Hellbender, the newest film from family filmmaking team Adams Family Films, premiered at Fantasia Fest 2021 and quickly found its place among my favorite films on the festival lineup. The film takes a unique approach to occult horror and coming-of-age stories as it follows a mother-daughter team of witches called Hellbenders, mixing elements of hard rock music, mythmaking, and folk horror to create a chilling yet completely unique piece of horror cinema.
I had the chance to speak with directors Toby Poser, John Adams, and Zelda Adams over Zoom after the festival’s close, where Hellbender won Best Score and Best Actress. We talked about small-scale filmmaking, occult mythology, and the complexities of parenting and family dynamics.
Film Cred: Hi there, folks! I got the chance to watch Hellbender as part of my Fantasia coverage and absolutely adored it. One of the things that really caught me about it, that I didn’t realize until the credits started rolling, [is] that it’s really just the three of you behind the scenes of everything. The three of you are listed as directors, and John and Zelda are listed as DPs, so I wanted to know a bit more about how you approach the filmmaking process, how collaborative [it] is, or if there’s a distinction between a ‘Zelda’ thing or, say, a ‘Toby’ thing.
Zelda Adams: Well, we’ve been making films together for 11 years now, and we’ve kind of figured out who is good at what, but we really try to do pretty much everything all together. Whoever is not, like, being filmed and acting on camera is the one behind it, controlling the camera and directing.
Toby Poser: Yeah, we all come up with ideas together. We spend a lot of time in the car together, or hiking, or over meals, and that’s sort of our office. We’ve got this wandering office which is basically anywhere, and in our office we conjure up ideas. I really like to write, so I might slap down a scene. We rarely work with a set, full script, so the scene will really just be a jumping-off point. And John’s amazing with music, as well as many other things.
John Adams: Thanks. Yeah, I think Zelda’s answer is right on the money. At this point, we kind of know who to count on for what, and then we kind of know that there’s some responsibilities we share all across the board like directing.
FC: That’s fascinating! I was really impressed watching the credits roll and being like, “Wow, it’s the same three people over and over again!”’ [Toby], you mentioned John’s skill with music, and music is a big part of Hellbender. Maybe this is a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question, but which came first: the idea for something with this music, or this story about these two witches and their relationship that came to involve their fictional band?
JA: You know, I think it’s funny that…so, we have the band H6LLB6ND6R and we’ve been playing together for a while, and we were working on this move idea and bouncing ideas off of each other, and I think what really happened is, once we settled on what the story was gonna be, we knew from our last movie that we wanted to have more joy in Hellbender, even though it was going to be a dark tale. It just became super apparent that we want to show the relationship between the mother and daughter, we want it to be fun, because we want, y’know, we want it to have that great drama, and what better way than to have them do what you guys [Toby and Zelda] do in real life, which is be in a band together?
ZA: We had a band called H6LLB6ND6R because we just loved the name, Hellbender. And then we were like, well, we’re creating a movie with some sort of witchcraft, why don’t we figure out what a Hellbender is? Make our own mythological character. So, I would say this movie definitely came along just revolving around the title, Hellbender.
FC: I love that you mention “joy,” because even as we’re getting into the darker parts of the film, there’s still this closeness Izzy and her mother have onscreen that I thought was a really fascinating tug-of-war. In family horror like Hereditary, there can be really over-the-top backgrounds, and the circumstances of Hellbender are so much more low-stakes, so that closeness that Izzy and her mother have feels very real. It feels very much like a real family dynamic.
TP: I think that means we succeeded with our mission, then, because I’m fascinated by family dynamics and universal struggles and triumphs we all have as individuals, and if we’re lucky enough to have a family, within a family. I think it was interesting to think, well, maybe everyone has that. Maybe life is just hard whether you’re a Hellbender or a human, and let’s do that through a really fun, supernatural glass.
FC: Speaking of that joking familiarity they have, there’s a conversation that stuck out to me where Izzy and her mother are talking about how to do different sorts of spells, like “What happens if you have ivy and spiderwebs? Oh, you can climb trees like a monkey.” One of the things that I keep coming back to when I think about Hellbender, is your approach to how magic works in this really material sense — it has this really ritualistic sense to it. I think of the key in the door, how Izzy’s mother can put her hand on this door and a key comes out, and there’s a table inside that the keys go on because they’re not just going to disappear…
JA: I’m so happy you caught that! We found this box of keys, and they were these old keys, and I was like, “Oh my god! We have to do something with all these keys!” and I loved it because it shows how many times Izzy’s mother goes up there.
