Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, and John Adams on their Family Horror Road-Trip Movie, Hellbender | Interviews

TP: And Zelda has an amazing eye, visually. And John is really great with conjuring up action, and we’ll try to figure out, “Why do we do that action?” And between the three of us, and when Lulu is around, she has great ideas, we just bring our own spice and see what we can cook with that. 

Especially with the film’s experimental passages, involving a supernatural book, were those trickier to get right because they’re so instinctual? 

JA: It’s a combination, originally we were making a video for a song called “Black Sky,” and we made a couple editing mistakes. Something happened in the editing bay that was completely by mistake. And we saw it and we were like, “Wow! How did we do that?” And we had to go figure out how we made that mistake, and then it really informed making “Hellbender.” Once we figured out how to make that super colorful, saturated strange mistake, how we could repeat that and how we could get better at it, that became really important to our storytelling, because we wanted their world to be hyper real. 

And also what informed those book visions, and those dream visions, was the fact that we were living in an RV, driving around the country. Nature was just telling us when to film. We would be like in the Green Mountains, or the Pacific Northwest, and the storm would roll in, and we’d be like, “Oh my god, we need to film this now.” And luckily we’re just a unit of three, sometimes four. We can just set up a mic and a camera and we’re filming ten minutes. 

What’s this RV trip? When was this? What?

ZA: So actually, this whole movie was shot during COVID. The only scene that wasn’t was the opening scene with all the women, that was like three days before the country shut down. And then, we kind of had this bigger story idea, we were going to shoot in my public school and there were going to be more characters. Maybe a romantic relationship! But then with COVID, we were like, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen!” And I think it’s a good thing that it’s not going to happen, we needed to get back to our small scale of crew and production, and just shoot what we know, shoot with our personal size. And I’m so happy we got a little slap in the face to do that. Because it really did make this movie feel more isolated, especially in a huge time of isolation. 

JA: And we bought an RV because suddenly she didn’t have to go to school. Her school got canceled, and we were like, “You know what, let’s just get a trailer and drag ourselves around America and finish this movie. And let America tell us how it’s going to play out. And it was a very interesting time to live in a trailer, because we had a lot of things to ourselves.” 

Were there more road trippy elements in the earlier cuts, documenting different parts of it? 

ZA: You know, we had a lot of stuff that didn’t make it into the dream sequences that we really could have made one total psychedelic big film, because America is constantly throwing candy at you. 

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