Haunted House 7 - Hausu (1977) and Wooden Spirit (Junji Ito)

In this episode of Horror Joy, Brian and Jeff make an unplanned stop on their “haunted house tour” by traveling from U.S.-centered hauntings (slavery, Jim Crow, Reagan-era policies, conquest) to Japan, discussing Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult film Hausu and Junji Ito’s Fragments of Horror story “Wooden Spirit.”

They compare how both texts present “haunting houses” animated by spirits and brought out through women, linking them to gender roles, eroticism, and the fetishization of culture and material heritage.

They analyze Hausu’s deliberately camp, self-aware style, the named archetypes of its seven schoolgirl protagonists, its comedic-horrific deaths, and themes of girlhood’s end, queerness, postwar trauma, and consumption.

They read Wooden Spirit as eco-horror and cultural fetish, emphasizing wood’s “eyes,” seduction, and men’s uselessness, and close by finding joy in horror’s weirdness, comedy, and formal experimentation.

Breaking the Mirror: Hausu and Bad Love Objects by Erin Nunoda

Hausu of the Rising Sun: Death of the Girl by Georgia Thomas-Parr

Beyond the Panel: Cinematism and Affective Responses in Itō Junji's Tomie by Ivan Darío Jaramillo Chávez