10 Most Mind-Bendingly Confusing Horror Movies

The Film

Experimental Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s feature debut follows a teenage girl named Gorgeous and six of her friends as they arrive at her aunt’s creepy mansion for a vacation. But this is no ordinary house and this is no ordinary haunted house film, and here – that is, the movie’s first few scenes – is pretty much where the logical plot ends

What follows is a truly surreal and baffling expedition into the mind of Obayashi filled with amateur acting and even more amateurish effects (supposedly deliberate) as Gorgeous and her friends are terrorised by household items including a cannibal piano, a killer mattress and a possessed light fixture.

This isn’t quite doing House the weird justice it deserves so we’ll just add that it’s batsh*t insane and includes a scene in which a disembodied head bites one of the girls on the derriere. Yes, you read that right.

What The Hell It Means

It’d be easy to dismiss House as pure lunacy but there is actually method to Obayashi’s madness. Apparently, much of the inspiration behind the film came from the director’s young daughter and its more mental moments are kind of like a catalogue of weird childhood fears that only young minds could come up with – hence they don’t really make a lot of sense.

Obayashi has also said House is inspired by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Either that or he was on acid throughout filming.