FC: I absolutely loved it and all those details like that! Things like the Hellbender sigil needing to be surrounded with feathers to see what someone else is doing with this sort of ‘bird’s eye view’ and the special effect of the iris around the frame when that happens, all of that comes together to form this very material, naturalistic approach to magic, so I wanted to ask where that came from. What inspired that approach to that more herbalist style of magic, needing ingredients based on things you could find just walking around in the woods?
TP: Well, two things. One, we really wanted to not follow any rules to the best of our ability. We just thought, “You know what? We’re a family that doesn’t follow rules, why should our stories follow rules?” And when it comes to witchcraft too, we thought, “Let’s try to be as original as possible with creating our own mythology, our own rules to witchcraft.” In fact, we only say the word “witch” once in the film, when Izzy says, “We’re kind of a cross between a witch, demon, and apex predator.” It’s the only time that word ever comes up, I think because we wanted to really stick to our guns and create something different. It really was a matter of logic, I mean, little things that you mentioned like the spiderweb and the ivy are so cool because that is basically the logic behind our witchcraft. Asking ourselves, “Well, what’s sticky? Spiderwebs. What does ivy do? It clings to a tree.” Y’know, just little things like that helped inform our discoveries with witchcraft. And the second thing is, the nature of how we work is often with what is in front of us, what’s there for us to use. We don’t have big lights, we live immersed in nature on a mountaintop and that kind of tells us everything we need to know: what’s around us, what we can use, that’s part of our magic.
JA: What’s also fun is where we live is a very remote area, and it’s filled with lichen and mushrooms and glowing things at nighttime. It’s filled with magic! It’s fun to celebrate those things that you see in nature that look so magical. We wanted their plates of food, for instance — we talked a lot about that — we wanted the crowd when they saw it to be like, “That’s, like, bark and like…all things that you just would never eat,” because we wanted to have a lot of fun with the fact that they’re not human, and raspberry briars are what they eat. It’s what we see all the time, and they’re really beautiful to look at, so nature really informed us on what we wanted visually.
FC: The food is one of our first introductions to “strangeness” in the film, and I thought it was really interesting because it reminded me of Hannibal. Obviously the plating there is different to mask that it’s all…human, but I thought the presentation of food being so delicate and so foreign was really interesting.
JA: Yeah! We had a lot of fun with that. We wanted it to look like something out of a restaurant magazine, like something really pretty, because the mom really cares! She has to be really careful about what she feeds her child because if a worm or a bug or something gets in that, the inevitable gets closer. So, she’s very careful to make sure the only thing that gets on the plate is things like bark and pine cones and algae.
FC: We get further and further away from the dinner table as the film goes on, but those naturalistic elements play such a huge role. It sort of plays into the mythology you’ve come up with to go along with the Hellbenders, like the Seasons prayer at the dinner table. All these occult horror elements go along with this ‘redefining,’ in contemporary folk horror, of witches as a symbol of matrilineal power, so I thought it was interesting to see Hellbender not only tune into that but subvert this emergent trope in such a clever way. What got you to that point in the mythology, where there’s always two Hellbenders and a new one is born when one eats the other?
TP: So, we were doing research on really old women, like Lilith and Eve, and I was really into Lamia, the Libyan serpent goddess. A lot of that had to do with the whole cycle of regeneration and the idea of “the Child, the Maiden, the Crone” and menstrual blood, monthly cycles, and the moon and all that! I mean, it’s all so delicious. Basically, it boiled down to us being really stuck on the idea of the Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its tail. That played into the cycles of nature, so we thought, “Maybe these Hellbenders, to really emphasize the loneliness of what it means to be a Hellbender, is that there’s only one, or two at a time.” It’s a little sad, and it’s an immediate conflict, if you have a mother who becomes the daughter who becomes the mother who becomes the daughter…you can look at the sacrifice either way. To have a new Hellbender you have to consume the old Hellbender, you know, and on and on and on. There’s something so sad about that, and I think it can be looked at as either the ultimate sacrifice, if the mother gives herself over to the daughter in order for the daughter to become a mother, or you can look at it as an extreme case of aggression, like if the daughter instigates that. For us, once we got hitched on that, it helped so much for us to hone the dichotomy of the closeness, the love they have for each other, and the tragedy that it will end. At the end, then, Izzy is essentially saying, “Well, hey, while you’re around, let’s be a team. Let’s be our true selves, and when I’m ready…well.”
