Above: The movie poster for Sweet Home.
It was at the height of the early-'00s J-horror boom that director Kiyoshi Kurosawa built his reputation as a master of the eerie. A nuanced filmmaker whose methodical style provoked genuine chills, he stood apart from the glut of jump scare merchants with a brand of anxiety-inducing, existential horror that eschewed shock tactics in favour of deep, brooding atmospheres. As slow-burners like Cure (1997), Pulse (2001), and Loft (2005) left audiences lingering over the nature of the human condition, a turn to family drama with 2008’s Tokyo Sonata would then mark the apex of his career with an Un Certain Regard Jury Prize win at Cannes. Fast-forward to September 2020, and he’s been recognized for excellence once again, with a Silver Lion win at Venice for his latest film, Wife of a Spy.
But back in 1989, the rookie director was at the reigns of a horror film of a decidedly different nature. Sweet Home is genre schlock at its most distilled form, a film defined by cliches and debts to Western classics like The Haunting (1963) and Poltergeist (1982), rather than the visceral terror of Kurosawa’s later works. In the years since its release he's publicly disowned it, blaming producer interference for an inferior final cut—and yet the film maintains a unique legacy. Sweet Home is the basis for one of the biggest video game franchises in history, and it spawned a whole new genre of gaming in its wake.
Sweet Home presents a fascinating case study. Produced by cult Tampopo (1985) director Jûzô Itami, distributed by Godzilla production house Toho, and starring Japan Academy Film Prize-winner Nobuko Miyamoto, it is, essentially, a B-movie with big ambitions. Roping in legendary, Oscar-awarded special effects and make-up artist Dick Smith (The Exorcist (1973), Scanners (1981), The Godfather (1972)), it follows a naive filmmaking crew exploring a dusty old mansion in search of forgotten artistic treasure. But surprise, surprise, things start to go awry when a malevolent spirit wreaks havoc within its walls. As a ghostly colossus awakens and dismembered corpses begin to crawl, the "sweet home" of the film's title promptly reveals itself to be not so sweet after all.
Few could argue that it's original, but Sweet Home is certainly a lot of fun. The film bears little in common with the meditative and fastidious directorial style Kurosawa would cultivate by the end of the decade, but the thrilling and formulaic plot, hapless stock characters, and rich set design were endemic of a boom in cheaply-produced genre films that would hit Japan in the early ‘90s. The spectacular physical effects are genuinely impressive. From sliding flesh to a molten lava throne, they are the heart and disturbed soul of the movie.
Above: The title screen for the game Sweet Home
But it's the unique marketing strategy of the film that is at the crux of Sweet Home's unexpected legacy. Produced at the latter end of one of the most barren decades in Japanese cinema history, where the advent of home video caused mayhem for the box office, the major studios resorted to bold new methods of promotion in an attempt to fuel sales. In the case of Sweet Home, a video game for the 8-bit Famicom system (better known as the NES in the West) was produced in conjunction with the movie. This wasn't a straightforward cash-in; the two mediums of Sweet Home were produced simultaneously, with Kurosawa and Itami serving as supervisors for the game, and with the marketing for each fused together into a singular television commercial.
Neither format of Sweet Home was ever released outside of Japan. In fact, such a rarity did the film become that VHS copies would exchange hands via internet marketplaces for up to $160 a copy in the years after its obscure release. But the Famicom title, which follows the film's plot with a closeness that was unprecedented for a video game at the time, fared well. Pitting the cast against ghouls and monsters inside the film's Mamiya Mansion, and even recreating one of the goriest set pieces, it offered one of the first genuine explorations of horror on a home console.
"Experience the first true survival horror film!"reads the tagline for a DVD version released years later, likening the original film to the popular video game genre it spawned: "survival horror." These games, popularized in the mid-'90s with Sony PlayStation releases like Resident Evil, Clock Tower, and Silent Hill, recycled the same tropes that Sweet Home had built it's wild goose chase upon: a vast, labyrinthine setting, an inescapable evil, and an emphasis on puzzle-solving.
Kurosawa's film earmarks countless devices that would become staples of survival horror titles, particularly the Resident Evil series. The opening of Sweet Home finds the camera repeatedly dwelling on a key in a red velvet box, as if to highlight its necessity for gaming progression. It is used, in the film, to enter a foyer marked by a grand staircase and marble statues, which bear an uncanny resemblance to that of the Spencer Mansion 1996's Resident Evil. The whole premise of Sweet Home, wherein a documentary film crew armed with video cameras visit a booby-trapped house cursed by family tragedy, is knowingly referenced in the teaser demo for Resident Evil 7—a game that went on to sell eight million copies upon release in 2017.
It's little surprise that Tokuro Fujiwara, the co-creator of the Resident Evil video game series, had worked under Kurosawa and Itami in the creation of the original Sweet Home Famicom title. He even claims that his 1996 title was supposed to be a remake of Sweet Home—an effort to implement gameplay that had not been feasible seven years earlier due to hardware limitations. His franchise would go on to span 33 unique gaming titles, as well as the Resident Evil film series, which, ironically, bear far less in common with their video game counterparts than with Kurosawa's Sweet Home.
Above: Sweet Home, the game.
Fujiwara hit the big time with Resident Evil, but Sweet Home did little for Kurosawa's career. Producer Itami secretly reshot multiple scenes—including the climax—and then released it without Kurosawa's permission. For this slight, Kurosawa sued his producer; but the fallout ended up stunting his own career for the years to come. He was banished to the realm of made-for-TV and low-budget independent filmmaking—though, this fortunately occurred just as Japan's now-legendary straight-to-video “V-Cinema” boom had kicked off. Coincidentally, it would be another film based around a malevolent force named Mamiya that would provide Kurosawa's international breakthrough in 1997: his psychological crime horror Cure.
Itami, meanwhile, suffered an even worse fate in the years that followed Sweet Home. After his 1992 film Minbo offered an unapologetically critical view of organized crime in Japan, a Yakuza gang tracked down and severely maimed Itami. Five years later, his murder was supposedly orchestrated by the same gang, who claim they him at gunpoint atop a tall building before forcing him to jump to his death in a staged suicide attempt.
The ties between horror movies and video games remain strong 30 years on from the landmark release of Sweet Home. Director Guillermo del Toro, along with Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, designed 2014 horror game P.T.—a "playable teaser" for the franchise relaunch title Silent Hills downloaded over a million times in September 2014 alone. While Silent Hills was cancelled six months later when Kojima left production house Konami, del Toro remains optimistic about the future of such collaborations, hypothesizing in 2016 a "mono-platform world" where movies and games will become a singular, joint medium.
But as is the case with most supernatural entities causing terror among the living, salvation usually lies at the source of the mystery. For Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and a wealth of other terrifying titles, there is but one common denominator: a long-forgotten title by one of Japan's great modern filmmakers.