There are no other filmmakers in the world of indie horror who are even remotely like the Adams Family. Based out of rural New York, these DIY wizards have produced four of the most interesting horror features of the last five years. Comprised of dad John Adams, mom Toby Poser, and daughters Lulu and Zelda, the family members do everything themselves; when shooting, for example, they might be handling the camera for one scene and then acting in the next. Although they made four non-horror features before 2019’s ghost story The Deeper You Dig, they hit their stride when they turned to fear. Their 2021 Hellbender has a 97% “Fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes, their 2023 historical/carny horror Where the Devil Roams has been nominated for a Fangoria Chainsaw Award, and their 2024 monster flick Hell Hole recently debuted on Shudder. Toby, a former soap opera star, is the chief architect of their screenplays, and we recently chatted with her about how the family works, what they love about horror, and what they hope audiences are taking away from their remarkable films.

When you were growing up, were you a horror kid? Did you have any favorite spooky stories or movies?

I guess I was a bit of a late bloomer. I had a fascination, but scary things were not generally encouraged at home. I loved Halloween; loved the creeping of autumn, the darkening skies, and the lore that came with that season. I lived on the edge of a cornfield, which was my playground—sublime in the fall when the stalks turned crackly and hard and became architecture for hiding and skeletons for scarecrows. But I sought out horror entertainment privately. For instance, on Sundays there was something called Creature Double Feature which was a secret passion. I’d lie on my stomach near the TV screen with the volume low so my mom couldn’t hear, and I’d suck on a massive spoon of peanut butter, making it last the whole movie or two. Most of these were black and white. The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971) especially freaked me out. I went to my first in-cinema horror movie when I visited a friend in a different state. I was about fourteen—we saw Sleepaway Camp—and I was thrilled beyond measure. But I really feel like it took stepping into actually making horror films for me to realize I’d been a horror kid all along—and I had a ton of catching up to do.

Before the Adams Family happened, you were playing a glamorous villainess in the soap opera Guiding Light, a character that was 180 degrees from the blue collar or outsider women you’ve written for yourself. How much of your work as a screenwriter has been fueled by what you wanted to explore as an actress?

The reason I wrote our first screenplay (initially a brutal ghost western) in 2009 was because I was fed up with waiting to be invited to the show, so to speak. Tired of waiting for waning auditions at forty and stressing over whether I was enough of this or that . . . So when we as a family decided to take off for a year to make our own movie, it was incredibly empowering for all of us, since we all wanted to enact this specific story in tandem with living on the road. And I realized very quickly that this was an opportunity not only for myself as an actress, but to portray women my age in any given scenario, portraying whatever themes were important to me at any given time. Actors just want to act, preferably in textured roles that aren’t just scene dressing. So becoming a filmmaker who writes and directs has been a thrill for me as an actress as well.

John and I were just talking this morning about a comment someone made, that as we’ve progressed as filmmakers, we’ve only gotten grittier and grosser. We both considered that a lovely compliment! I felt very pressured in my twenties to thirties to meet certain standards of beauty that honestly bore me to death at this point. I love watching all kinds of women onscreen—glamorous or weathered as hell, all shapes and all ages—but I myself no longer feel the strain of reaching for certain tiers of beauty. Quite the opposite, actually, and I love that freedom.

Lulu Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser in Rumblestrips; image courtesy of Toby Poser.

The first Adams Family feature, Rumblestrips (2012), is a delightful slice-of-life movie about a mother taking her two daughters on a cross-country road trip, but it has some interesting little nods to horror, winding up with an incredibly tense third act. Did you ever consider making a horror movie for the first Adams Family feature?

Yes! As mentioned before, this was initially a very dark, violent tale about a mother who leaves the Oregon Trail with her two young daughters and encounters a trapper along the way. A moment of togetherness (okay, sex) by two lonely adults takes a terrible turn and both girls die and haunt the mother as she seeks vengeance across the mid-1800s American wilderness. We quickly realized we were not ready to make a period piece, so we modernized the story and even began shooting it. The first scenes in the movie are the setup. But one day we were happily driving in the RV and John said, “Toby, I don’t think I’m ready to kill the kids,” and I said, “I’m not ready to kill the kids either.” And so we didn’t kill the kids. We shifted the narrative a lot, but kept the meeting up of a mysterious and shifty character in John. That scene with him still creeps the hell out of me. But the fact that he acted it so well may creep me out even more.

The dialogue in your films feels so natural, almost never striking a false note. Do you improvise a lot while shooting?

We do, yes. Often we have a written template of a scene—but not always—as a jumping off point. If there’s something crucial I don’t want to miss, I lean on that template. But usually once we start shooting, each of us knows what feels most natural to say, or we often discover what the scene is really about while doing it.

After the comedy-drama Knuckle Jack (2013) and the suspense film The Shoot (2014), Halfway to Zen (2016) was the last of the four non-horror Adams Family movies and is probably the sweetest, with its story of an ex-con trying to care for both his estranged daughter and his father, who is suffering from dementia. After that comes the first horror film, The Deeper You Dig (2019), which is a pretty serious tonal shift both in terms of writing and visual aesthetics. What made you decide on such an extreme change after Halfway to Zen?

