House

1977’s House is a classic of what writer Chuck Stevens calls “le cinéma du WTF?!,” and it’s one of our favorites of the genre here at The A.V. Club. (We even inducted it into the New Cult Canon a few years back.) Written by director Nobuhiko Obayashi based on one of his young daughter’s nightmares, House is like an episode of Scooby-Doo directed by Richard Lester while he was utterly zonked out on psychedelics. Or maybe it’s like a ghost story told around the campfire by a precocious preteen who’s also out of her mind on psychedelics. You know what, maybe just watch the trailer:

Trust us, it’s utterly delightful, and it’s playing at the Music Box Theatre this Friday and Saturday at midnight screenings hosted by our friends at The Front Row. (You may remember them from the screenings of Boarding House and Hardware we told you about earlier this year.) We’re giving away tickets to this weekend’s shows, and to win, you just have to send an email to avcontests@theonion.com with the subject line “Hausu.” We’ll draw winners tomorrow, Friday, June 9, at 3 p.m. CT, handing out four pairs of tickets that’ll be good for the midnight shows on the nights of either June 9 or 10.


Later this summer, The Front Row—whose mission statement reads, “The Front Row is dedicated to the exhibition of cult classics as well as the reintroduction of obscure cinema deserving of greater recognition. Films are presented in the best quality format available, most often in archival 35mm”—will also be presenting screenings of cult classics Anguish, Hard Boiled, and Last House On Dead End Street. You can find links to the Facebook events for those screenings above.