VID: Great White Cat (Hausu)

[terajk]

Fandom: Hausu (1977)
Music: Theme from Jaws by John Williams
Summary: You’re gonna need a bigger appreciation for surrealism.
Content notes: Physical triggers (e.g., epilepsy or migraine: strobe lights, bright lights, “stutters” cuts between 2–3 stills), gore, surreal violence
Length: 1:44

"Jaws Hausu signed" (Watch on YouTube)

Download MP4

First things first. Without the lovely fionnaadams this vid would not exist. In my time of despair she told me that, yes, you can make blank screens between clips in iMovie.

After making A Happy Song Where Everybody Dies, I still had a ton of clips left over and I felt kinda bad for not getting enough scary bits in. (Beneath its lightheartedness, Hausu is basically a horror movie.) I’d read that the Toho film company had asked writer/director Nobuhiko Obayashi “to dream up a movie which would capitalize on the success of the recently released Jaws.” Except that I remembered it as “to make a movie LIKE Jaws.” Semantics? Probably. But I specifically asked myself “What if Hausu were more like Jaws?”

Also, I didn’t know that Shiro the (cute and fluffy) cat was evil until, like, Gorgeous is putting on the lipstick and you see Shiro’s eyes flash green. I didn’t even know she isn’t even Gorgeous’s cat–I mean, why would Gorgeous just pick up a strange cat and pet it? I haven’t been this duped by an adorable creature since Puella Magi Madoka Magica. (I figured her tripping the teacher was just your standard kitty assholery.)

In other words, this vid is my love letter to Shiro the Evil Cat. (Or, at least, a “Damn, You’re Scary!” letter.)

This is the first vid I’ve made to a song without lyrics–which was intimidating but a lot more fun than I thought it would be. So much fun that I forgot to listen to the music all the way through before laying clips in the timeline and had a complete rough draft before realizing that the music just…stops. I thought I could find a full version and just keep going for another 40 seconds, but the full version sounds different and I would’ve needed to remake the whole vid. And more importantly, I like this version better.