An Interview with the Adams Family, writers, directors and stars of HELLBENDER!
L-R: John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser
Parents know how hard it is to get their kids to do anything, let alone be part of a home movie. The Adams Family (not that one) is comprised of John, his wife Toby, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu. Together they write, direct, and act in their own films, which have been making a splash in the indie horror world. Their latest of which is the recent Shudder hit “Hellbender.” You’d never guess the disgusting things they think about lensing on the way to soccer practice.
“Hellbender” is the story of Izzy (played by Zelda), a reclusive teenager kept on a short leash by her loving, but unnamed mother (played by Toby), who knows more about their family’s dark history than she lets on. Black magic and heavy metal ensue, which Zelda, Toby, and John were happy to spend time talking about.
Lowell Greenblatt: When you're conceiving a project like this, how do you decide which family member has which role in front of, or behind the camera?
John Adams: That's the first time someone asked that. Zelda, what do you think?
Zelda Adams: I think, simply put, whoever's not in front of the camera is the one directing, controlling, and making sure everything is going smoothly. What do you guys think?
JA: You know, the first horror movie we made, “The Hatred,” was more of a test run for whether we wanted to do horror. Toby was writing a script, and Zelda and I were driving to soccer practice when she said “we should make a horror movie.” I said “oooh that sounds fun!” She said “And I want to kill a lot of people,” and I was like “even better!” A 12-year-old killing a lot of people sounds great. From “The Hatred,” we learned a lot about what we liked and what we didn't like, and then we made a movie called “The Deeper You Dig.” Again, Zelda said “I want to be a ghost, but let's twist it so it's not the classic ghost story where I’m like, playing a piano.” She wanted to turn it on its head. Toby was also really interested in tarot and she did all this research, so that story came together because each of us took the time to talk through what kind of character we wanted to be.
ZA: It's really cool because our family life and our filmmaking left are totally intertwined. There are a lot of times when we're driving to soccer practice or we're having dinner just talking about the movies that we want to create, and the scene that we want to shoot later. So many of our ideas just start to combine and it's so fun to see how they communicate with one another.
So when you sit down to dinner, do you ask Toby “is there blood in this?”
[Zelda laughs]
JA: She knows there’s blood in it. She just asks “who’s blood is in it?”
“Hellbender:” a family film!
How did you come up with “Hellbender” as your next project after “The Deeper You Dig?”
Toby Poser: Two things, really. First of all, we have a band, H6llb6nd6r, which preceded the movie. We were making music videos and and we started to notice a visual style that was coming out, especially for a song called “Black Sky,” that was just kind of witchy and dark with crooked trees. We explored it further and thought about what a hellbender entity actually is.
I also discovered that my father, who I grew up with, was not my biological father, and I was donor-conceived. Learning that when you're 50 really gets the wheels turning, narrative-wise. Like what kind of story can we build off of this? We came up with this matrilineal descent of badass women.
ZA: At first we were like, “what if your father was the devil?” Then we said, “wait a second, who do we think we are? We don’t have a budget for this.” So we made it much more miniscule and decided to make our own mythological creature.
Izzy (Zelda Adams) watching Amber (Lulu Adams) like she may or may not be food.
Speaking of which, how did you come up with the hellbender mythos?
JA: We definitely wanted to make our own mythological figure. We didn’t want to make a movie about JUST a vampire or JUST a cannibal. We wanted to have our own set of rules and we talked a lot about what they could be. We went through a lot of things. Originally hellbenders got their powers from eating babies. Like what’s the worst thing you can do to get power? Someone said “eat a baby!” Then someone said “no, eat a puppy! That’s worse!”
Yeah, that might be worse.
We filmed it, but it looked silly and we thought it wasn’t not going to fly. What is it that we're actually going after? We decided that it would be fun to use this as a metaphor. In the past, women were tortured and killed because of their power and intelect. And what drives that desire to kill them and torture them is fear. We thought fear is where they can derive their power from. We wanted them to have exceptional power because we wanted them to be one step above humans on the food chain. That was important so the audience could ask themselves “who am I rooting for here?” They’re vicious to my kind [humans], but as a hellbender, shouldn't they be the best hellbender they can be? So hopefully the audience is a little conflicted about who they're rooting for.
A movie like this is on a budget, but many of the effects really got me. How much of it was CGI and how much was practical? How do you decide you're going to put your daughter on her back with blood and entrails coming out of her for days on end?
JA: Well we decided to because it's so fun. [Laughs] “What could be the worst thing we could do? Oh, splitting Lulu in half.” We work with a guy named Trey Lindsay, who's basically our fifth family member and a wonderful human being who always says yes to all of our ideas and works really hard with us to create the effect that we want to do. It’s a combination of practical effects and CGI, but mostly we like to shoot things organically so they feel real. Lulu's chopped-off body was a huge driftwood tree with seaweed and syrup all over it, with Lulu sitting on a picnic table pretending to scream in pain. It's a lot of fun to do this stuff and it's a lot of fun to try to do it honestly.
One more question: what CDs did Mother give to Izzy?
JA: Ooo, great question.
ZA: I never had a question like that ever. I absolutely love that. Knowing how similar the mom and Izzy's relationship is to our relationship, I would say that the mom gave Izzy like a Tom Waits CD, which is something that Toby would give to me. But if I were to give a CD to Izzy, it would definitely be “American Idiot” by Green Day.
TP: Actually one of John's bands, Banana Fish Zero, was in the pile of CDs.
Hold on. I have to ask, what kind of music is Banana Fish Zero?
JA: Party punk. We were a regional act that toured up and down the East Coast. We loved having fun and we were definitely off-color. The sound of BFZ has kind of filtered into “Hellbender.”
ZA: I think we might even cover a song from Banana Fish Zero in the H6llB6nd6r album that's going to be released on vinyl. But they’re on Spotify.
Interview edited for length and clarity. “Hellbender” is currently streaming on Shudder.
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