The House with a Clock in Its Walls

“I didn’t think it was that scary,” my son said skeptically.

It’s not scary for most adults, true, but there’s material in there almost guaranteed to disturb a very particular audience, Christian parents.

If stuff like a young child being tricked by an evil presence to practice necromancy or a shell-shocked warlock making an onscreen blood pact with a demon (with a recognizable demon name) fails to scare young children, then their parents will be even more disturbed. I remember back when I was six, and concerned Christian parents were losing their minds over The Care Bears Movie. If they think the book in that was evil, I mean, this book’s got like a pentagram, and the kid’s blood drips into it…

Some parents are skeptical when their kid wants to trick-or-treat as Harry Potter. Imagine how they’ll react when he asks to go as Azazel, Fourth Prince of Hell! (I’m not sure that’s the right ranking for him, but I’m not going to Google it so late at night.)

In fairness to the movie, its most diabolical/Satanic/alarming elements are portrayed as evil and dangerous. But I’m guessing some parents will not want their young children exposed to such things at all.

Oddly enough, most of this extreme stuff (the stuff most likely to freak out parents) isn’t actually what makes the movie scary. (In fact, when that demon shows up, he kind of looks like a Muppet extra from Labyrinth, which makes it hard to take him seriously.) My nine-year-old daughter got decidedly spooked and leaned over into me in dread during several tense, creepy moments throughout the movie, but when that Man-or-a-Muppet demon showed up, her immediate reaction was incredulous giggles. The moment may even be intended as comedy to a degree because everybody can see the human involved is using such poor judgment. I suppose mentioning the demon’s involvement is a light spoiler, but I think parents deserve a head’s up on that one since the charming movie poster and spooky trailer gloss right over just how dark the dark magic gets.  

As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, The House with a Clock in Its Walls is a horror movie for children. (There aren’t many of those. Return to Oz was my little sister’s childhood favorite. More recently, there’s been Neil Gaiman’s legitimately terrifying Coraline. And much of Tim Burton’s work is right there on the edge.)

I was honestly shocked when I learned Eli Roth was directing a children’s movie. I almost never watch horror, so I’ve never seen the Hostel films (torture-porn classics) or anything else Roth has directed (except the “Thanksgiving” short from Grindhouse, a film I liked overall). I’m more familiar with his work as an actor and particularly remember his turn in Inglorious Basterds, a film I really liked. Still I know Roth’s reputation as a director/producer of grisly horror. I couldn’t imagine him making something kid-friendly, but he does a pretty great job with this, especially for a first attempt. (It’s really hard to keep objectionable material out of kids’ stories.  I, personally, am laughably bad at it.)  But Roth manages to tell a good story, full of engaging characters, heartwarming moments, and legitimate scares.

To children, The House is scary (sometimes very scary. Know your child.) My nine-year-old definitely got nervous at times (although she enjoyed it), and she usually eats up spooky material, so she’s not always the easiest child to scare. (Of course, if you want to scare her, she’ll be happy to help by gamely playing along. She loves a good scare and recently won’t shut up about the voice she hears whispering to her in her bedroom. Last month, it was an alien. Now it’s graduated to an incorporeal presence.)

If you’re an adult, the movie won’t scare you at all as you watch it, but there are definitely some creepy images in the third act designed to reappear when you’re sleeping and haunt your nightmares.

Though I think the world of Cate Blanchett and Jack Black and love their performances here, I have to admit that the film is a bit uneven. It suffers from some pacing problems that may result, in part, from an odd tonal shift in the second act when the movie tries to become a fun-loving, early Harry Potteresque adventure before remembering it’s a horror movie again in time for the intensely scary finale.

The House with a Clock in Its Walls is not a perfect movie, but I enjoyed the film enough to hope for a sequel.

The Good:
The emotional resonance of Cate Blanchett’s character’s storyline is powerful enough to eclipse some of the movie’s less effective elements. I have to heap praise on Roth here. I began feeling the echoes of this particular thread before I even knew of its existence in the story.

There’s an excellent scene early on that’s such a fixture in horror movies even my nine-year-old called it out immediately.

As recently orphaned Lewis Barnavelt slumbers in his new bed in his uncle’s house, he’s visited by a very familiar apparition.

“That’s not his mother,” my daughter whispered to me because obviously. “That’s the evil thing.”

We didn’t know yet what “the evil thing” was, but I mean, come on, when your dead mother visits you and starts asking you to bring her very particular objects, that’s obviously “the evil thing.”

There’s a scene really similar to this in the (highly mockable) 1980s live action Masters of the Universe film which my sister and I watched all the time and loved even though it bears little resemblance to the far superior (though still highly mockable) He-Man cartoons.

In that movie, the recently orphaned young Courteney Cox is approached by the miraculous apparition of her dead mother, only, of course, it’s really Evil-Lyn in disguise. She wants the girl to bring her the cosmic key. In The House with a Clock in Its Walls, we get an uncannily similar scene. It sent me into a reflective trance. I couldn’t stop thinking about the intensity of the loss felt when the bond between mother and child is severed by death.

