With Hellbender, the Adams Family casts their most potent spell yet

No one makes movies quite like the Adams Family. Since 2013, the filmmaking family (Toby Poser, John Adams, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu Adams) has crafted thoughtful and resonant independent films on a shoestring budget. The family members star in, write, direct, produce, and even score their films, creating singular works completely outside of the traditional studio ecosystem. While their earlier films like Rumble Strips and Knuckle Jack were dramatic comedies with an off-beat twist, the filmmakers dove head-first into the horror realm with 2019’s acclaimed supernatural thriller The Deeper You Dig. The film had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Fest, and now the Adams Family is back at Fantasia with Hellbender, a dark coming-of-age tale steeped in folk-horror.

Hellbender stars Zelda Adams as Izzy, a 16-year-old living deep in the woods with her mother (Toby Poser). Cut off from the rest of society, Izzy is told she has a dangerous disease and can’t make contact with anyone outside their confined. When she encounters a young woman on a walk around the mountain (Lulu Adams) Izzy begins to question the truth of her condition. That unease is then blown wide open after Izzy eats a live worm during a drinking game with her new friends, and she inadvertently awakens a long-dormant power within her that feeds on the life force of living beings. Desperate to protect her, her mother explains the dangerous nature of their kind and why they must remain hidden from society. But you try telling that to a teenager.

Hellbender is a bold look at an unusual mother-daughter bond, filtered through a folk-horror lens. Filled with great music (performed by the actual family members), strong performances, and striking shots of the secluded wilderness, Hellbender is a remarkable leap forward for the Adams family. We caught up with the filmmakers to discuss the inspirations behind the film, the lessons they learned from The Deeper You Dig, and how Fantasia changed their lives.

Hellbender screens next at Austin’s Fantastic Fest in September, and will arrive on Shudder in 2022.

Bad Feeling Mag: You’re back at Fantasia with Hellbender. What was it like coming to the festival for the first time with The Deeper You Dig in 2019?

Toby Poser: The first image that comes to mind is just like attacking a castle. Maybe in reverse. I mean, it just was so thrilling for us. It was the greatest invitation to the horror world. And such wonderful people. I mean, [Fantasia co-director Mitch Davis] is just the coolest, most supportive guy.

John Adams: Yeah, I think in a sentence, it changed our lives. Because you know, our lives are film and soccer and cooking and all those things mixed together. And when we walked into Fantasia, it just changed our life. And we saw it immediately. It was like, “Oh, wow. So this is life-changing.” And just in a wonderful, magical way.

Zelda Adams: Yeah, it really did so much for us. And Fantasia was so welcoming to a weird family like us, which we appreciate.

What inspired Hellbender? Was there a defining moment after The Deeper You Dig that led to this idea?

John Adams: I’ll answer two things. One is we learned a lot from the reviews on The Deeper You Dig about things maybe we could improve on and also things that maybe we did well, and that was really great. That’s why something like Fantasia is so wonderful because you get reviews, you meet so many people that give you honest feedback. So that helped. But the real thing that really got the subject going was that Toby found out that her father wasn’t her blood father, the father that she grew up with wasn’t her real father. It’s a beautiful story [though]. [But] we were like, “imagine if your father was the devil.” [Laughs] And how weird that would be. And so we started out with a movie called The Devil’s Daughter, but it got boiled down to Hellbender.

Toby Poser: And my dad ended up being a nice Jewish doctor.

John Adams: He’s not the devil.

What led you to concentrate on the mother-daughter storyline for the film?  

Toby Poser: It’s always difficult to tell what comes first, our life or our creativity. And in our case, it’s just this symbiotic beast at this point. And so since we are mother and daughter, and Zelda was 16 when we started shooting Hellbender … we like to tell stories about families. And in our case, we were a family with a daughter who’s on the cusp of adulthood. And so we were tinkering with that idea, not only of an adolescent coming into her own power, but also a parent, and what that means and all the mistakes that are made. To us, it’s really enriching to find parallels between real life and the stories in our film. It just deepens the narrative.

Zelda Adams: I think we also really just wanted to tell a story revolving around strong women. That was really a big goal of ours.

In terms of filmmaking, the scope feels so much bigger this time around. You were talking about some of the feedback you received from the last film; what did you want to do differently this time around?

John Adams: Well, one thing I wanted to do differently that people a lot of times said that they wish that [we] had developed the backstory or the story between the mother and the daughter a little more, because in The Deeper You Dig, [the daughter] gets dispatched pretty early. And then she’s really only a ghost, you know? So we really wanted to have fun because these two have a really fun relationship in real life, we thought it would just be so fun to capture that. It’s fun to watch.

Toby Poser: Also, movement, something that Zelda has really contributed to us is her young eye, and she’s really wanted more movement in our films. So between The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender, we got some fun toys, which Zelda really mastered. We got the drone and Zelda operates that, and also, a gimbal, a steady cam.