After Halfway to Zen, I felt compelled to tackle that damn ghost western. Lulu had just started college. We dropped her off in Oregon, then John, Zelda, and I took an amazing road trip through Glacier Park in Montana, through Alberta and Yukon all the way to Alaska. To help explore the themes and era of the ghost western, Zelda (she was twelve at the time) shot John and me in period clothing in these incredible locations (think glaciers and snowy mountains with soaring eagles and grizzlies roaming valleys). I mean, we were hiking up glaciers and donning our period costumes and Z was shooting us in blizzards. But I still was snagged on this story. John and Z were antsy to shoot something, so Z had this premise where she wanted to kill a bunch of men. So while I was writing, the two of them (and Lulu makes a cameo) made a fifty-minute Civil War-era visual poem called The Hatred. It’s super-violent and gorgeous. And when that was done, I definitely wanted in on that game. So when it was time to start shooting something new, I believe it was again Zelda who thought that it might be cool to do a story where the young female victim gets vengeance in death by calling the shots on her perpetrator’s trajectory in life. This evolved into the ghost/possession story in The Deeper You Dig.

The Deeper You Dig is one of my favorite ghost movies from the last decade. It does something that Hellbender and Where the Devil Roams also do: It feels like it comes from some age-old regional folklore. Are any of the Adams Family films inspired by local legends?

Thank you, Lisa. We strive to devise our own original mythologies, but they are sometimes inspired by other cool figures in established lore and theologies. I value research to get the juices flowing. For Hellbender, I read a lot about fierce women and goddesses: Lamia the Libyan serpent-goddess, Lilith, Kali the Destroyer. For Where the Devil Roams, there was the Bible itself and stories of polar opposite deities in heaven and hell. It was easy to spring from there into a tailor-made narrative about the collision of magic and humanity. For The Deeper You Dig the Seven Circles were a metaphor for the Seven Stages of Grief. Those gave us a solid platform to stage the supernatural realm Ivy must trudge through to rediscover her connection to the shadow world and consequently her daughter.

Near the conclusion of The Deeper You Dig is one of the best gore effects I’ve seen in years (involving—spoiler alert!—a decapitation). When you thought of that bit of action, were you worried about being able to pull it off?

Ha! Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and this was our first time working with our VFX wizard, Trey Lindsay, who we just threw all our trust into, with gratitude and a kind of naive and blind excitement. John really wanted to do a decapitation, so he had the What and Where, and I had to justify the Why, and Trey had to deliver the How—which he did so beautifully.

Was there something in particular in the response to The Deeper You Dig that made you want to dig deeper (pun intended) into horror?

Absolutely. The response was such a beautiful surprise, but even more impactful was the almost immediate sensation that we were joining a family—one where we felt welcome and right at home. It was as if our previous dramatic features were important side roads we took while finding where exactly we wanted to go. There was zero doubt that our next feature, which turned out to be Hellbender, would also be a genre film. So yeah, we found our family, our audience, and our mojo.

Hellbender was inspired in part by your band, H6llb6nd6r. Can you talk a little about how your side music project impacts your filmmaking (and maybe vice versa as well)?

We had a lot of fun making music videos between films, and this collision of music and visuals led to some witchy vibes and trippy, cool editing “mistakes” that eventually spurred our shooting the film Hellbender. Sometimes John will write a tune that we know is just waiting for a story we’ll tell through a camera. And sometimes music will bubble up and reveal itself from the story we are already telling on film. There’s always a flow between the two. Music performance often becomes an important device within our films, particularly in Hellbender and Where the Devil Roams—less so in our current production, Mother of Flies. But where there is no musical performance in Mother of Flies, there is the poetry of spellcasting, which is its own kind of music.

The family shot Hellbender during the Covid pandemic while crossing the country in an RV. How often did the locations dictate the script?

A lot! We’ve always taken cues from our surroundings. Nature is so generous, dropping gifts in front of our feet like our old beloved cat who used to drop a mouse or bird’s head in our shoes. You can’t help but notice—you must notice. And you must show gratitude by loving the cat and by shooting what Nature shows you. Also, because we are often discovering the film as we shoot, these cues are such helpful hints—not only thematically but because they are right there in front of us. We don’t need to go find and pay for them or build them or create them on a computer. (Although we have our wonderful Trey to help us do that, too.)

One of the many things I love about Hellbender is that the relationship between teenager Izzy (Zelda Adams) and Mother (Toby Poser)—loving without being saccharine, friendly but with Izzy’s impending rebellion stewing—reminds me of my relationship with my mother (which is something I can’t say about many movies in any genre). Do you think Hellbender hits women in a different way than it does men?

Without intending bias in any way, we did want to make Hellbender without regard for men in general. We simply wanted a world where the focus was on women, without apology—and definitely in regards to a matrilineage with zero apology for their powers, even their violent ones. (Izzy honors that power, while Mother tries to suppress it.) So I can’t quite speak to how men absorb the film, but I’ve been happily surprised by how many men enjoy the film. I can say that the response from women has been so cool. I like to think of the film as a coming of age for both characters, really. Mothers can be hypocritical, often out of fear that their children will do what they did, but mothers can be fun; can be friends. And teenagers want to forge their own paths—but also want honesty and trust from their mothers. We wanted to cast a light on mother-daughter relationships, but through a supernatural glass. I love these intersections of reality and genre.

