The horror film Mother of Flies deals with the fight for life in true indie manner while celebrating nature and its order.
Toby Poser and John Adams, along with their two adult daughters Lulu and Zelda Adams, are playfully known as The Adams Family. The American family makes quintessentially independent cinema: they direct, screenwrite, produce, and act in the leading roles themselves. Additionally, the DIY family composes and writes the music for their films as the band Hellbender.
Family filmmaking began nearly 17 years ago. Poser and Adams practiced movie magic together, and the kids grew into it. The Adamses initially adhered to a so-called one-hour rule: the young daughters were only allowed to participate in filming for one hour at a time. After the girls grew up, the family no longer maintains a separation between filmmaking and regular daily life.
”Making movies is lucky for us because it’s not work,” John Adams describes.
The family moved to horror films a little later, as the genre allowed them to explore nearly anything through a gloomy lense. The Adams Family makes horror movies about what they have faced in their own lives.
Their latest film, Mother of Flies, begins in a car. Slowly, the car makes its way into the forest in the Catskill mountains. The woods call to cancer-ridden Mickey (Zelda Adams), and she finds her way there without a map or directions, as if on instinct.
The doctors have only given Mickey months to live but she is not ready to give up. Her father Jake (John Adams) wants to support his daughter and, despite his scepticism, has joined her on this trip.
When they reach the woods, they meet a witch called Solveig (Toby Poser) who promises to remove Mickey’s tumor in three days.
The story is a personal one to the family. Both John Adams and Toby Poser have survived cancer. Discussing the matter via film has helped them process the issue as a family.
”We are pretty open. We think making movies is a great way to have conversations with people about the hard stuff,” Poser explains.
According to her, Solveig’s poetry and spells were particularly rewarding to write. The family themselves also create the practical effects they favor in their films.
Everyone in the family takes part in scriptwriting. They don’t go far in search of locations or supporting actors either; both are often found in their local forests or neighbourhoods. The house overtaken by trees that is seen in the film is the family home, with magical greenery added on in postproduction.
The changing seasons add colour to the screen and there is something calming about the woods, even in the middle of a horror movie.
”I’m trying to celebrate what I have been looking at since I was a kid. It is a celebration of the woods, the clouds, the rivers and salamanders – everything I have relationship since I was just tiny,” Adams says.
The local woods may also offer up something that the scene needs, like an animal carcass. The wildest ideas, however, are usually spoken out at the dinner table.
”We call it throwing spaghetti and seeing what sticks,” Poser says.
“Spaghetti looks like blood,” Adams explains.
Minja Viitanen