The filmmaking troupe The Adams family returns, this time with a creature feature/environmental horror story. John Adams, Toby Poser, Lulu Adams, and Zelda Adams tend to tackle their films as a family (The Deeper You Dig, Hellbender, Where The Devil Roams). This time around, John and Toby traveled to Serbia and invited Todd Masters, Trey Lindsay and some other friends along to join in on the fun.
Hell Hole‘s gooey and gory SFX, VFX and creature effects were bought to life by Masters (From, Child’s Play), with his studio MASTERSFX, along with Trey Lindsay of Moondog Pictures (Hellbender, Where the Devil Roams) and the Serbian-based studio Cinergy FX (Hellraiser).
The story centers on an American-led fracking crew working deep in the Serbian wilderness that finds themselves at odds with government-assigned environmental advisors. When they get approval to drill, the workers uncover the unimaginable: a dormant parasitic monster entombed deep in the frozen rock. Now awakened, it tears through the mining facility in search of the perfect host.
John Adams and Toby Poser joined us to chat about expanding their cast and crew, shooting in Serbia, the worst bodily orifices for a parasite to utilize, and bringing a killer cephalopod to life. Read our full interview below, and watch Hell Hole now streaming on Shudder.
You are consistently challenging yourselves as filmmakers. You definitely have a style to your movies, but they're never the same, and I never know what to expect when I'm going to watch an Adams Family film except for I know I'm going to have a good time and I know it's going to be weird This time we went with a sci-fi horror creature feature. I love it.
John Adams: We loved it too. It was a great opportunity. We could never have done this with our usual mode of operations with me, Zelda, Lulu, and Toby. We couldn't have made a big monster movie like this, it was a great opportunity to get in there and make a creature feature. It was a super big joy.
Toby Poser: Yeah, and getting to work with Todd Masters and his Masters FX team was just the cherry on top of the slimy cake. I mean, the nicest guy in the world.
Let's back up a little bit. Your shoots typically are much, much different. Usually, your cast and crew are your family, but this time you guys went way, way big. You didn't just gradually increase. For Where the Devil Roams, you were working with a larger group, but it's a big leap from that to this. You went to Serbia to do this masssive thing, what were the challenges of that, what was that experience like, and some of the pros?
TP: Man, it's funny, what jumps to the top of my head is for the pros was I didn't have to carry all that equipment. I hate to be lazy bones, but-
I don't think you can say you're lazy bones when you're literally writing, directing, starring and doing a million other things I'm sure you are not necessarily credited for.
JA: It was great to watch Toby direct over there and run that big ferry boat of people. It was really fun. It's so different from when everything's done around the kitchen table. This was all done out on set with 50 or 60 people starting at five in the morning, and people really respected Toby. She ran a great ship. We were lucky that our actors all came with a kind of genuineness and they were very generous to us. They were all Serbian, so sometimes there were some serious communication problems, but before every scene, Toby hung out with them, and they walked out and nailed stuff because we had to do things very fast.
How did you find your cast?
TP: There's a really wonderful casting agent named Anna from Cast For You in Belgrade. We were in Belgrade for three weeks, we got to meet this cast, and we had so much fun. John and I were just getting in there, improvising with them, and the truth of who should be what was immediate. They were so lovable, so wonderful, and a lot of their humor is injected straight through it.
A lot of the cast was in Subspecies V as well, right?
TP: Yeah, probably five or six people. We are always saying in our stories with the mythologies we build, you have to fucking believe it. For anything to work, no matter what the tone of the film is, even if it's a farce, you have to believe the horror. This cast came in just so willing to play, and they believed some outrageous shit, and we're grateful to them for it.
JA: Yeah, we wanted to laugh, stretch our legs, and do humor in horror. They were very nice to play the straight people. That's important because if they just came in and acted goofy, it wouldn't have played well.
And then you get to say things like, “I've got a tender hiney hole.”
JA: I get to do that stuff. Right, exactly. I get to say that with a straight face.
TP: That was good acting.
JA: That was actually real. I do.
Did you write that line for yourself?
JA: Of course I did. Yes. I loved playing that guy.
During your writing process, do you inject lines in there for yourselves? Do you guys specifically say, “I want this line for my character?”
TP: Oh, I know I did. I used to always inject menstruation into our films. Now that I'm fucking 55, I'm like, I'm throwing in there a post-menopausal for the hags in the world, representing. “I don't need a tampon, but I'll shove it up my nose if it'll stop me from smelling your shittiness.”