Izzy, the daughter in Hellbender, has been lied to by her mother for her entire life, and when the lie is uncovered Izzy reacts with growing fury. Was it ever uncomfortable to be crafting scenes like that knowing you’d be playing the mother opposite your real daughter?

It never was uncomfortable. If anything, it was a little strange when the two characters face off because Z and I have a pretty mellow, easy rapport. Neither one of us is confrontational, so we had to push each other in ways. Ambient comfort is natural, but I love “acting” with Zelda, playing against that comfort, against reality.

Where the Devil Roams is set during the Great Depression yet includes anachronistic elements like a hard rock score and modern tattooed and pierced performers. Was it your intent to give it a sort of surreal, timeless quality? I’m also thinking of the stylized stage performances the family gives at the carnival.

Yes. The film is about outsiders, so we made a choice early on to embrace a looseness. Budget had a little to do with this, but we also were excited to poke certain anachronistic holes in the design and music in the film. This invited, as you say, a kind of strange timelessness, which the film’s mythology is all about—the Devil pulling strings through the ages.

Only two of the eight Adams Family features—The Shoot and Hell Hole—don’t include one or both of your daughters in the cast. Do you find it makes a difference when you know you’re writing a character that will be played by Zelda or Lulu?

Sure. It’s a pleasure and natural to write for them, but that’s also because they both can take the ball and run with it, making their characters their own so easily. And in the two mentioned films I really miss their presence. But with The Shoot and Hell Hole, good casting made the job really easy on shoot day.

Hell Hole has a distinctly different look from the other Adams Family films. How did shooting in Serbia present challenges you hadn’t encountered before?

This was our first time working with someone else behind the camera—with a sizable crew in general, really—so it was challenging because we are so used to wearing all the hats, but it was also illuminating and wonderful learning to entrust those roles to other talented people. It was such a thrill showing up on set with trailers and trucks and monitors and the sweet guys slinging tea and breakfast . . . Shudder and both the American and Serbian production teams really offered us a tremendously cool, unforgettable experience. Serbia itself was wild—and very mysterious at Rtanj Mountain, out in the Serbian Carpathians, where we shot at a former Soviet mine.

The Adams Family films have felt relevant right from the start (Rumblestrips is about a mother who turned to pot growing to support her family). Hell Hole is a monster movie on the surface but is also layered with a sly plot about fracking and men getting pregnant; it could be read as a full-on political allegory, and even includes one funny directly political line (“Hey, I voted for Bernie Sanders!”). How important is it to you that the Adams Family films have something else going on just under the entertainment?

It’s important to us to have layers of intention and meaning in our films. There’s usually an autobiographical undercurrent in our films, but if we can weave something important to us into the narrative, all the better. With Hell Hole we wanted to make a mutinous rock and roll monster romp, but we also wanted to serve up some food for thought regarding bodily autonomy; flip the story and put men’s bodies in the spotlight for a change. We always hope to challenge viewers in certain ways—challenge them to love and challenge them to dislike our characters. The line between protagonist and antagonist is fun when it’s slippery.

Three of the four Adams Family horror films deal in part with very physical gender-swapping. Do you see horror as a way to explore themes that might be considered too uncomfortable for other genres?

We believe horror is a brilliant realm to paint tricky or sticky issues with a palette of dark hues and bloody textures. The genre lends itself to humor and shadows and very human fears. Gender definitely holds a fascination for us. Couldn’t quite say why—maybe because we are all very close and that’s just how our closeness manifests within our stories? To the point where genders slide into each other. We really enjoy tapping into that curiosity. Horror feels like a safe place for that, although we’ve been challenged a couple of times in regard to who can question or portray gender in which ways.

Your blog posts at your production company’s website (wonderwheelproductions.com) are really gorgeous. Have you considered taking that deep dive into prose and going for a book?

Thanks very much for checking them out! I’ve always wanted to write an actual damn book, but I’m too busy making films to devote my time to it these days. I hope to tackle a book or two or five eventually, because my heart is really in the rotten word. (That’s a typo but I kind of like it.)

If Hollywood came knocking, how would you answer that door?

I think there’s room to continue certain types of collaboration, so I’ll say . . . maybe we’d answer the door . . . But it would be a slow, dramatic creaking open after a series of “who is it, what do you want,” and “we don’t want any’s.” But we are not seeking their knock, and if anything, I consider collaborations a supplement to what we love doing ourselves.

What’s up next for the Adams Family?

We are tremendously excited about a feature we are wrapping up called Mother of Flies. It shares some DNA with Hellbender, but it leans even further into the folk horror and magic—more from a necromantic angle in this case. It’s all about life, death, and transactions made between the two. So far, I’ve cracked a rib hanging naked and covered in blood emerging upside down from a giant vagina in a ceiling. But it was worth it.