The House With A Clock In Its Walls

This fall, gore-meister Eli Roth is preparing to bring something unbelievably shocking to the big screen– a family movie.  The man behind blood-soaked fare like the ‘Hostel’ movies, ‘Cabin Fever’ and ‘The Green Inferno’ is going in a completely different direction with ‘The House With a Clock in Its Walls’, based on John Bellairs’ gothic children’s novel.  The film stars Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, and ‘Daddy’s Home”s Owen Vaccaro.

Vaccaro plays orphan Lewis Barnavelt, who must move in with his eccentric uncle Jonathan (Black) who lives in a strange house once owned by a warlock named Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLachlan).  “You’ll see,” Black’s character says, “Things are quite different here.”  Along with Jonathan’s neighbor, the always-dress-in-purple Florence Zimmerman (Blanchett), Lewis discovers a world of magical mysteries, none of which is as bizarre as the titular clock, which is hidden somewhere in the walls of the house.  But while they can hear it ticking, they cannot locate it.  As Uncle Jonathan ominously declares, “We don’t know what it does, except… something horrible.”

‘The House with a Clock in Its Walls’ arrives in theaters this fall, just in time for Halloween.  As Roth stated, he grew up on Amblin Entertainment films, like ‘Goonies’, ‘Gremlins’ and ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and since this film is being released by Amblin, Roth channeled his childhood memories into this project and even used the vintage logos for the trailers.  Roth got to work with one of his idols, Steven Spielberg on this film and his influence is detectable in the trailers.   Roth also cited Guillermo del Toro, Sam Raimi, Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton as influences in the VFX-heavy feature.  Not only is this Roth’s first family movie, it’s his first period piece as ‘The House…’ is set in 1955.

Here, you can see the first trailer for the film:

 

And here, you can see it, with Roth’s commentary, in which he described some of the process he used in developing this film:

 

As a bonus, here are a few photos from ‘The House with a Clock in Its Walls’:

 

And finally, here is another edit of the trailer, just for good measure:

 

The screenplay was written by Eric Kripke, best known for his work on TV on ‘Supernatural‘, ‘Timeless and Amazon’s upcoming comic book-adaptation ‘The Boys‘.

‘The House with a Clock in Its Walls’ opens on September 21, 2018.

Source: IMDb