“Torture porn” maestro Eli Roth‘s latest film, oddly enough, is the family fright flick The House With a Clock in Its Walls, a massive departure from blood and guts films like Cabin Fever, Hostel and The Green Inferno. We suppose that makes Roth’s seventh feature his most accessible film to date, taking Roth to the top of the box office charts this past weekend.
Roth’s House With a Clock is a throwback to the films that put production company Amblin on the map, and as Roth recently noted in an interview, it was Steven Spielberg who urged him to really crank up the scare factor and genuinely try to impart family-friendly frights…
Steven said to me, ‘Make it scary.’ He said, ‘Kids want to be scared. You gotta make it scary.’”
There are indeed some solid scares in The House With a Clock, but there’s one scene in particular that may very well be “nightmare fuel” for a generation of kids. It’s the sort of scene that the kids of today will be writing articles about twenty years from now (hopefully right here on BD!), citing it as a movie moment that they’ve never been able to scrub from their brain.
Spoilers, obviously, are incoming.
So the basic gist of The House With a Clock in Its Walls is that a dead magician, Kyle MacLachlan’s Isaac Izard, has come back from the dead to enact his master plan. Using the titular clock in the walls, Izard plans to literally turn back time, essentially reversing the natural order of things in such a way that humans never actually existed… and never will. Izard wants to inhabit this new Earth with only his girlfriend by his side, and for a brief moment in the film’s final act, this reversal of time actually does take place and impacts a few unfortunate souls.
One of those poor souls is Jack Black‘s Jonathan Barnavelt. For a few minutes, Izard’s dastardly plan turns Barnavelt into a literal baby, and Roth makes the insanely unsettling decision to use a lifelike baby for the sequence… with adult Jack Black’s head atop the baby’s body. Baby Black is then carried around by the film’s child star, Owen Vaccaro.
Oh and of course, Baby Jack Black also pisses all over itself. Naturally.
The imagery is incredibly creepy and highly unnatural, and Roth focuses the camera on the effect throughout the entirety of the sequence. He revels in the absurdity of the moment, playing out like perhaps the most “Eli Roth” thing about the film. Then again, a topiary lion repeatedly shitting out dead leaves for laughs is pretty damn “Eli Roth” as well, but I digress.
Speaking with /Film, Roth broke down the utterly bizarre scene.
“I saw the baby that [makeup effects artist] Adrien Morot made for Mother!… I held that thing, it was so real,” Roth explained the scene’s genesis. “I thought ‘What if you put Jack Black’s head on a baby?” We said, ‘Well, is it adult brain or baby brain?’ We said, ‘No, it’s gotta be baby brain ’cause adult brain you can have him get out of it, he’d be advising you on what to do.’”
Roth continued…
“Once we did it everyone was obsessed with the baby, and it’s such an uncomfortable image and so unsettling, but the way he treats it it’s like watching him talk to his uncle but his uncle’s also a baby. You know, it’s a Jack Black baby specifically, that’s what makes it funny.
Adrien Morot is a genius, and then Louis Morin was our visual effects adviser… [he made] some CG enhancements… the eyes… the crawling baby, cause it couldn’t fully physically crawl but you held that thing in your arms. That was a real baby. It was weird in person as it is in the movie. It’s a weird uncomfortable image.
That’s one of those things… kinda like Weird Science, that thing that Chuck gets turned into… You remember these things. And in Time Bandits when the Supreme Evil turns him into a pig and he runs up… I was really uncomfortable when the guy gets turned into a pig. You remember that stuff so clearly. Things getting turned into other things; I wanted to see it and I wanted it to look as real and weird as possible.”
And there you have it. After making five horror films and a revenge-thriller, Eli Roth’s most enduringly nightmarish image is in his debut as a family filmmaker. Just ask Twitter…
Well I don’t know what creeps you guys out but Jack Black’s full-size head on a baby body ranks right up there with HOLY SHIT WHY DID THEY DO THAT?!?
— J (@HeSlimedMeRay) September 24, 2018
Also, this film will most certainly be a fixture on lists of “movies that traumatized me as a child” by Gen Z writers 20 years from now. There’s a baby with adult Jack Black’s head that skeeved me right the fuck out.
— Nathan Weinbender (@ntweinbender) September 23, 2018
watched The House with the Clock in its Walls with the family today. The shitty CGI baby with Jack Black’s head plastered on it was the most horrifying image I’ve seen in so long and I recommend the movie for that experience alone.
— Hippie Rat (@hippierizzat) September 23, 2018
Just see The House With the Clock in its Walls. The scene with baby Jack Black will haunt my dreams tonight and onwards i imagine
— Rocky’s Boots (@JagerShakes) September 22, 2018
So, @housewithaclock was an okay movie. I was a little scarred from the baby Jack Black scene though 😨
— Angie (@angthecommoner) September 21, 2018
@eliroth really enjoyed a house with a clock it was great, i was sceaming in theaters when i saw that jack black baby it was horrific , still loved the movie
— robbiedistasio (@bobbydistasio) September 24, 2018
