How Eli Roth Shifted From R-Rated Horror to Amblin’s The House With a Clock in Its Walls

Author: Germain Lussier / Source: io9

“I’ve been looking to do a movie like this for a long time,” Eli Roth told io9 in Los Angeles recently. Thanks to films like Hostel and Cabin Fever, the director’s name has long been synonymous with gory, intense, R-rated horror. That’s why seeing his name on the PG-rated family film The House With a Clock in Its Walls initially seems so surprising.

“I was actually thinking of ideas that I could write [myself] because scripts like this just aren’t really being made.

Scary kids movies are almost a lost genre now,” Roth said.

Most kid-targeted movies these days are animated, or they’re PG-13 sci-fi or superhero movies. Roth wanted to make a movie like the ones he grew up watching: Time Bandits, The Dark Crystal, Dragonslayer, Labyrinth. So, he was delighted when producer Brad Fischer, with whom he was working on another project, acquired the rights to a 12-book fantasy series written by John Bellairs that starts with The House With a Clock in Its Walls.

Roth saw it as exactly the kind of movie he was looking for, a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gremlins, E.T. and Poltergeist, which he cites as his “seminal theater-going experiences.” And those films all have one thing in common: They were produced by Steven Spielberg’s company Amblin, which is the same company producing The House With a Clock In Its Walls. That link really got Roth fired up to take what is, in his mind, the next step in his career.

“I looked at Sam Raimi’s career. I looked at Peter Jackson’s career,” Roth said. “I remembered what Raimi did with Spider-Man and how excited I was or what Peter Jackson did with The Lord of the Rings, thinking about his early films, and how excited I was for that.

How they each took those [horror] sensibilities and applied them to kids’ fantasy.”

However, Raimi going from Evil Dead to Spider-Man, or Jackson from Meet the Feebles to Lord of the Rings, somehow feels more natural than Roth going from Hostel to, well, anything. In truth, though, Roth says the language and violence restrictions actually opened up his creativity in ways he didn’t…

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