Interview With Filmmakers John Adams And Toby Poser For ‘Hell Hole’

I really think that if you haven’t heard of the up-and-coming horror filmmaking group, The Adams Family, you must have been living under a rock for the last three years. John Adams and Toby Poser, along with their daughters Zelda and Lulu, have really taken the horror world by storm with their last three films, 2021’s Hellbender, 2023’s Where the Devil Roams, and now with this year’s Hell Hole, through their company, Wonder Wheel Productions. These moviemaking powerhouses not only write, direct, and star in their films together, but they also make original music in their family band, H6llb6nd6r. Like… fuck man. Is there anything they can’t do?

The Adams Family’s latest, Hell Hole, is their take on a creature feature.

Hell Hole hails from the filmmaking family behind Hellbender and centers on an American-led fracking crew that uncovers a living French soldier frozen in time from a Napoleonic campaign, whose body hosts a parasitic monster.

To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with John and Toby via Zoom about how the project came about, working as a family, what’s up next, and more!

PopHorror: Hell Hole is a trip and I’m super excited to talk to you about it today.

John Adams: Thank you! That makes us very happy.

Toby Poser: Nice!

PopHorror: What inspired the story and how did the project come about?

Toby Poser: John and Zelda were driving through Alberta, Canada, and calling me nonstop whenever they had service about these amazing oil fields and this idea about a man camp.

John Adams: Yeah, we were just driving through man camp after man camp and we were like, if we could, one day we should make a movie about a drill hitting a monster, waking up a mother monster and just terrorizing a bunch of men in a man camp. So, we went on the Joe Bob show, and the producers of Joe Bob had all met working for Troma and they said, “Do you have any ideas?” We thought this would be kind of a good opportunity for the Adams Family to take a right turn and do a Troma-esque movie. We pitched them this one and they were like, “Great, let’s do it!” One thing led to another and it left Canada. We had written a script about Canada, and we all ended up in Serbia, and we made a rock and roll, kind of punk monster movie.

PopHorror: You did! You definitely did. I’ve heard it described as a punk horror movie. The music is amazing. I loved so much about it. Something that I always appreciate is practical effects. Can you tell us about the creature design?

Toby Poser: Yeah, I’m wearing his T-shirt today! Todd Masters and his team at MastersFX made a beautiful, beautiful creature just from notes. They read what we had described in the script but then they were just kind of very intuitive and they made this beautiful creature. There was a puppet, there was an animatronic, there was a small 3D print of it that our other guy, Trey Lindsay, who we work with, could use as well. Todd was out there with us and he’s the kind of guy that will just whisper something in your ear that you need to know but he’ll make you feel like you thought of it. He’s so generous and he’s on there doing everything with you. It was just like a dream come true.

PopHorror: And the gore is a plus.

John Adams: We love the gore! There was a lot of gore. We were all covered in KY Jelly and gore.

PopHorror: Your projects are mostly a family affair with you two and your two daughters. Writing, acting, John you even compose original music and this one is no different than that. I’m seriously impressed. I posted that I was watching this and people went nuts. “Oh my god, is that a new Adams Family film?” You’re just known as “The Adams Family.” People know who you’re talking about and what to expect and what’s coming up. That’s amazing. What was it like kicking the idea around about Hell Hole? What is your creative process as a family?

John Adams: Actually, we threw this one to Lulu, who is living in South Korea. We asked her if she wanted to write the script and she was like, “Yes!” She wrote the first draft of the script, and it was really beautiful. What it showed us when she handed it over to us was, she had introduced to us humor. Like not the kind of dark humor that we as a family just kind of comes to us intuitively. She has a very funny sense of humor. It’s completely like exactly like Hell Hole. We were like, this is perfect because we want to make a creature feature, but we also want to have fun with humor. Her script got us off to a galloping start. Then Toby fixed it up because Lulu had written it for Canada because we were going to shoot it here in the Catskills but when that changed, Toby took the script and rewrote it for Serbia with all the culture clashes and all those things that come with the history of a place like Serbia.

