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| Hell Hole Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
One year on from Where The Devil Roams, Fantasia International Film Festival regulars Toby Poser and John Adams – generally known as the Adams family, though this time they don’t have their kids in tow – are back with another genre work. Hell Hole is a bit of a departure for them, filmed in Serbia and taking a distinctly irreverent approach to its subject, with lots of silliness alongside the gore. It centres on an exploratory fracking team which uncovers something unexpected buried beneath the ground, and with it an obscure cephalopod parasite which wants to make its home, specifically, inside the bodies of men.
“You really took the ‘What if men could get pregnant?’ question and ran with it,” I suggest when we catch up.
“Yeah,” says Toby, laughing. “Let's just be honest, with all this stuff that's been going on in the States, it was kind of cool to consider flipping that storyline and giving men's bodies a little attention. But we also wanted to have fun. We wanted to make a monster movie, and we wanted to tackle a few current relevant conversations.”
There's the fracking thing as well. I mention that a couple of years ago I saw a film called Unearth, and I know there've been other fracking horrors. Do they see that as a developing genre?
“Aliens was also miners,” John points out. “It's always a good place to start off when you're stripping the earth and unearthing things, you know, because that's just a great place to play.”
“I love metaphors,” says Toby. “You have a body being mined, and you have the earth being mined. It was a good opportunity to play with both of those. One under the ground and one above.”
The body she refers to is going to stick in people’s minds partly because it comes wrapped in a very organic-looking membrane. How was that created?
“I love that question,” Toby says.
“That was the Serbian effects crew,” says John. “A couple that we met that the producers brought in to do a lot of the practical effects, or at least to help with the practical effects. They worked really hard, talked to us a lot about how to make a membrane, how to make something that you could break through so it really had a good organic feel. It was all done in real time, so we only had one shot at it. Our French actor was phenomenal because he was literally buried for two hours, and it was in wintertime. He was a great sport. I mean, I don't think he probably loved that day, but boy, did he do it.”
“He never complained,” Toby adds. “He was so gung ho beautiful. And again, just playing with membranes right now, we're doing some practical stuff in the film we're shooting, and I'm kind of obsessed with membranes.” She grins.
There are lots of other fun effects in it as well. They usually do a lot of their own effects and design work, so how did the process work this time?
“We had the Serbian on set people and Trey Lindsay’s effects,” she says, “but we also had the immense pleasure of working with Todd Masters, with Masters FX, and he actually was out there for two weeks with us. We kind of had to pinch ourselves that we got to work with this guy. He brought his beautiful monster in various iterations. We got to then live with the monster. We brought the monster back from Serbia. And so that was really great, and we're so happy the producers made that happen.”
“Everyone should try to come through customs with a monster,” says John. “You have to do it once in your life. It's really fun trying to explain what your monster is doing there.
“Todd built this beautiful monster so that we could have a real monster that we filmed. He also built Trey Lindsay really small versions of the monster so that Trey could do stop motion effects for things that he couldn't do with the big monsters. So everything's kind of shot in real time with just great artists. You know, the combination of Todd Masters and Trey Lindsay and the crew over in Serbia, it was just really fun – the great synergy to create this monster.”
Did they always know that they wanted cephalopods?
“The inspiration comes from this amazing, cool story about this woman – Jeanne Villepreux, I think, was her name,” says Toby. “She decided to devote her life to studying the argonaut. I’m a science geek, so I love cephalopods, and I was really inspired by the story which goes into science, sexism, and everything above and below. It's a great story.”
I ask how they handled the rather intimate scenes where the cephalopods come into contact with human bodies, and they both laugh.
“Most of it on me so that nobody would complain,” says John. “A lot of it was done on set, so there was a lot of things being jammed in me, and it was fun. We all wanted to have a monster that needed to get inside men, and there's really only two viable ways for that to happen. And that's what our movie's about, because it needs to get in there to grow and to live and to have its young have a womb. So it was fun to do that. It was a fun image.”
“If you think about it, we're afraid of so many things that are natural in our bodies,” says Toby. “Like, if you get water up your nose, it's not so bad. You know, you're used to things coming out of your nose. If you get a bug in your ear, it's kind of hellish. Obviously, there are much more threatening holes that people aren't comfortable with, but just all their bodily functions, I think it was cool to kind of shine a light on those. And for me, there's nothing sexual about what's happening here to men's bodies. It's purely functional. One could even look at it like, well, evolution is about survival, and this is a very smart phylum who's found a way to – without giving anything away – to see how it can connect with another small, smart phylum, cephalopod to human. I just love that conversation. Is it really wicked?”
