Breaking the Mirror: Hausu and Bad Love Objects

ABSTRACT:The 1977 Japanese horror movie Hausu has become infamous for its exaggerated, cartoonish representations of teenage death: of girls being eaten by pianos, submerged in bleeding clocks, smothered by a torrent of pillows, or dismembered in kaleidoscopes of swirling, two-dimensional objects. When writers care to analyze the film at all, it becomes an emblem of atomic destruction or an excursus on the need to educate a less informed, consumer-oriented audience; its wild aesthetic flourishes solely as a cipher for its political critique. Making use of queer area scholarship, cultural studies work on shōjo manga, and historical investigations into the gendered qualities of the Japanese nation, this article seeks to refocus this often-disregarded film from being understood solely as either a kitschy cult artifact or an allegory for Japan's wounded postwar nationality. Rather than cultivating a coherent political project, Hausu aligns homoerotic bonds between women both with the capacity to inflict injury and as a potential escape from injurious bonds. To view the film in this light is thus to reconfigure this "bad object" (as in, trashy midnight movie) through the lens of queer theory's bad object: a portrait of same-gender intimacies without nonnormative guarantee.