The director Eli Roth has previously indulged his cinephilia with gory exploitation throwbacks (Hostel), but in The House With a Clock in Its Walls, he makes a nostalgic fun house movie geared toward a younger crowd, and it pays off. This screen version of a celebrated 1973 book by John Bellairs doesn’t have the sophistication of an adaptation like Hugo, but no film in which Cate Blanchett head-butts a vivified jack-o’-lantern could be entirely without merit.

The movie has the pleasingly demented texture of early Tim Burton. It bears the logo of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company and is seen from a Spielbergian child’s-eye view. After the deaths of his parents, Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) goes to live with his uncle, Jonathan (Jack Black), secretly a benevolent warlock. Jonathan is obsessed with finding a clock hidden in the house by its previous magic-dabbling occupant (Kyle MacLachlan). Lewis asks to apprentice.

The pleasures of the movie are mainly in the design of the Victorian house and its grounds, replete with a chair that behaves like a dog, and in the affection for re-creating the 1950s period, down to a surprise use for Ovaltine. Black is perhaps too sardonic a presence, but Blanchett — as a fellow spell-caster — takes evident pleasure in deadpanning lines like “I melted Salvador Dali’s watch once, right off his wrist.” Playing material like this with conviction is its own form of magic.