“But also on top of that was a fun idea, which is if the monster feels safe inside of you, he or she uses your orifices to get in and out,” says John. “But if it doesn't feel safe, if it feels threatened and you can no longer protect it, that vessel is in serious danger. So that was also a fun element to the movie.”
There are a number of spectacular ways that people die in the film. How did they approach that side of it?
“With just great joy and fun,” says Toby. “We really had fun thinking about it, especially where the shit's hitting the fan. For me, my favourite one was trying to think if a cephalopod could camouflage itself in trees. You know, the tentacles are down in the brush with the roots.”
“When people panic, they lose their heads, literally. And so it was fun to visualise that,” says John.
I tell them that despite the subject matter and gore, I think it feels like a very light-hearted film. Was it fun to shift tone like that?
“That is super nice of you to say, because that's exactly what we wanted to do,” he says. “We wanted to just step off of our family train for a second and just make a rock n’ roll monster....”
“...which people are welcome to take further,” Toby adds. “We wanted to drop those little seeds of more serious context, but it's really up to the viewer whether they want to dig on the science or the fun monster narrative or the social conversations.”
“Also, with the environment we were working under and with the production team that were working with, it was kind of a time to explore a different type of horror movie,” John continues. “When we make movies as a family, we have a lot of time. We sit at the dinner table and we talk about themes together, and it's much more complicated. It's got a different flow. This was a new technique for us, and the best thing to do in this environment was to have fun and explore.”
We talk about their decision to shoot in Serbia.
“We originally had written this story for upstate New York, where we're from,” says Toby. “But the producers posited that we could shoot this in Serbia. And so we were going over that – like, why not? And it was really fun. It was cool to adapt the script for Serbia. Because when were over there, we could really sit down and have a conversation with one of the great administrators over there, who helped us translate the lines so that they're funny. There's a lot of local humour in there. And that cast are so lovable. But then when I was making the subtitles, I'm like, ‘Oh, let's put this back into the American context so they still find it funny,’ and that was a fun exercise.”
“We learned a lot when we were doing the casting and the rehearsals with them,” says John. “One of the things that was really fun is, first of all, it wasn't just Serbians. There was French, there was Russian, there was lots of international community involved in this movie. And another thing that we found funny about it was communication problems of cultural differences. And Americans, they have a way about them, but Serbians have a way about them too. How do those interact as soon as all hell breaks loose? For us, that just made it funnier.”
“And were kind of the aliens,” Toby points out.
He nods. “Yes, that's right. We were the fish out of water there.”
I ask if they think that US viewers will recognise the jokes that are made when people are mistranslating the French character’s desperate attempts to communicate, and Toby says that they can’t wait to find out.
“I think those jokes are more for the European crowd,” says John. “Some of that will pass over the Americans. Even the Serbia/Siberia joke that could just fly right over. Everybody says that happens all the time. When we were like, ‘Oh, we're shooting in Serbia,’ people would be like, ‘Oh my God, why would you be going to Russia right now?’ And it's just like, ‘Okay, you know what? Let's drop that.’”
We talk about the ruined building where the film is shot. Toby tells me that it’s a former mine.
“Isn't it cool? It had hammers and sickles all over it. It's not a Soviet mine, but was defunct, and it was just gorgeous. Talk about a great gift. And it was also in a really cool area called the Rtanj Mountains, which come with their own mythology. A lot of people think because there are three pyramid shaped mountains there, that it's got some really spooky, creepy vibes and that there are these electromagnetic fields under it. So there is just this wonderful foundation of mysteriousness. And it was often misty in the morning. And then vampires supposedly really originated there, pre-Dracula, not far from where we were shooting as well.”
“There's a whole alien culture there, too, so it was great,” adds John. “This idea just fit right in there. Not that this is about an alien, but the whole vibe there is perfect.”
They’d love to work there again sometimes, Toby says, and we go on to talk about something that came up last time I spoke with them: the word ‘faerie’.
“We've shot Faerie,” John says, “but we've still got some more things to do. It's a movie that's going to take a couple years because of the way the storyline goes. But we also shot two other movies. We're just finishing up the second of two that we shot over the last year. One is almost edited and done, and that's called Slug. And then we have another movie that's really fun. We're just going to go home from Fantasia and we're going to do the last shots with our daughter, Zelda.”
Toby tells me that they don’t ever want to stop making family films. “It's where our heart is.”