Toby Poser: And also, Tiffany, we knew we wanted to make a fun monster romp, but because of the timing, there were certain things happening in the United States that were also kind of cool to inject into this storyline like Roe v. Wade was being overturned. The United States is always kind of putting its hands in places so we didn’t want to make any specific answers. We thought this was a good time to bring up questions. Within horror it’s always fun to bring up conversations that are probably more important than the answers. There were some that I, definitely as a woman, wanted to bring up.

PopHorror: I think that horror allows a platform where you can talk about these things in a different way than you can in other genres. It allows you to be more authentic and realistic about it than if you were to take these topics and make a drama. Horror allows that open platform to just go kind of crazy and say what you are thinking about it. That’s why I appreciate the horror genre.

John Adams: We agree. It’s an open minded and inclusive community. We can all talk about things without screaming it over each other. We can cover these subjects in blood and have a good, honest conversation.

PopHorror: As a family, you guys created Wonder Wheel Productions to create your own horror films. How did you introduce Lulu and Zelda to the horror genre?

Toby Poser: It’s funny because our very first film in 2010, it ended up being a drama, but it wasn’t meant to be one. It was meant to be a very dark, bloody Western ghost story. We just kind of weren’t ready creatively, psychologically ready to kill our kids, which was what was supposed to happen so it turned into a drama. But from the get-go, we were leaning in that direcion. Fast forward a few years, we really were interested, and I think it came… Like Zelda in particular, wanted to make a film about where she gets to kill a bunch of dudes. So something came out of that called The Hatred and then out of that came The Deeper You Dig and by then, we just knew we were snagged. We found our calling. And more than that, we found our love. Like this feels so fucking right in the way that you meet the one you love.

John Adams: It’s so true that Zelda is the one that introduced us to the idea of “Let’s make a horror movie,” because Toby was writing a script, and we were a bit bored because we had made four movies, but they were all dramas. Me and Z and Lulu were sitting around literally twiddling our thumbs and Zelda literally said, “How about we make a movie where I kill men?” It was like, well that’s the best idea ever! We just have to figure out which men we’re going to kill. What happened was we made this little movie called The Hatred, and then we got into a film festival called HorrorHound that was fantastic and suddenly we realized what I was just saying before. This is a community that I want to be a part of because of their openness, and we haven’t looked back.

PopHorror: Well, we appreciate that. What do you guys have coming up next?

Toby Poser: We’ve got two things we’re really excited about. One is called Slug and the other we’re toying with the name Mother of Flies. We want to see, does that kind of conjure up feelings of something you’d want to see? Mother of Flies?

PopHorror: Uh, yes please. I’m intrigued. That could be anything.

Toby Poser: That’s where we’re leaning. They’re two films that definitely have very much our DNA in them. We’re excited about them.

PopHorror: I’m excited too!

John Adams: The kids are back involved in both of them. Both girls are back into both of these movies and that’s always super fun because we just have an energy and dynamic together that’s pretty joyful and it makes the process of making movies so exceptional. 

PopHorror: I’m so glad to hear that! I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?

John Adams: I have to say that my favorite movie really for horror is called The Innocents. It’s from Norway. It’s this super dark, brutal movie that stars four kids and it’s not like someone chasing somebody around with a knife or anything like that. It’s the kind of movie I love, the kind of movie that I love that we like to try to make but yeah, The Innocents. If anyone gets the chance to watch that, it’s fantastic.

PopHorror: I’ve heard it’s pretty fucked up.

John Adams: It’s pretty fucked up.

Toby Poser: It’s great. I’m going to mention a new one just because it’s been on my mind a lot. I loved The Devil’s Bath, which is out by the Austrian team that made Goodnight Mommy and The Lodge.

Thank you so much to John and Toby for taking the time to speak with us. Hell Hole is now currently on Shudder!