The Man Who Made Horror Feel Like a Fever Dream
In House, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 debut feature, a piano eats a girl’s legs. A severed head bites someone on the ass. The whole film behaves like a children’s cartoon that has ingested something deeply wrong—pastel colors, cheerful music, then sudden grotesque death. It’s one of the most purely strange things Japanese cinema ever produced, and it came from a director best known at the time for making TV commercials.
Obayashi occupies a register that has no clean Western equivalent. Some fans reach for Tim Burton as a reference point, but that undersells him. Burton’s darkness is theatrical, designed to be appreciated from a safe aesthetic distance. Obayashi’s weirdness feels structural—as if he simply could not conceive of telling a story any other way. His follow-up films, including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and The Last Snow, each operate in their own invented grammar. You don’t adapt to his work so much as surrender to it.
He was also, for decades, a committed feminist in an industry and an era that made that genuinely unusual. His films are full of young women who drive the action, who survive, who refuse the story they’ve been handed. He’s credited with inspiring a generation of Japanese girls through those portrayals—a harder thing to pull off than any number of haunted houses or time loops.
His late-career film Hanagatami arrived when he was in his seventies and battling cancer, and it burns with the restless energy of someone who still has too much to say. War, youth, the body, the way beauty and catastrophe occupy the same frame. He kept shooting music videos for idol groups well into old age, as if commercial work and serious cinema were never separate things to him. Maybe they weren’t.
Arte Tracks sat down with him around that time, and watching the interview, you get the sense of a man who finds the question "why do you make such strange films?" genuinely puzzling. For him, apparently, the strangeness is just the natural shape of whatever he was trying to say. I think about that sometimes when I’m watching something competent and efficient and completely forgettable.