Music is so integral to your films, and especially in Hellbender. Can you talk about the music in the film, especially the music with the duo in the band? What were some of the influences that led to that?

Zelda Adams: Well, the music that you’re hearing is actually music that we’ve created from our family band, called H6llb6nd6r. And so we kind of wanted to build upon our band. And we were like, “Well, let’s just kind of make a movie revolving around our band and make a storyline.” And I think it’s also a great gateway into bringing fun into the movie because it’s very dark. But when you bring the music and the band scenes into it, it adds a little bit more fun.

John Adams: And Zelda and I, we talk a lot about music. And one of the things that we love about ’80s hardcore is how fast it is, like they get in and out of a song in a minute. And so these days, we try to write nothing over two minutes, and we try to get in under one minute. So it really works with soundtracks, because in soundtracks a song doesn’t last very long.

Do you ever go back to your films, sort of the way people watch old family videos?

Toby Poser: We reference our films all the time. We constantly say, “Oh, man, we’ve got to watch Rumble Strips, because Zelda was six, Lulu was eleven, and John and I were quite young. I think we keep putting it off and think maybe we’ll have a local retrospective one day, because it’d be pretty wild to watch them again.

Zelda Adams: And you’re so right, that it is like family videos. I can look back on those movies in ten years and see tiny Z, you can also see our filming evolution, which is fun.

Your filmmaking style, especially on these last two films, is really well-suited to horror. Is that something that you want to continue exploring, or are there other genres you want to branch out to in the future?

Toby Adams: We definitely want to stick around in the horror scene. We didn’t start there. We started with drama. But I think once we stuck our toes in horror, it was just like, “Where have you been?”

John Adams: You know, the horror world is very accepting of taking chances. And they’re very accepting of art. And that’s something that we really want to do. We found our family, and it’s a great family.

Was Hellbender filmed during the lockdown?

Zelda Adams: It was, yeah. We bought a truck and a trailer and decided to hit the road because I was doing all online school. We were like, “Let’s just go drive around America, get some wonderful footage, and film our movie.” And so that’s what we did. Some of the scenes were with my sister, Lulu Adams. And in the scenes, we were even social distancing with her.

Toby Adams: The prologue of the film with the women was shot right before the lockdown. I think we shot that on March 7. So everyone’s huddled there, but they are outside. But we were lucky to squeeze that in. And then after that everything changed for us.

You can see some parallels to the COVID situation within the story as well.

Toby Adams: I think so. I think there began to be very clear parallels between the isolation of these characters and COVID. And even the one character Amber says, “none of us can get close.” It’s kind of true. We liked the parallel between the isolation of these people and the loneliness that a lot of people were experiencing at the time. We didn’t set out to make a COVID film, but there definitely were some clear parallels.

Many indie filmmakers that receive a lot of acclaim for their early works are often approached by Hollywood these days and offered Blockbuster projects; is that something that interests you if those opportunities come up? Or do you really enjoy the complete control that you have now as a unit, which must be really hard to give up?

John Adams: We probably all have different answers. My answer is that I love the way we operate. It’s so fun.

Zelda Adams: I think we work really well together as a tight-knit group. It would be nice to have a bigger budget, I think we would have more opportunities. But I still want to work with just us.

Toby Poser: It’s fun to learn next to each other. I mean, as John and I, as adults, were learning the ropes of filmmaking, so were our 6 and 11-year-old kids. And now Zelda is 17, and Lulu is 22. How many families can say they get to do that together? I have to say, it’s pretty cool. And if we weren’t a family, it would still be fun, but in this case, we get to live and learn and create at the same time, and that’s been the best gift ever.

John Adams: I have to point out too, it would be so weird to work in an industry movie, because we move so fast, like we shoot everything and we’re wrapped up in like in an hour. And it would be so odd that in an hour, you know, the snack tray would be out, you know what I mean? It would just be so odd how cumbersome a production would be. I’m sure it would be really fun too, but we would have to bend our minds around that. Because if we see a tree and we like the way it looks, we set the camera up, we set the mics up, we quickly have a conversation about the different things we can say, we shoot it and we leave before someone comes and asks for a permit. [Laughs]

What are you working on next?

Zelda Adams: We’re working on a new story. It’s going to be another horror. With some, I would say, western and gangster sub-genres. It’s going to be a time piece about a traveling gangster family.

John Adams: Zelda wrote this terrific skeleton that is basically a gangster family, traveling, doing vaudeville, and they’re pretty vicious in something that they do. And, like all vicious people, the devil comes back to get its pay, and they pay a heavy price. We’re having a lot of fun getting ready to blast off.

Hellbender screened during the 2021 edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival and will screen during Austin’s Fantastic Fest this September. Hellbender will be available via Shudder in 2022.