The Adams Family Takes on Creature Features with the Wonderfully Goopy Hell Hole
The filmmaking collective known as the Adams Family has spent the last decade or so establishing themselves among the best indie creators in the horror genre, cultivating an ever-expanding fanbase while doing it all Their Way. The minds behind Where the Devil Roams (one of the best horror films of 2023) and Hellbender (one of the best horror films of the last decade, bar none), to name just a couple, have proven remarkably versatile in terms of tone, craft and sheer ingenuity, simultaneously upping their ambition with each project and holding onto the DIY qualities that made them into scrappy fan favorites to begin with.
With Hell Hole, their latest feature, the filmmaking family has constructed their biggest horror sandbox yet, packing every frame with as much production value as their small budget can muster and riding a fascinating tonal line between black comedy and sincere character drama. The results are mixed, but while Hell Hole is not the family’s best film, it is proof that they’re still among the most fascinating and consistently entertaining players in the horror game.
Creative and life partners John Adams and Toby Poser take point on this family production, co-directing and co-starring in Hell Hole as well as co-writing the script with their daughter Lulu Adams. The duo play business associates Emily (Poser) and John (Adams), oil drillers who’ve decamped to the wilderness of Serbia in search of a big fracking payday. Right away they run into trouble, as environmental scientists Nikola (Petar Arsić) and Sofija (Aleksandar Trmčić) warn them they might be endangering a local habitat. Still, Em and John are determined to press ahead, and when they do, they strike something other than the local mammals the scientists were out to protect.
Something, as revealed in a prologue set 200 years earlier, is buried out here in the wilds of Serbia, just a few hundred feet away from an abandoned coal mine and its derelict support buildings. It’s much stranger, and much nastier, than anything the crew expected to encounter, and as they’ll soon find, it wants to use them for its own dark biological purposes.
If Hellbender was the Adams Family playing in the realm of folk horror, and Where the Devil Roams was their dark carnival, then Hell Hole is, as the premise suggests, their take on a goopy, paranoid creature feature in the vein of John Carpenter’s The Thing. It’s a movie about working-class people just trying to do a job, only to find they’re contending with something far beyond the realm of their understanding, and it’s within that structure that the film mostly succeeds. The dialogue is believable, the world feels lived-in, the characters are just as worried about what weird food they might have for dinner as they are about the strange stuff they just dug up, and the low-budget aesthetic meshes perfectly with the subject matter. It’s a film full of believable, tactile grit, and that makes it both endearing and instantly real for us.
It’s what the filmmakers do next that makes Hell Hole into a mixed bag. As they have in their other films, the Adams crew sprinkles loads of memorable quirks into the narrative, from two workers on the site who won’t stop chatting about nonsense to the way Nikola shifts into full mad scientist mode when he so much as sniffs a potential discovery. There’s an offbeat humor to the whole affair, and an overt, punk-rock cartoonishness (thanks in part to John Adams’ score) to the moments when actual monsters start to squirm across the screen. But the film also has a quieter side, a side that’s interested in the eco-horror of it all; the feminist bent of the way the monster seems to behave; and the ways in which the people we work with can become a sort of chosen family. None of these elements fail outright, but along the way the strange, singular stew starts to feel at least a little diluted by the sheer number of ideas stirring around in the narrative. It feels smarter than your average creature feature, but in its quest to prove that, it sometimes gets lost in the vastness of its own ambition.
Ultimately, though, that doesn’t matter, because what we’re here to see is a monster story, and as a monster story Hell Hole absolutely delivers. The creature effects are satisfying, the violence simultaneously unsettling and hilarious, and the pacing of the film inserts just enough paranoia to keep the tension on while never letting us forget that this is supposed to be fun. As directors, every film Adams and Poser have delivered feels like it’s building on the ones that came before, and visually, that’s definitely true here. The production values of the broken-down Socialist factory buildings that serve as the film’s backdrop are off the charts, the tension and humor are (mostly) well-balanced, and the explosive moments when the monsters come out are enough to leave your jaw on the floor.
And perhaps more importantly, there’s a sense throughout the film that the Adams Family will keep building on what’s come before, a feeling that these are horror filmmakers still on the ascent. Even when Hell Hole falters, it’s also a reminder that this family of multi-hyphenates has only just begun to show us what they can do, and that makes it all the more thrilling.
Directors: John Adams, Toby Poser
Writers: John Adams, Toby Poser, Lulu Adams
Starring: John Adams, Toby Poser, Petar Arsić, Aleksandar Trmčić, Marko Filipovic, Anders Hove, Max Portman
Release Date: August 23, 2024 (Shudder)
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.