“Why did this not disturb me so much when I watched Masters of the Universe?” I wondered, overcome by a deep, crushing sadness that was almost terror. (I mean, we all die. Children lose parents. Sometimes parents lose children. There is nothing we can do about it. That’s scary.)

I assume the concept didn’t bother me as much when I watched Masters of the Universe because 1) Evil-Lyn was my favorite character and 2) I was a child with living parents (and, also of course, 3) Masters of the Universe is…um…not great).  

So I have to give The House credit for making me feel the depth and significance of that connection, and the violation of that false promise, and the shattering horror of that loss.

Blanchett, of course, has talent enough to elevate any material, but she’s not the only one who deserves credit for the emotional resonance of Flo’s journey since the movie primed me to experience it when Blanchett wasn’t even present.

Roth does an amazing job of making us feel the emotional intensity of the story. Children’s fiction (on page and screen) is absolutely crawling with orphan protagonists. Orphans are as much a staple of juvenile fiction as Mr. Darcy clones are of romance novels. But you don’t often feel the horror of the loss this deeply.

I’m totally unfamiliar with Lorenza Izzo (though I’ve just discovered she’s Roth’s soon-to-be-ex wife), but I think she plays the recently departed mother of Lewis very well. And Blanchett, as always, is excellent. Even if the rest of the movie were a mess, it would be worth watching for her performance and her character’s journey.

Fortunately, the rest of the movie is pretty good.

Another extremely compelling aspect of the movie involves the house’s one rule. Christian parents who are leery of letting their kids soak in so much occult material might want to give the movie a chance because there’s definitely a strong allusion to the second chapter of Genesis running through the whole thing, and that could make for a convenient reading of the film to discuss with your children afterwards.

Anybody from a Judeo-Christian-Islamic background can’t possibly miss this. Frankly, if you’ve ever even idly flipped through a Gideon Bible in a hotel room, or watched American TV, it’s going to jump right out at you. Little Lewis’s eccentric Uncle Jonathan (charismatically played by the always vivacious Jack Black) tells him early on that there are basically no house rules–except one. Lewis can do whatever he wants. He can eat cookies for dinner. Stay up late. Explore all the books and shelves and furniture.  Except one cabinet. That cabinet, he is not supposed to open. He’s not supposed to go near it, not even touch it. You get the idea, right? Opening up that forbidden cabinet is the one thing his new father figure asks him not to do.

The way this all plays out in the end made me strongly suspect that the author of the novel was Catholic. I mean, I know Eli Roth is Jewish, but I didn’t know anything about John Bellairs. I did order the book from Amazon a few days ago, though, in case the little kids and I wanted to read it together. Sure enough, at the bottom of the first page, we find Lewis travelling by bus to his new home. “His lips were moving, and he was saying a prayer. It was one of his altar-boy prayers,” and then we get a prayer in Latin.

In the movie, Lewis instead passes the time on the bus by shaking a Magic 8-Ball, trying to communicate with his parents. I used to pray through the Magic 8-Ball, too, when I was a teenager, hoping against hope that at the last minute we would not end up moving from the DFW Metroplex to Laredo in the middle of my sophomore year of high school. It wasn’t my Magic 8-Ball, of course. My devout parents would never in a million years have bought me a Magic 8-Ball, so I used my best friend’s. Constantly. Sadly, no matter how many times we shook that thing, it never gave me the answer I wanted. But my friend did give me her Magic 8-Ball as a going away present.

The movie highlights the importance of family and of choice. It does make magic use look pretty fun but definitely doesn’t shy away from the scary side of dabbling in the dark arts.

Some of the whimsical interludes of enchantment in the story are very charming, which is a little frustrating because these completely shift the tone of the movie. The middle section of the film is quite different from the portions book-ending it. My husband pointed out that if the tension built in the beginning were never broken, the movie might become too intense for children. That’s true, and the wonderment of these delicious middle scenes will probably delight young viewers.

I’ve already praised Blanchett’s performance, but perhaps I haven’t said enough about Jack Black. He’s fantastic here. This part is absolutely perfect for him and suits his eccentric talents beautifully. I mean, who else would play somebody’s kimono clad warlock uncle who loves to eat chocolate chip cookies baked by his platonic female neighbor and constant companion?

I was also delighted to see Colleen Camp in a small part. I actually leaned over and whispered to my daughter, “That’s Evette from Clue!” We’re all huge Clue fans at our house. I also got a kick out of seeing Kyle MacLachlan who must have had a lot of fun with his role. Renée Elise Goldsberry is also quite good.

Young Owen Vaccaro makes a very winning Lewis, and I was really impressed with Sunny Suljic as Tarby Corrigan. I kept thinking I’d seen Suljic in something before, but maybe I’m just developing a sixth sense because he has lots of intriguing projects coming up in the future.

The set design, art direction, and costuming are all really appealing, too. The movie makes us believe we really are exploring a spooky old house with a mind of its own right along with Lewis. And I loved the way that in most cases, the costumes contributed to the character of the major players.