JA: And again, it was really fun to line them up with nature. Spring doesn’t announce, “I’m over!” and Summer just suddenly is there. The two of them, they’re always attached. Human beings always think of time as marching forward, so there was something fun about time kind of always reaching backwards. It’s a fun, backwards cycle, and we wanted to explore that. It’s also neat that, in effect, they really are one person. Like Toby says, the Ouroboros is ultimately one entity just spinning around. The Hellbenders are like that too, like yin and yang. They’re fighting against each other, and they’re loving each other. So, it was fun just to kind of explore that. It was very important that the seasons thing ran in reverse. It was very important that Fall, like, reaches back into Summer. Summer doesn’t fade into Fall, and that was really fun for us.
FC: Similar to the Ouroboros that you mentioned, Toby, I loved watching Izzy have this coming-of-age story and kind of being a lot more like her grandmother without knowing it. It was especially interesting considering families being a central topic, but the idea of Izzy’s mother hiding the past because she’s trying to be better, it had me questioning how long this exact cycle had been happening. Zelda, you especially really stand out as Izzy, learning all of these new things, and it feels like you can almost see what her grandmother would’ve been like. Obviously, you mentioned you don’t go in with a fully set script, but in terms of performance for you and Toby, what was it like to perform that role and embody these ideas, especially having that boundary between your real relationship and the constructed one between your characters?
ZA: It was really fun, playing Izzy and considering the parental themes that were coming into play. Toby is NOT a strict mom, and I’m very grateful for that. In the movie, though, the mom is trying to keep these things away from Izzy, which just makes Izzy want to do them even more, and she’s just going to try to find out how to do them on her own without getting good advice or talking about it. You see that in real life all the time: strict creates sneaky, so it was really fun covering that theme since it’s really different from how we live in real life.
TP: Yeah, it was really fun to take things that happen with many human families, mothers and daughters…the parents always want to try to protect their kids, especially if they’ve been wild. I think it’s the wildest ones who are like, “Do NOT do drugs! Do NOT drink!” I think part of it is because, you know, “I did it. I’m so glad I didn’t OD or crash my car or get hit by a car or whatever,” and another part of it is we just want the best for our kids. Parents get caught in lies all the time. We were looking for little parallels all the time, so, like, the stash of maggots, y’know, lots of parents are off nipping tokes on their weed and telling their kids not to do drugs, or the book that’s hidden in the attic. To me, it’s kind of like the equivalent of kids going into the attic and literally finding all of the secrets there, including their dad’s Playboy magazines, or their mom’s Playgirl magazines, or their diaries of their parents and realizing all these incredible things their parents did. It was fun to find those parallels, and for teens as well. Izzy is literally testing her boundaries when she goes off of her property and finds Amber, and figuratively she’s testing her boundaries by going to the book behind her mom’s back. We thought it’d be really cool to show these universal themes of the hardships of being a parent, right, or an adolescent, just as Hellbenders.
FC: Absolutely! I think that’s about all the time we have, but I’ve really loved getting to hear more about Hellbender and all of these fantastic little things I missed the first time around. I know that Hellbender is coming to Shudder early 2022, and I wanted to get your folks’ thoughts on that decision: was that something you were expecting or hoping for? How does that feel?
JA: We’re totally blown away and completely thrilled. We all agree: one of the great things about Shudder is, well, there’s lots of different kinds of horror and lots of different kinds of horror fans, and we really enjoy the community Shudder has built around that. It was a pretty huge honor that Shudder bought our movie from us, because that’s exactly where we wanted it to be, so we’re super-duper thrilled, and they’re incredibly nice, because they do treat us like what we are, which is a family of three that’s having a lot of fun making movies together. They talk to us like that, and they treat us like that, and it’s a great relationship so far.
ZA: Yeah, every morning we kind of wake up and we’re in awe of just, like, what’s going on. It feels like we’re so lucky. I know that Toby’s mostly been on the production side of it, but I know that Yellow Veil has just been so wonderful and so helpful, so we’re extremely grateful to them as well.
FC: Yeah! I remember talking to a friend of mine about how I was hoping I’d be able to show Hellbender to other people and she had said, “It sounds like completely a Shudder kind of thing,” so it was really cool to see it end up there. I just want to reiterate before we wrap up that I had so much fun watching Hellbender. It was such a treat of a film, and I wanted to give props to the three of you as a team because it’s really something special that I just had a wonderful time with. Again, thanks so much for taking the time to talk and I’m really excited to watch Hellbender again when it comes out!
