Zelda Adams Talks New Coming-Of-Age Horror Hellbender Premiering On Shudder

The New York filmmaking family The Adams are back with a new film Hellbender, premiering as a Shudder Original this February.

Real-life mother and daughter Toby Poser and Zelda Adams star in Hellbender, about Izzy who suffers from a rare illness that has kept her isolated with her mother her whole life. She begins to question her sickness, pushing back on a life of confinement to learn the dark secrets of her family’s past. I spoke with Zelda Adams at Fantasia Film Festival about the coming-of-age horror film and working with her family.

The initial idea for Hellbender came after learning a real-life secret about her mother Toby Poser’s background. “Two years ago, [my grandmother] had cancer and was slowly dying. Right before she died she told my mom [that she was] donor conceived. [Her] father that [she] grew up with is not [her] biological father.,” Adams told me. “That made my mom and all of us start thinking, wait, what if her real father was the devil?”

Originally the family had the idea for a movie called The Devil’s Daughter, but, when they realized their production wasn’t big enough for something of that scale, they switched gears to focus on an original mythology. “[We thought] what if your parent was a witch and then we decided to make not exactly a witch story, but our own feminist mythological creature called the Hellbender. That’s how Hellbender was born,” she said, highlighting that the creature isn’t hyper-sexualized as women often are when coming into their own in horror films. “There’s no sexuality of the mythological creature. They reproduce on their own. That was really important to us in the process.”

The film explores growing up and a monologue, used in the later half of the film, teases what has been awakened within Izzy. “We loved using that poem to give insight into what is actually going on with the mother and daughter,” said Adams. “One of the themes that was really important for us to convey is nature versus nurture. Izzy's nature is to be a Hellbender. She was raised to be a human, but she's not a human, so is it okay to face her nature? That's up for everyone else to decide.”

Hellbender also features impressive and trippy visuals that draw you further into the story. “We love playing with dream sequences in our movies. In our last movie The Deeper You Dig, we had something called The Seven Circles where the character goes into this other realm,” she explained. “Going into different realms, into dreams, gives you so much room for artistic expression and to have fun with psychedelic effects and color and beautiful landscapes. It really helps explore the unconscious.”

Not only is Hellbender a compelling story that explores the damned feminine, it’s the name of The Adams family’s experimental punk band, whose music soundtracks the film. “My family and I, we do everything together. [We] make movies, but we’ve also been making music together ever since I was a kid. In the past two years, we’ve been calling our band H6LLB6ND6R, but all the ‘E’s are sixes. I’ve grown up around music,” she shared. “So it’s really fun mixing our talents together. We really used our band in the film because we wanted to add a lot of fun into the movie.”

What makes this film even more impressive that the The Adams family — consisting of John Adams, Toby Poser, Zelda Adams, and Lulu Adams — is a one-family show when it comes to creating their films. They do it all — writing, directing, producing, scoring, editing, and even starring in Hellbender. “My parents had always been models or actors so they've always been in that art world, but as they started getting older they weren't getting as much work for that stuff. They were like, ‘Well, screw this! Let's just make our own stuff. let's make our own movies,’” Adams said. “I remember they asked me and my sister Lulu, ‘Kids, do you guys want to act in a movie?’ The movie Twilight had just come out and I wanted to be the next Bella Swan so I was like, ‘Of course, I want to act in a movie, are you kidding?’ So that’s how it all started. Ever since I was six we’ve been doing this, so that’s 11 years now. We’ve all grown as filmmakers together and we’re all best friends. We each have equal insight and input into our movies and if we ever have a disagreement we just shoot it the three different ways and in the editing process we’ll see which way works best.”

Adams shared that the whole family is so “grateful” for the film to make its way to Shudder: “It's just so exciting. Every morning we wake up and we just look at each other like, ‘What is going on? This is crazy!’” she shared. “We just feel really fortunate and so grateful.”

Hellbender premieres exclusively on Shudder on February 24.