Toby, I literally paused on that. I cocked my brow. I did a rewind like, “Did I hear that correctly? I did. That is what she said.” I love it.
JA: It was great because Lulu wrote the first script by herself, and she has super dirty humor. A lot of that humor comes straight from Lulu's wonderful mind.
Let's talk about Todd Masters. When I met you guys a few years back, you said, “We're building up our effects skills.” You showcase that in Where the Devil Roams, and then for this one, you put Todd Masters on! How did that come to be?
TP: I think it was one of our producers, Matt Manjourides, who reached out to him, and we were lucky. It was a holiday, so we got to have Todd himself come out to Serbia and just run on the ground with us. The thing that's cool about Todd is he'll whisper something in your ear and you're like, “That's a great idea.”
He'll make you feel like you're the one who came up with it. He's kind of a mensch, so he's there with this KY Jelly in his little spray can iridescence, and you think, “This is like I'm playing in the mud with my five-year-old friend,” and it's Todd and he comes with this beautiful monster. We're very, very grateful for that,
JA: He's been a huge hero of Trey Lindsay's, so Trey got to work with one of his heroes, and the two of them were laughing the entire time in Serbia about every Harryhausen shot because they both want to bring back stop-motion photography. There was a lot of stop-motion, Todd made Trey a tiny little monster filled with wires so he could have the monster run using stop-motion. It was a pleasure, and beyond the fact that Todd's an amazing artist, he's a great human being that you want to be just standing next to.
That's awesome. How collaborative was the process for the look of the creature? Did you guys say, “Run with it,” or did you have some concepts in mind?
TP: Thematically, we needed certain things to happen in the vein of a cephalopod. I'm a total science nerd, so I've done a lot of research on the Argonaut octopus, so that was in the screenplay, but then they intuitively were able to take that a step further and just know where to go with it.
JA: They had a limited amount of time, too. Basically, Todd made a monster out of all of his monsters. He took all of his monsters in his studio and started putting them together, he and Toby really worked through what it was going to look like.
He Frankensteined a monster.
JA: He did.
TP: Some of the animatronic body pieces were from Men in Blackø.
JA: Apparently, there were some Slither parts, too, so it was pretty cool.
It's very fitting that you would have some Slither parts in there. What's the worst orifice do you think that a parasite could enter and exit out of?
JA: Oh, that's a cool question.
I mean, they're all pretty bad.
JA: Best question ever.
TP: I love that question.
JA: How about you?
TP: Well, this is anecdotal; I have to mention one of the producers who was also a puppeteer, Seager Dixon. He was an amazing puppeteer, and he was literally buried under the ground with a little oxygen tube to do something with the hand puppet, and he got a bug in his ear. That's pretty horrific. So I'll go with the ear.
That's pretty awful.
JA: I was going to take the ear, but you took the ear. I would take the eyeball. I wouldn't want anything crawling in and out of my eyeballs, too close to my brain, and I don't want to see it happen.
Those are both good answers. Any orifice is a good answer, but those are particularly skeevy ones, right? Things aren't supposed to come in and out of there. Functionality-wise.
JA: We put this monster through every orifice imaginable, and some orifices actually hit the floor because it was like, “Okay, it was fun to shoot, and it's hilarious, but I think maybe this one should hit the floor.”
No, what went too far?
JA: There was one especially that was like, “Let's let this one drop. It's great. We have it. We can watch it anytime we want. Maybe we'll put it up on some website sometime.”
Can you put it on the FANGORIA website? Thank you.
JA: There we go, yes. The more fun footage is the behind-the-scenes footage. I have the actual footage, but the behind-the-scenes footage is just too funny, with all of us directing how this huge tentacle needs to go in a particular hole.
Do you ever have those “Wow, this is our job” moments as you're discussing something like, “How does the tentacle get in this hole?”
TP: Yes. We have it all the time, and we love it. Preferably, we have it when we're at a diner, and everyone else can hear us.
I have a question about something in the credits, “Monster Maker therapy,” what is that credit for?
JA: Monster Maker therapy?
TP: I don't know that.
JA: We didn't do the credits because the producers did all the credits. Now I have to go back and find it. That's really wonderful.
I brought you an Easter egg to solve. You're welcome.
