Blanche the Cat (House)
Old cats can open doors, but only ghost cats can close them again.
Yeah, I bet you weren’t expecting a cute kitty in this, were you? Of course, that brings up the question of whether Blanche is actually a monster. She is, and it’s buried in the concept of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s candy-colored surrealist horror-comedy House, one of most stylistically amazing films of the 1970s.
The movie is often misunderstood as being just weird or crazy; I mean, on your first viewing, how are you supposed to take a horror movie that has lighting like a cereal commercial and has weird side trips into slapstick comedy and a train sequence through a brightly-colored matte painting and utilizes literally every single cinematographic trick in the span of 88 minutes?
But at the heart of the movie is its story concept from Obayashi’s pre-teen daughter Chigumi. Obayashi used Chigumi because he set out to make a horror movie from the perspective of a child near the ages of the characters. Many of the more “odd” things in the movie come from that, including the concept of the cute witches’ cat that helps lead the film’s seven characters to their Technicolor doom.
Blanche is sinister from the beginning. Because the movie is based entirely in magical thinking, she just appears and disappears out of nowhere before they get to the titular house, and it unsettles Gorgeous’ friends, who suspect that she is a witch’s cat. With the film’s psychedelic imagery, Blanche becomes a distorted horror monster, and an image of her deals heavily in the film’s wild climatic scenes. – Ryan Gibbs
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