Editorials

How ‘The Happiness of the Katakuris’ Subverts Horror Movies – and Musicals

August 21st, 2024 | By Nathan Keowen

The moment a flying demon rises from a woman’s soup to steal her uvula at the top of The Happiness of the Katakuris, director Takashi Miike refuses to limit the unrestrained chaos of his lesser-known masterpiece. Sandwiched between the release of Miike’s two most well-regarded horror classics,  Audition and Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris stands as an undefinable departure from traditional horror form. But if forced to define it, Happiness is a horror musical.

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Set at the idyllic new White Lovers’ Inn, the six-member family of the Katakuris struggle to adjust to rural life as the patriarch Masao Katakuri leads them on his quest to run a successful family business.  As a soft remake of the Korean horror film The Quiet Family, the movie begins by following the dark trajectory of its Korean counterpart. Guests start dying in unexpected ways, and the family resorts to hiding the bodies to maintain the reputation of the Inn. But it takes little time for the film to shatter its simple horror narrative into a thousand musical pieces.  

It begins with the discovery of the first body, a guest who has mutilated himself with the Inn’s room key. As the camera pushes into the dark bedroom crime scene – complete with a few spooky jump cuts and eerie music stingers – the family of the Katakuris leaps into the room with a song and dance ripped from any great rock opera.  

This horror musical continues its blissful anarchy with love ballads, choreographed dance numbers, a disco music video, a zombie choir, and a finale ripped from the opening scene of The Sound of Music.  Even the tagline on the American poster calls it, “The Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead.”  The Happiness of the Katakuris torpedoes its horror narrative, transforming it into a ridiculous musical extravaganza.  And yet somehow the film retains its horrific elements – zombies, a volcanic world-ending eruption, and a crazed serial killer – and manages to merge two genres.  But how can these two conflicting genres function together?

To address how these two genres function as one, both, the horror and musical operate in heightened realities. In both cases, the audience is asked for a high level of suspension of disbelief. In one case the audience is asked to believe in mad scientists, zombies, and blood-sucking monsters, and in the other, audiences are expected to accept a character breaking into song and dancing around their world as if nothing about their choreographed lifestyle is strange.  

Within their heightened realities both genres use a similar approach to tension and catharsis regarding narrative release. In the horror movie, the audience is waiting for the kill, and in the musical, waiting for the song. In both cases, whether a character begins to scream or sing, both serve as the moment of release. And when the two genres are combined, these two moments are usually combined to act as one. As the knife comes down, the villain breaks into song.  

Horror and musicals are made from the same fabric, and yet the combination of the two genres also plays as a glorious recontextualization of the musical in particular. In horror musicals like Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Shop of Horrors, and Happiness, the mode of musical is upended. The traditional fanatic jubilance of the musical and the grim macabre of the horror flick force a reevaluation of the musical setting.  

In director Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors, the pop styles and music of 1960s Americana are contrasted with its dark man-eating plant B-Movie narrative. In Jim Sharman’s Rocky Horror Picture Show, the joyous marital musical narrative is thrust into the dark sexual world of Dr Frank-N-Furter. The world of zombies, murder, and suicide smash into the peaceful family story of Miike’s film. The horror narratives serve as a disruption of the “normal” happy musical.  

In all three films, the audience is at first presented with stories that promise to bring about a heteronormative happy musical ending. Little Shop’s Seymour pines for the lovely shop girl, Rocky Horror’s Brad proposes to Janet, and Happiness’ Katakuris look forward to the time when their Inn will provide the perfect family life for them all. Then the horrors begin. The horrors subvert and critique of the perfect happy musical. The horrors take the safety of the song and dance and make them deadly. 

Within the genre’s subversion, the horror musical uses its mode to assess and judge its cultural movement. Rocky Horror moves to play with the heteronormative expectations of the 1970s, Little Shop attacks the wild capitalism of the 1980s, but what does The Happiness of the Katakuris have to say with its subversions?

At the end of both Rocky Horror and Little Shop, the characters are faced with near-world-ending calamities (see the Little Shop original ending). Both films are deeply bleak. Miike takes Happiness in a different direction. Instead of forcing his well-intentioned-but-criminal family to their rightful and just comeuppance, Miike gives them the one thing they’ve been dreaming of all along – a perfect valley for their Inn filled with snowy mountains, waterfalls, and elephants. The family dances in the sunlight, freed from the horrors of the bodies they’ve hidden, the serial killer on the loose, and the zombies that rose from the ground. While this happy ending seems to parody the musical genre’s common need for a clean resolution, Miike seems to be pushing for a different final tag to his film.

Takashi Miike’s finale for the Katakuris subverts the subversion of the horror musical. Instead of embracing horror’s dark twisting of the musical, Miike uses the musical to subvert the horror genre. Instead of infusing a musical with darker themes, it feels as though Miike is elevating his horror movie with joy, chaos, and ridiculous fun. Every element of The Happiness of the Katakuris drips with, well…  happiness. Both Rocky Horror and Little Shop are rooted in tragic story arcs, but Miike refuses to take his family story to its darkest conclusion, breathing a new life into a sub-genre that at its core is about taking itself less seriously.