Eli Roth’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls comes from Amblin Entertainment, the same production company behind E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Gremlins, The Goonies, and other family-friendly genre classics. What else do those films have in common? They were all directed, written, or produced by Steven Spielberg, who gave Roth, best known for grisly horror fare like Hostel and The Green Inferno, some advice about making his first kids movie.
“They really wanted to relaunch what Amblin was in the ’80s. Steven [Spielberg] couldn’t have been more supportive of me,” the Cabin Fever director said. “And when he saw the movie, he said, ‘Eli, you really did it. You really made a true Amblin movie. It’s not mocking or beholden to something before it, yet it feels like it’s in the tradition of those. You’re really carrying the torch.’ It was pretty magical.” Spielberg also told Roth that The House with a Clock in Its Walls should be “scary” because “kids want to be scared. You gotta make it scary.”
Some kids are scared by magical pumpkins, others by Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan in the “Ava Adore” music video. It’s a generational thing.
“I look at what Sam Raimi did with Spider-Man or what Peter Jackson did with Lord of the Rings. I love their early horror films. Those are the directors that I aspire to be like. You go see Spider-Man and you see the Sam Raimi in it, and his Evil Dead fans, there are little jokes in there for them, too. So people that love my horror films are going to see this and definitely see my sensibility.” (Via)
Do you want to see Jack Black be involved in some wacky magical hijinks, and also get tortured and have his heel sliced open while chained to a chair? Go see Eli Roth’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls, opening September 21.
(Via Vulture)
