Name: House (1977)
Start: 2025-10-04T21:45:00-04:00
Location: Tampa Theatre

13th Annual "A Nightmare on Franklin Street" series
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1h 28m / Not Rated (R equivalent) / Comedy, Horror
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Toho (the biggest film production company in Japan and the home of Godzilla) told experimental filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi they were “tired of losing money on comprehensible films.” Well, mission accomplished — House, the movie he gave them based on ideas from his pre-teen daughter, is incomprehensible along every axis. Gorgeous, mad at her new stepmother and seriously only referred to by the nickname Gorgeous, gathers six friends and plans a trip to visit her aunt at her home in the country. Minutes after their arrival, the house begins to spring bizarre, demonic traps to K*ll the girls. The sentence you just read can do nothing to prepare you for what this movie looks like, sounds like, feels like — victims die by piano, by futon, by mirror, by watermelon (kind of) and by cat painting, frequently represented through intentionally-unrealistic special effects and animation. Almost unknown in the US until 2009 and defiantly strange, House is part romance, part road movie, part teen comedy, part terrifying ghost story, entirely a triumph of inexplicable artistic choices. The individual pieces of the movie don’t hang together into a cohesive whole so much as they just occupy the same space, each scene connecting to the others but supplying the viewer with no clues about any previous or subsequent scenes. They’re as related but as separated as the rooms of a house.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

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VIEW the rest of the 2025 “A Nightmare on Franklin Street” series lineup at https://tampatheatre.org/movie-categories/nightmare/
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Support for the 2025 A Nightmare on Franklin Street series is provided by the following sponsors: “Mummy & Me” screenings are sponsored by Tampa Electric. Additional support is provided by First Florida Insurance Brokers. Promotional support is provided by Tampa Bay Parenting Magazine and Scaradise.