlessly blows de Bont’s embarrassment out of the
water. That film is the 1989 Toho/Capcom co-production Sweet Home,
written and directed by Japanese master of horror Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Much like The
Haunting (of Hill House), Sweet Home follows a team
of investigators who travel to a notoriously haunted mansion isolated
deep in some wooded hills; a mansion haunted as a result of the
horrible, tragic deaths that befell members of the family for whom it
was built. The film’s atmospheric sense of dread, its
characterization of the house as a malignant entity, and its gradual
unveiling of the tragic history that resulted in its haunting all
draw heavily from both Jackson’s novel and Wise’s film. The
differences are mostly in the specifics: rather than a team of
paranormal investigators, the team in Sweet Home are art
restoration experts and documentarians, who have come to make a TV
special about the house, which was built not by an industrialist, but
a famous painter. They have come to capture the unveiling and
restoration of paintings believed to be entombed inside the house;
paintings from the final months of the great artist’s life, when he
barricaded himself inside his haunted home and set out to chronicle
the story of his family’s tragic fate. It is a very effective
reinterpretation of the same basic premise, and one that offers great
possibilities for creepy art design, which the film thoroughly makes
use of.
The other way in
which Sweet Home differs from its obvious-if-uncredited
inspiration is in its approach to the horrors of the haunting. While
Shirley Jackson’s novel is far more psychological than visceral,
and Robert Wise’s film is a true slow-burn that believes in
suggesting rather than actually showing, the studio intended this
film to be a much more aggressive special effects showstopper; a
Japanese answer to the likes of Poltergeist. Fortunately, it
meshes this more visceral style with the gradually-building nature of
the story very smoothly, in a way that mostly really works. It still
starts as a solid slow-burn, but (mostly over one fantastic, long
sequence) builds up to a special-effects-driven horror-show.
Ironically, it handles this balance much more effectively than the
official 1999 remake of The Haunting, whose CGI-heavy effects
sequences often felt woefully out of place. It certainly helps that
both the atmosphere and the effects are excellent, and Kiyoshi
Kurosawa is an expert in building and sustaining suspense. The
haunted house ambiance is absolutely spot-on, with art design of
foreboding decay draped in heavy shadows. The shadows are also the
key to one of the film’s creepier visual elements: one of the ways
in which the haunting manifests is by bringing the shadows to life as
a slithering, malicious entity (think of the fan-favorite Doctor
Who episode Silence in the Library). The effect is
technically simple – just practical lighting - but has got to be
one of the more unique and effective ghostly presences in the genre.
The effects elsewhere in the film, however, are decidedly more
elaborate.
In an unusual move,
Toho flew in American special effects maestro Dick Smith (Scanners,
Ghost Story, Tales from the Darkside) to handle the
film’s special effects, and he pulled out all the stops. The
haunting of Sweet Homes Mamiya Mansion takes many forms,
ranging from atmospheric and subtlely creepy to in-your-face gory and
insane, and they all look great. There’s ghostly makeup, there’s
animatronics, and there’s unexpectedly nasty gore that feels
reminiscent of a Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci flick. Smith was
clearly given the keys to the funhouse on this one, and he makes the
most of it. The effects work alone make the film worth recommending,
but the film is strong enough in its other aspects that they are more
like the icing on the cake.
Not that the film is
without its flaws. Of course, one could argue that it is a flaw in
itself that the movie is basically an uncredited remake of another
film (one could call it a rip-off if they were being less kind), but
it brings enough of its own mythology and unique backstory to the
table, and Kurosawa executes it well enough, that most fans tend to
give it a pass. It does, however, have a pretty erratic tone in the
first act, with some too-broad comic relief that feels out of place,
especially once the characters get to the house and the film enters
its atmospheric build-up phase. In keeping with the excessive
broadness of some of the comic relief, some of the characters (ie,
the obviously more disposable characters) are too one-dimensional for
their own good. There are also a few moments early on where the film
tips its hand a bit too heavily (why is there a six-foot-tall axe
just sitting around in a way-too-conspicuous way? Could it be to set
up a gory kill later? I wonder...). The rumor is that, not unlike
Poltergeist, Sweet
Home's production involved a bit
of a power struggle between the more uncompromising horror auteur
officially in the writer/director's chair and producer Jûzô Itami,
who wanted a more mainstream-marketable commercial film, and one
can't help but suspect that it is from this behind-the-camera tension
that its first-act unevenness stems. Fortunately, these flaws
are more or less isolated to the first half-hour of the movie; once
the haunting of the house kicks into high gear, they are long
forgotten as the film gets very good, and as Kurosawa presumably
takes a stronger hold on the film's artistry.
