Nobuhiko Obayashi, an idiosyncratic Japanese filmmaker whose wide-ranging résumé included a horror movie about a house full of furniture that eats schoolgirls, a fantasy about a boy who befriends a six-inch-tall samurai and an antiwar trilogy that he completed while being treated for cancer, died on April 10 in Tokyo. He was 82.

The cause was lung cancer, which was first diagnosed in 2016, The Associated Press said, citing an announcement on the website of his latest film, “Labyrinth of Cinema.”

Mr. Obayashi’s startling feature debut, in 1977, was “House,” a demented horror movie that is more comic than scary. The Los Angeles Times called it “one of the most enduringly — and endearingly — weird cult movies of the last few decades.”

Reviewing it in The New York Times in 2010, when it had a theatrical run at the IFC Center in Manhattan in advance of a DVD release, Manohla Dargis described the goings-on.