John Adams And Toby Poser Of The Adams Family Talk Their New Creature Feature “HELL HOLE!”
A new Adams Family film is becoming an annual tradition. The prolific filmmaking family is back with arguably their most accessible film yet, the Shudder exclusive “Hell Hole.” John Adams and Toby Poser have directed another, homemade horror film, co-written with their daughter Lulu Adams (their other daughter and collaborator Zelda Adams is hanging back for this one, since she’s starting a modeling career, but don’t worry, she’s still in the band).
To be fair, the “Y” in their “DIY” aesthetic is a bit of a stretch this time around, as “Hell Hole” marks the first time the family shot with a full crew, as well as overseas. Trey Lindsay, their special effects artist teamed up with genre legend Todd Masters to make a creature feature about American frackers in Serbia, who dig up a parasitic creature. John and Toby also star with an international cast in a gooey throwback that just made waves at the Fantasia Film Festival. They’re always a pleasure to talk with, and this time was no exception.
Lowell Greenblatt: Serbia is a long way from your home base in upstate New York. Did you write it for New York originally?
John Adams: We were inspired during a trip we took. We were driving from Montana to Alaska, through the Alberta fracking fields and we thought “oh man, we have to write a movie about a man camp getting invaded by a monster. That’s where it started. When we went on “The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs,” the producers asked if we had any ideas. We told them that idea, because it was something we could never do as a family. Those guys had all known each other from working with Troma, so we thought it would be a chance for us, the Adams family, to make a good, Troma-esque monster movie. We were going to shoot it in the Catskills, but they called and said “hey, we’re going to shoot it in Serbia.” And we were like “okay, let’s go to Serbia!” So Toby rewrote the script.
LG: What were the considerations for rewriting the script for the change of location?
Toby Poser: We didn’t know exactly where it was going to be shot when we rewrote it, but when we realized we were going to shoot there, it was so perfect. Like we called the outbuilding you see “the Gulag.” Really it was more about the languages. The environmentalists are actually speaking Solvenian and we’ve got the French [character]. We love traveling, and languages, and I think it enriched the story. You’ve got international frictions and histories of fractured countries.
Image: Shudder
LG: It’s a good mix. Speaking of Troma, I’ve described the film as the best 90s Full Moon Pictures film ever made. There’s one particular kill in the middle of the film that’s a bit of a spoiler, but looks like Trey has upped his game with special effects. Was that all him, or did Todd work on it, too?
JA: Great question. Trey does some stop-motion tentacles mixed in with Todd’s tentacle monster, and there’s a skeleton we filmed in there. So it’s basically a composite of three different real, organic things happening.
LG: How did you wind up working with THE Todd Masters?
JA: [Producer] Matt Manjourides brought in Todd. He loves Todd. Everybody loves Todd, and now we know why. Not just because he’s a great effects man. He’s a great human being. You want to stand next to him when you’re doing art. It’s all positivity and ingenuity.
TP: He’s the nicest guy. I was just emailing him a little while ago. And there’s DNA and pieces from his past movies like “Men In Black” and “Slither” in there. It was a quick job to get ready for, so they recycled a lot of stuff. It was really fun.
LG: Trey Lindsay is usually your go-to effects guy. Did he work in conjunction with Todd?
JA: Trey came with us to Serbia to work with Todd, who is his hero. It was a great meeting of minds and they had a ton of fun working together. Even though these monsters look beautiful, they’re hard to film for too long. You have to figure out ways to really keep them alive and interesting for the camera. So Todd gave Trey lots of tentacles of all different sizes, as well as a miniature 3D model of the big monster. Any time there’s a long take of the monster moving, it’s Trey taking the miniature and shooting it in stop-motion. Those two love stop-motion. They were like “this is a [Ray] Harryhausen shot, and THIS is a Harryhausen shot.” So it’s all real.
LG: You all collaborate as a family, but was this the first time you wrote a script with Lulu?
TP: She was living in South Korea at the time, and kind of just whipped out that first draft, which was a gift. There’s still DNA from that draft, particularly in the Teddy character. She got it rolling for us, and there were changes when we found out we were shooting in Serbia.
JA: She also brought the humor. When we read her first draft, we thought “let’s lean into this. Let’s have fun and mix the gruesomeness with humor” Our films usually have dark humor, but it’s not the kind we employed in this movie.
LG: The film was obviously inspired by the parasitic horror of “Alien” and “The Thing,” but I love the tropes you invert. The “corporate” guys are sympathetic and trying to save lives, and the conservationists seem a little too gleeful at the discovery of a monster. How much was Lulu and how much was the two of you fleshing it out?
Image: Shudder
JA: Thanks for talking about that. It was just important to us. These days, there’s so much volatility in any kind of…anything, really. What was fun about these characters was just what you said, making sure everyone is in the same soup. There’s no right and wrong, no blue and red. That’s what was really important to us. Like [Toby’s character] voted for Bernie Sanders. And she’s also making some tricky ethical and moral moves. The first time I saw that was in “Ghostbusters,” where the environmentalist was the “evil character.”
LG: There really is no “bad guy” here. It’s just where characters are leaning, which is interesting.
TP: Even the monster itself is a living thing, which is probably better than a human and a cephalopod, two incredibly intelligent creatures trying to be something more to survive. So it's hard to try and pin down the malevolence of something that just wants to survive.
LG: Exactly. It didn’t ask for this. It just wanted a warm place to hide. Speaking of the creature, how much of it is based in science?
TP: You know, the spiel [the character] is giving about the chemical, the shell, the egg case, and the brew chamber is all steeped in real science, because I love that shit [Laughs]. I love cephalopods. I read a lot about this woman, Jeanne Villepreux-Power, who studied the argonauts. Everything she’s talking about is true. It’s so fascinating. The stuff about the bacteria is true for mollusks in general. We just extended it to humans in case someone asks “how did he live so long?” But I enjoyed researching it.
LG: I love that this is still an Adams family film, even at a higher level. How do you maintain your identity with more money and resources coming in?
JA: I think we knew this was going to be a learning experience so we could continue understanding our identity. After “Hellbender,” we were approached by a lot of people to make movies and we wanted to know what it was like to work with a crew. What the rules are, and stuff like that. We discovered there are a lot of rules when you work with other people, and with a production company. There has to be rules when like 60 people are moving something together or else there’s chaos. It’s a pirate ship with all the bad pirates. You want to be on a pirate ship with one bad pirate.
LG: Sure. When everyone has a peg leg, you need a real one to stand on.
JA: That’s what we learned. We grew up as a family with no rules for our filmmaking, and we saw there were a lot of rules here that we have to stick to so things don’t fall apart here in Serbia.
TP: It was a challenge, but it also comes down to the writing. Nobody was saying “oh, you can’t do that” or “can you change that in the script?” That’s where a lot of our natural humor and our interest in genderbending, and all those little things that find their way into our films. We were able to stick to that, which was really nice.
LG: So what’s next? Your band released a new song, so in what context will we hear it?
JA: We’re working on a really fun movie right now. We’ll lay the title on you and see if you like it: “Mother of Flies.”
LG: Oh, I’m sold.
JA: “Rotten” is one of the songs that goes with it. We love writing the music that goes through our films. We’re almost done shooting it, so we’re very excited about it.
Interview edited for length and clarity. “Hell Hole” premiers on Shudder August 23rd.
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