Eli Roth, the man behind Cabin Fever, Hostel and The Green Inferno, was certainly an unlikely choice to direct Amblin’s The House With a Clock in Its Walls, but an inspired choice all the same. After all, as it turns out, Steven Spielberg’s intention was to make a genuinely scary family horror film, hearkening back to the edgier for-kids entertainment of the ’80s.
Speaking with /Film, Roth relayed Spielberg’s key advice to him.
“They really wanted to relaunch what Amblin was in the ’80s,” Roth told the site. “Steven [Spielberg] couldn’t have been more supportive of me… Steven said to me, ‘Make it scary.’ He said, ‘Kids want to be scared. You gotta make it scary.’”
Roth added, “When you see the movie, you’ll see stuff from my other movies — just done in the PG version of it, in a very subversive way.”
In the film, arriving in theaters on September 21, 2018…
“The magical adventure tells the spine-tingling tale of 10-year-old Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) who goes to live with his uncle in a creaky old house with a mysterious tick-tocking heart. But his new town’s sleepy façade jolts to life with a secret world of warlocks and witches when Lewis accidentally awakens the dead.”
Also starring are Kyle MacLachlan, Colleen Camp, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Vanessa Anne Williams, and Sunny Suljic.
Based on the beloved children’s classic written by John Bellairs and illustrated by Edward Gorey, The House with a Clock in Its Walls is written by Eric Kripke (“Supernatural”).
