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‘The House With a Clock in Its Walls’ is Home to Eli Roth’s Most Unsettling Movie Moment to Date

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“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…

Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

Editorials

‘Leprechaun Returns’ – The Charm of the Franchise’s Legacy Sequel

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leprechaun returns

The erratic Leprechaun franchise is not known for sticking with a single concept for too long. The namesake (originally played by Warwick Davis) has gone to L.A., Las Vegas, space, and the ‘hood (not once but twice). And after an eleven-year holiday since the Davis era ended, the character received a drastic makeover in a now-unmentionable reboot. The critical failure of said film would have implied it was time to pack away the green top hat and shillelagh, and say goodbye to the nefarious imp. Instead, the Leprechaun series tried its luck again.

The general consensus for the Leprechaun films was never positive, and the darker yet blander Leprechaun: Origins certainly did not sway opinions. Just because the 2014 installment took itself seriously did not mean viewers would. After all, creator Mark Jones conceived a gruesome horror-comedy back in the early nineties, and that format is what was expected of any future ventures. So as horror legacy sequels (“legacyquels”) became more common in the 2010s, Leprechaun Returns followed suit while also going back to what made the ‘93 film work. This eighth entry echoed Halloween (2018) by ignoring all the previous sequels as well as being a direct continuation of the original. Even ardent fans can surely understand the decision to wipe the slate clean, so to speak.

Leprechaun Returns “continued the [franchise’s] trend of not being consistent by deciding to be consistent.” The retconning of Steven Kostanski and Suzanne Keilly’s film was met with little to no pushback from the fandom, who had already become accustomed to seeing something new and different with every chapter. Only now the “new and different” was familiar. With the severe route of Origins a mere speck in the rearview mirror, director Kotanski implemented a “back to basics” approach that garnered better reception than Zach Lipovsky’s own undertaking. The one-two punch of preposterous humor and grisly horror was in full force again.

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Pictured: Linden Porco as The Leprechaun in Leprechaun Returns.

With Warwick Davis sitting this film out — his own choice — there was the foremost challenge of finding his replacement. Returns found Davis’ successor in Linden Porco, who admirably filled those blood-stained, buckled shoes. And what would a legacy sequel be without a returning character? Jennifer Aniston obviously did not reprise her final girl role of Tory Redding. So, the film did the next best thing and fetched another of Lubdan’s past victims: Ozzie, the likable oaf played by Mark Holton. Returns also created an extension of Tory’s character by giving her a teenage daughter, Lila (Taylor Spreitler).

It has been twenty-five years since the events of the ‘93 film. The incident is unknown to all but its survivors. Interested in her late mother’s history there in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, Lila transferred to the local university and pledged a sorority — really the only one on campus — whose few members now reside in Tory Redding’s old home. The farmhouse-turned-sorority-house is still a work in progress; Lila’s fellow Alpha Epsilon sisters were in the midst of renovating the place when a ghost of the past found its way into the present.

The Psycho Goreman and The Void director’s penchant for visceral special effects is noted early on as the Leprechaun tears not only into the modern age, but also through poor Ozzie’s abdomen. The portal from 1993 to 2018 is soaked with blood and guts as the Leprechaun forces his way into the story. Davis’ iconic depiction of the wee antagonist is missed, however, Linden Porco is not simply keeping the seat warm in case his predecessor ever resumes the part. His enthusiastic performance is accentuated by a rotten-looking mug that adds to his innate menace.

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Pictured: Taylor Spreitler, Pepi Sonuga, and Sai Bennett as Lila, Katie and Rose in Leprechaun Returns.

The obligatory fodder is mostly young this time around. Apart from one luckless postman and Ozzie — the premature passing of the latter character removed the chance of caring about anyone in the film — the Leprechaun’s potential prey are all college aged. Lila is this story’s token trauma kid with caregiver baggage; her mother thought “monsters were always trying to get her.” Lila’s habit of mentioning Tory’s mental health problem does not make a good first impression with the resident mean girl and apparent alcoholic of the sorority, Meredith (Emily Reid). Then there are the nicer but no less cursorily written of the Alpha Epsilon gals: eco-conscious and ex-obsessive Katie (Pepi Sonuga), and uptight overachiever Rose (Sai Bennett). Rounding out the main cast are a pair of destined-to-die bros (Oliver Llewellyn Jenkins, Ben McGregor). Lila and her peers range from disposable to plain irritating, so rooting for any one of them is next to impossible. Even so, their overstated personalities make their inevitable fates more satisfying.

Where Returns excels is its death sequences. Unlike Jones’ film, this one is not afraid of killing off members of the main cast. Lila, admittedly, wears too much plot armor, yet with her mother’s spirit looming over her and the whole story — comedian Heather McDonald put her bang-on Aniston impersonation to good use as well as provided a surprisingly emotional moment in the film — her immunity can be overlooked. Still, the other characters’ brutal demises make up for Lila’s imperviousness. The Leprechaun’s killer set-pieces also happen to demonstrate the time period, seeing as he uses solar panels and a drone in several supporting characters’ executions. A premortem selfie and the antagonist’s snarky mention of global warming additionally add to this film’s particular timestamp.

Critics were quick to say Leprechaun Returns did not break new ground. Sure, there is no one jetting off to space, or the wacky notion of Lubdan becoming a record producer. This reset, however, is still quite charming and entertaining despite its lack of risk-taking. And with yet another reboot in the works, who knows where the most wicked Leprechaun ever to exist will end up next.


Horror contemplates in great detail how young people handle inordinate situations and all of life’s unexpected challenges. While the genre forces characters of every age to face their fears, it is especially interested in how youths might fare in life-or-death scenarios.

The column Young Blood is dedicated to horror stories for and about teenagers, as well as other young folks on the brink of terror.

Leprechaun Returns movie

Pictured: Linden Porco as The Leprechaun in Leprechaun Returns.

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