Horror and comedy share much in common. Both are affect-driven genres that hinge on build-up and release while helping us navigate through cultural taboos. For exemplars of this genre marriage, look no further than Wes Craven (the Scream quartet, The People Under the Stairs, and Shocker) or Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2). However, effectively combining the two can prove challenging, and Kôji Shiraishi’s new film House of Sayuri is a case in point. Pitched explicitly as a horror-comedy, it hits some bumps in its merging of wacky humor with Takashi Shimizu-esque slow-burn Gothic.
The film begins with a multigenerational family moving from a cramped apartment into a spacious (but haunted) house, wherein a revenant spirit announces itself through increasingly menacing means — nocturnal whispers, possessions, and eventually murder. Shiraishi deftly handles the escalating supernatural intrusions. A specter flickering in guttering staircase light prefaces intense violence; one memorable scene depicts a dying character’s blood painting the wall red (a possible homage to Dario Argento’s Tenebre) before finally culminating in Junji Itô-esque surrealism, a ghost’s face unfurling into a mass of writhing tentacles.
Which is to say, Sayuri makes overtures to the cultural anxieties underlying many haunted house narratives, with several lines pointedly alluding to what constitutes a “happy life.” An early scene depicts a teacher asking her disinterested class to analyze a poem by posing questions such as “Where do we find happiness?” and “What exactly is happiness?” The film ultimately disavows the notion that domestic ownership equals anything like existential fulfillment or familial harmony. It locates horror in the conformist embrace of cultural repetitions, depicting its haunting as something like a tape stuck in a loop: the same ghostly giggle echoes through the house again and again, haunted TVs replay snippets of glitchy footage, and one character repeatedly watches the simulated reenactment of her beloved’s grisly death.
Shiraishi evinces a deep understanding of horror’s inner workings, which is no surprise, given that he’s responsible for the deeply upsetting Grotesque and the brilliantly dread-soaked Noroi, a masterclass in found footage horror. In Sayuri, he displays affection for the genre without relying on easy fanservice, and he also creates real stakes by refusing to pull his punches at crucial moments. He puts Sayuri’s clean-lined, open-concept haunted house to good use, using several cunning third-floor overhead shots to achieve scares.
Unfortunately, the film stumbles in its approach to comedy. Sayuri’s genre tensions are woven into its plot: the final act’s survivors combat undead evil by embracing their own “lifeforce,” using equal parts humor and tai chi to ward off wraiths. While horror and comedy share much in common, synthesizing the two within a single narrative can present complications: horror-comedy works best when it’s organically mining humor from its innate excesses. Put more plainly, the most blackly comic horror films know when to keep a straight face. Sayuri doesn’t locate that tricky tonal balance, so its fart gags, sophomoric jokes, and kooky mannerisms are realized as little more frustrating distractions.
At times, Sayuri does promise the kind of gonzo genre mix-up often mastered by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike — consider, for example, the former’s Real and Before We Vanish and the latter’s Gozu and Lesson of the Evil. But while it never reaches anything near the heights of those films, it contains plenty of indelible images and moments, and sometimes that’s all a good horror movie needs.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 1.
