This 1977 Japanese cult film directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi drunkenly walks the lines between horror, comedy, live action cartoon, dream journal and unfiltered batshit insanity. In the film, seven schoolgirls visit an aunt’s country home, which clearly could use a good ghostbusting — mattresses attack, pianos gnaw off fingers, and butts are bitten. Odder than a sack full of ODDSACs, this recently Criterion-memorialized flick touches on no shortage of AnCo themes — childlike wonderment, floods of blood, and experimenting with home-brewed special effects that turn the ridiculous into the sublime.
Avey Tare: Big horror nerd here! I reached a point where I watched so many classic horror films I just wanted to dig deeper. I had this really dense history of horror films book, The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies. I would write lists down to go to Kim’s Video. We had a friend there that would just let us take movies. I lived with Eric Copeland from Black Dice, we would just spend all out time watching these movies. They had a bootleg of it. This didn’t have any subtitles on it! They were like, “It’s not subtitled, but you should watch it anyway ’cause its pretty much one of the most mind-blowing, dumbfounding movies you’ll ever see.”
Geologist: When we were making Oddsac, something Danny would be like, “Do we need a narrative here? This shit doesn’t really make sense together.” And we were like You don’t need a narrative, man. You remember how much we liked House? No subtitles on that bootleg copy at Kim’s
Avey Tare: I think the early digital effects really lend themselves to the aesthetic of this new record too. That ’80s style of drawing in weird illustrative, digital effects.
Deakin: Backmasking and stuff.
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