TP: I'll get back to you on that.
JA: We could take a little monster therapy after that whole thing. So maybe we should call the producers and be like, “Hey, we didn't get any of that therapy.”
TP: I just drove down from Fantasia with Todd, that was good therapy because he's a great listener.
What was your favorite part of this project? You're incorporating so many new things.
JA: Oh yeah. My favorite was just living in Serbia; in this particular experience, we lived in Serbia and worked with Serbians. So rather than being American tourists, being outside of the Serbian culture, we're Americans sitting right inside of the Serbian culture with them. That's what I love the most.
TP: I second that. In this case, we were the aliens, and they were very welcoming of us.
What is your favorite line that your character says in this? You guys have some nice little zingers in there and were clearly writing fun lines for yourselves.
JA: Oh, no. That's great. What's yours?
TP: Since I said the tampon line before, I like it when Emily says to Teddy, “I think this monster is in the men, and maybe the men are the incubators.” And she's like, “Welcome to the club.” I like that line.
JA: I like my line when he finds out that the guy buried in the dirt is French and he's just like, “Wonderful.” He's just such this classic, a bit narrow-minded American that anything outside sucks, and so that was fun.
Do you guys have a favorite line said by another character that you didn't get to do yourself?
TP: That's a great question. Yeah, I love it when Danko says, “So Mama Monster fucked the soldier?”
JA: The French guy.
TP: Yeah.
JA: So, “Mama Monster fucked the French guy?”
TP: Yeah, “Mama Monster fucked the French guy?” And Baby Monster, he's like, “Wah, wah, wah.”
I want that on a T-shirt.
JA: Yes. That would be great. My favorite is when, Ivan says, “That's one big virus,” but he says it in Serbian and that's my favorite line of the whole movie. He was my favorite actor.
How do you navigate the language barrier when you're directing? I suppose you're going off of the emotion of it, are you feeling what they're saying? Does that add another challenge because you don't know the language?
TP: When we went over there, we just really sat down and worked on translating so that there's humor built into what the Serbians are saying. When we were doing the subtitles, we had to kind of revert some of that back so Americans could understand it. Serbians might look at the subtitles and say, “That's not what they said.” For instance, there's a fun line when someone says, “He exploded like a tomato!” But really, in Serbian, she's saying, “He exploded like Ivar,” which is their kind of tomatoey national spread. We wouldn't understand what that means. We really worked hard to do this do-si-do with the humor that both Serbians and Americans would understand.
JA: Also, there were so many lines that they couldn't do. The fact that they couldn't do it was just immediately written into the script. When someone says, “Wait, how do you say, I don't know how to say ‘sneak.'” They started talking about, “It's ‘snick.' No, it's ‘snick.'” When that happens it's like “great, actually figure that out right now. Let's film it.” Another time was “bongo,” when she couldn't say “bingo” she says, “Bongo!”
But we said, “Oh my God. Don't tell her that she doesn't know how to say ‘bingo' because it's so great.”
I love the humor, but more than anything, of course, I loved its disgustingness and gore. I'm a sucker for a creature feature, and you guys went full disgusting with exploded body parts, picking them up, and putting them into a bag. It was sick and I loved it.
TPr: The ear with the earring, that's my favorite.
JA: That's so nice.
Do you have that just on the wall somewhere, the side of the face with the earring?
TP: We wrote it in there because we're like, “We have to show it then because that's when people will connect.” Especially if someone already grew to love John's character, when they see that earring, it's like they're going to make the connection, that was important.
JA: It's gotten a lot of laughs. When we left Serbia, Todd was literally walking out the door, and he was like, “Oh, I need you to take home the monster.”
I was like, “What? No, no, no. We don't want to cross borders with this fucking huge creepy monster. How are we going to explain it?”
Luckily, we got back to America without too many snafus, and we had the monster down in the basement, which was hilarious. Whenever anybody came over, we'd send them down to the basement to pick something up, we were hoping that we would get to keep it forever. Todd started a museum, so we had to send back his awesome monster. We couldn't say we lost it because he had put some air tags on it.
TP: We do have a lot of weird skin and shit hanging from our walls. Absolutely.
I would expect nothing less. If I came to have dinner at your house and there was no skin hanging from the walls, I'd be like, “What the hell is this?”
TP: Nobody's going to rob our house.
Hell Hole is now streaming exclusively on Shudder.