There is one more
very important detail that no review of Sweet Home would be
complete without: the film was the result of a collaboration between
Toho and Capcom, and was produced simultaneously with a video game
version for the Famicom (Japanese Nintendo). This may be a unique
situation in both film and video game history: it isn't a
video-game-movie or a tie-in game based on a film, but companion
pieces made in tandem, exploring the possibilities of the story using
the strengths of both mediums. The game follows much the same initial
story as the film, and features many of the same art-design and
horror motifs, but also noticeably breaks off in terms of the ghostly
foes that the players face. Sweet Home for
the Famicom is often called the first survival-horror game, and it
truly does fit the bill: in many ways (right down to the creepy
mansion setting and the use of a door-opening animation as a loading
screen) it feels a lot like a precursor to Capcom's Resident
Evil of a decade later.
Gameplay-wise, the combat is a pretty accessible, not excessively
deep or grindey RPG (think Mario RPG
or Pokémon
in terms of depth), while the
exploration elements very much blaze the trail for survival-horror
conventions to come, and the game presents a pretty solid challenge
and level of tension. And despite having 8-bit graphics in a top-down
style similar to the original Legend of Zelda,
it is a genuinely atmospheric, gory game that is about as disturbing
as something for the Famicom/NES could possibly be. Between the gore
and the very dark subject matter, it is unsurprising that Nintendo of
America refused to release the film on their more family-friendly
version of the platform, and as a result the game has never been
officially available in the US. However, a fan-sourced
English-language version exists as ROMs and “reproduction
cartridges” for NES, and is highly recommended for fans of
survival-horror or retro gaming.
Since
the game was never released in America, it is not a huge surprise
that the film did not come out here either, given that in the 1980s
foreign-language horror was thought to be an extremely niche market
in the US. However, it is shocking that in subsequent years Sweet
Home has gotten as little
distribution as it has, which is to say, none at all. The film has
never been released on DVD anywhere in the world, and was only ever
released on VHS and laserdisc in Japan, meaning that is has never
been officially available with English subtitles. This is presumably
due to rights issues, possibly resulting from the unusual partnership
between Toho and Capcom which produced the film, but regardless of
the reason, it is a real shame: Sweet Home is
thus almost impossible to legally purchase, and literally impossible
to legally purchase in any version that non-Japanese-speakers can
understand. And unlike most films with this level of rareness, this
isn't some obscure indie, but a big-budget, major-studio theatrical
feature which by all rights should have several DVD and blu-ray
special editions by now. Fortunately, as with the video game, fans
have come to the rescue, and an English-subtitled version of the film
exists on YouTube. It has been up for quite a while without getting
pulled, so presumably it is safe for the time being, but I highly
recommend that you watch it while you can, since for the foreseeable
future this is likely the only way it will ever be available.
Sweet Home is
a strange beast: a visually-impressive major-studio horror
blockbuster, written and directed by one of Japan's finest genre
auteurs, with special effects by one of America's great
practical-effects artists, which despite that pedigree is almost
entirely unavailable through any official channels. That it doesn't
have an Arrow or Scream Factory release by now is somewhat
mystifying, and probably proof of how tangled its rumored rights
issue really is. While we can hope that eventually this situation
will change, it seems rather unlikely, so we can at least be grateful
for the fan-subbers who uploaded it to YouTube in its only English
version. As a loose, unofficial adaptation of The Haunting
of Hill House, it is worlds
better than Jan de Bont's The Haunting,
and as a haunted-house horror-show in its own right, it is very
impressive. It may start out a bit silly, but Kurosawa's expert
atmosphere and tension paired with Smith's wild and nasty effects
work are a powerful combo. If you devour Netflix's The
Haunting of Hill House and want
a very different take on the same basic concept, this Japanese
counterpart may be just the thing. And if you're looking for a new
horror game to enjoy this Halloween, the NES game would be an
excellent choice as well.
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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