House (1977) (Criterion Collection)

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Upset by her widowed father s plans to remarry, Angel sets off with six of her schoolgirl friends in tow for a summer getaway at her aunt s isolated mansion. In this house of dormant secrets, long-held emotional traumas have terrifyingly physical embodiments and the girls must use their individual talents if any are to survive.

How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi's indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip about a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt's creaky country home and comes face-to-face with evil spirits, a demonic house cat, a bloodthirsty piano, and other ghoulish visions, all realized by Obayashi via a series of mattes, animation, and collage effects. Equal parts absurd and nightmarish, House might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. Never before available on home video in the United States, it's one of the most exciting cult discoveries in years.