While The House With A Clock In Its Walls might be a fun supernatural horror comedy, the movie’s ending offers a surprisingly moving message about grief, loss, and growing up. Eli Roth debuted with 2002’s grisly Cabin Fever, a backwoods chiller that mixed body horror with offbeat humor and a relentlessly bleak tone reminiscent of the genre’s nastiest ‘70s hits. Roth followed this with Hostel, Hostel II, and The Green Inferno. However, the end of The House With A Clock In Its Walls is surprisingly more uplifting and positive than the director’s previous films.
The 2018 movie is an adaptation of The House With A Clock In Its Walls, a horror-comedy juvenile mystery novel. However, the book that the movie is based on also features as many fantasy elements as it does scenes of horror. The House With A Clock In Its Walls is closer to 2015’s live-action Goosebumps adaptation than darker children’s horror movies like Coraline or Nightbooks. Still, Roth earned solid reviews for The House With A Clock In Its Walls, perhaps thanks to the movie’s surprisingly mature handling of death and trauma.
Why Lewis’ Magic 8-Ball Breaks The Clock
Lewis Had To Let Go Of His Trauma From Losing His Parents
The House With A Clock In Its Walls opens with its hero, Lewis, losing his parents in a car crash. Sent to live with the eccentric Jonathan and his neighbor Florence, Lewis soon learns that the pair are a warlock and a witch, respectively. When the vengeful ghost of Jonathan’s ᴅᴇᴀᴅ friend Isaac tries to end the world with the eponymous demonic clock, Lewis is forced to leave behind his last physical connection to his parents to save everyone. In the process, Lewis lets go of his attachment to their memory and moves on from his loss.
Lewis’s last link to his parents was a Magic 8-Ball they gifted him. The toy tells Lewis to “Say Goodbye” as the clock enters its final sequence, and he reads this as a message to let go of his grief over losing his parents by throwing away the toy. This breaks the internal workings of the clock, stopping its doomsday countdown. For the many genre Easter eggs in The House With A Clock In Its Walls, this moment proves that the movie’s true horror is the tragedy of loss. Lewis wants to maintain a connection to his ᴅᴇᴀᴅ parents, and the villains take advantage of this.
Why Don’t Jonathan And Florence Save Lewis?
Lewis Had To Be Left Alone To Face His Grief
Isaac’s unᴅᴇᴀᴅ wife, Selena, takes the form of Lewis’s late mother to convince him to summon Isaac. Once Isaac was back in a human body, he could use the demon Azazel’s dark magic to protect his doomsday clock. This dark magic summoned a giant snake that Florence was forced to fight down in the boiler room while another trap turned Jonathan into a baby. This needed to happen metaphorically since Lewis had to be alone when he faced his grief, conquered his fear of loss, and found the strength to throw away his Magic 8-Ball.
Why Serena And Isaac Created The Clock
They Grew To Hate The World During World War II
The villainous Selena and Isaac created the clock to turn back time and destroy humanity after Isaac was driven to nihilism by WWII. While both Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween and The House With A Clock In Its Walls starred Black as eccentric horror-comedy heroes with supernatural skills, Jonathan had a far darker past than Black’s Goosebumps franchise character. Both Jonathan and Isaac were scarred by what they saw during the war, with their trauma taking them on very different paths.
Isaac’s trauma led him to become a villain as he consulted the demon Azazel about creating a clock that could turn back time and undo human history. Meanwhile, Jonathan becomes the strange, eccentric warlock that he is when Lewis meets him. As he did so, the demon Azazel convinced Isaac that destroying humanity would undo the horrors of WWII. Unlike Lewis and Jonathan, Isaac couldn’t let go of his trauma for long enough to see through this lie.
Isaac created the clock alongside Selena, convinced that this would somehow make up for the horrors of the war.
Thus, Isaac created the clock alongside Selena, convinced that this would somehow make up for the horrors of the war. While Lewis could accept that something terrible had happened to him in his past, Isaac was driven to evil by a desire to rewrite reality, and Selena joined him down this dark, doomed path.
Why Lewis Hits Tarby In The House With A Clock In Its Walls’ Ending
After Lewis saved the day, it might seem a little strange that he pettily used magic to hit his classmate Tarby with a basketball and humiliate him. However, this PG-rated horror movie has a good justification for this goofy scene. The duplicitous Tarby briefly befriended Lewis earlier in the movie but turned on him as soon as Tarby won the тιтle of class president. Magic allowed Lewis to stand up for himself, get revenge on his fair-weather friend, and gain a new love interest as he impressed one of his classmates with his magic-ᴀssisted layup.
What The House With A Clock In Its Walls’ Ending Really Means
Lewis Was Finally Able To Move On From His Parents’ Deaths
In The House With A Clock In Its Walls’ ending, Lewis and Isaac become mirror images of each other. The clock and the Magic 8-Ball are artifacts that tie the characters to their past. While the clock’s destruction kills Isaac for good, the toy’s destruction frees Lewis from his grief and allows him to enter adolescence unburdened by tragedy. While Disney’s Goosebumps reboot offers a PG horror story where kids and adults face their fears together, The House With A Clock In Its Walls is scary because Lewis can’t rely on his elders.
Lewis realizes that his parents aren’t coming back.
In the final scenes of The House With A Clock In Its Walls, Lewis realizes that his parents aren’t coming back and that, even among magicians, anyone who promises him otherwise is taking advantage of him. His loss is tragic, but he can also let go of his past and move on. This is something that Isaac’s trauma never allows him to do. Thus, Isaac dies for good while the hero of The House With A Clock In Its Walls can venture into adolescence confidently.
How The House With A Clock In Its Wall’s Ending Was Received
Opinions were mainly mixed on The House With a Clock in Its Walls. The critical score on Rotten Tomatoes was a slightly above average 65%, and the audience score was a rotten 45%. However, one audience member who loved the film’s themes wrote, “It is an inspirational film that celebrates the human spirit in the face of adversity. I enjoyed The House with a Clock on its Wall for it’s an inspiring story about love, compᴀssion, and heroism and doing the right thing. The film, although somewhat formulaic, will definitely pull at your heartstrings.“
However, the bad reviews were for very specific reasons. Film critic Tasha Robinson wrote for The Verge that it felt like the movie didn’t do enough to really tell a good story:
“The House With a Clock in Its Walls feels a great deal like the early Chris Columbus Harry Potter films, with their forced whimsy and upbeat, frantic pacing. Nothing about those early films had much sense of weight or impact — they just felt like a maniacal race to get deeper into the story.”
In a Reddit thread, one person said they were huge fans of the novels, saying they were their gateway to fantasy and horror as a child. However, the film left them disappointed. Redditor apexPrickle wrote, “While ultimately there’s a nice ‘found family’ theme here, it’s a little dreary, and boring, for a kid’s adventure fantasy.” That seems to be the consensus with The House With a Clock in Its Walls – it had its heart in the right place, but the film just didn’t go far enough when telling the story.
