By MICHAEL GINGOLD

Now streaming exclusively on Shudder, HELL HOLE is the latest from independent horror favorites The Adams Family–and a different kind of fright feature for them. At this summer’s Fantasia International Film Festival, where the movie had its world premiere, RUE MORGUE spoke with writer/directors Toby Poser and John Adams, and creature creator Todd Masters, who provided us a bunch of exclusive behind-the-scenes pics and art.

HELL HOLE (which we review here) also stars Poser and Adams as Emily and John, leaders of a small fracking operation in the wilds of Serbia. One of their drills unearths a man who’s been buried underground for a couple of centuries–thanks to a tentacled monster dwelling inside him that soon erupts from his body to worm its way into members of the fracking team. Having previously explored families under horrific stress in the more down-to-Earth THE DEEPER YOU DIG, HELLBENDER and WHERE THE DEVIL ROAMS, Poser and Adams (who scripted HELL HOLE with daughter Lulu Adams) here attack a more outrageous creature feature with a go-for-broke spirit and lots of practical critters courtesy of Masters (pictured below at left with Adams and Poser), whose long résumé includes TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT, SLITHER and many others.

Tell us about the origins of this project.

JOHN ADAMS: We were driving from Montana to Alaska; Toby had a job in Calgary, so [their daughter] Zelda and I dropped her off there, and then we headed up to Whitehorse. Along the way, we went through all the fracking camps up there, and the way the Adams Family works is, wherever we are, we say, “Wouldn’t it be great to shoot a horror movie here? What could we do? Oh, it’d be cool to have a monster that’s discovered in a fracking camp. And then, where to hide it? Well, let’s hide it inside of something. What could we hide it in? Men!” [Everyone laughs] So that’s how it started.

TOBY POSER: Then when we were doing THE LAST DRIVE-IN WITH JOE BOB BRIGGS, the producers [Justin Martell and Matt Manjourides] said, “What are some things you have cooking?” John mentioned this idea, and the next thing you know, we were writing the script–Lulu knocked out the first draft–and then we were in Serbia.

What was Lulu’s first draft like, and how does it differ from the film we see now?

POSER: Sex, love…

ADAMS: Sex… [Everyone laughs]

POSER: Actually, some of the DNA from the original draft is there, like the lovableness of Teddy [Maximum Portman], with the name; we wanted him to be kind of a teddy bear, and a counterbalance to the other characters, the roughnecks. That really started with Lulu; she helped introduce the characters, except Emily was originally going to be a younger woman and a love interest for Teddy, and we turned her into his aunt.

ADAMS: Also, it was set in Canada, and it had a lot of great romance. It was fun.

What wound up changing, and what influenced those changes as you went through development and production?

ADAMS: That is the answer: production. It was like, “Can we shoot this in Serbia rather than upstate New York?” Then Toby took over the script, because we were like, “Yeah, we’d love to shoot in Serbia. It sounds like a great adventure.”

POSER: The big thing we took from Lulu’s draft was, she’s fluent in French. So there was the great opening scene with the Frenchmen and the playoff of words, which was so much fun. Then we had to consider, well, how are we going to switch this to Serbia and keep the French? So we did some research on Napoleon, and we realized, oh, there was some activity in the Illyrian Peninsula, and we were very relieved [laughs].

ADAMS: Yeah, we didn’t wanna lose our French jokes.

Was there ever a thought of shooting in Serbia and just making it look like Canada, just covering up the signage and so forth?

ADAMS: Originally, in the first draft we wrote, that was the assumption, because we were like, well, is there fracking in Serbia? Is there wide open wilderness you could be stranded in? And the answer was yes, so we were like, OK, great. So we wrote that, and then the producers went over there to look at what was available to us. And they told us, “Look, it’s too European, so we need to set it in Serbia,” and Toby rewrote it that way.

POSER: Knowing we were going to have this wonderful cast of Serbian actors, it was actually a great opportunity. It actually enriched the story.

Did you take any inspiration from THE THING, which is kind of the granddaddy of this sort of movie?

POSER: That’s one of John’s favorite films.

ADAMS: Of course. It’s like the Beatles’ ABBEY ROAD, though: Don’t try to rerecord it or copy it, but you’re influenced by it because it’s perfection. We have an understanding of who we are, and we decided, let’s take the piss out of it a little bit, because you don’t want to try to remake THE THING; it’s such a beautiful masterpiece of alienation and loneliness and paranoia. So what are the things we could bring to it? That was what was fun.

POSER: And how could we also add a strange female element and yet have it focus on the men? That was obviously a big part.

Animatronics supervisor Josh Raymond finals the Hero puppet.

This is the first genre film you’ve done where the focus is not on a family and their relationships and how those are affected. It’s more about a larger group. How did that change in emphasis affect the way you wrote the script and made the movie?

POSER: I was really stoked to write something that was not based on your typical nuclear or half-nuclear family. Often, I’m a mother figure in our works and our kids are kids, or there’s a family dynamic. In this case, it was very important to me to focus on a woman who has no interest in motherhood. I don’t always want to represent mothers, either myself or any of the other mothers out there. A lot of women have no desire to be mothers whatsoever, and it was important that I enjoyed that and jumped into it.

ADAMS: What was also great was, Todd got involved early, and suddenly we were able to do something that there was no way the Adams Family could do on its own, which was to work with somebody like Todd and have organic, practical effects that would be masterfully done. So the focus became less on what we usually focus on, which is emotional horror, and we got to do something we’ve always wanted to try, which is physical horror. And then the next question was, how do we represent physical horror? Is it dead serious, or is there some humor to it?

Jackie West adds internal parts to the Stunt Gary puppet.

Todd, how did that play into your creature designs?

TODD MASTERS: A lot of it came out of just us chatting. We had early Zoom calls, and I like to work with illustrations and some sort of imagery going back and forth. So I drew something, showed it to them and they responded. It helped that I had a cache of tentacle mechanisms left over from MEN IN BLACK 3 or II or 12 or whatever, in a box from Rick Baker, because he was liquidating all his stuff. So when we were making Gary–we ended up calling the creatures Mary and Gary–we had that in mind. We had a budget we had to keep tight, and didn’t have a lot of time to make everything, so we needed a good starting concept, and fortunately, everybody really liked one of the early drawings. Then we just kind of went for it, and you guys were so cool about liking our stuff right away, so we could go right into the film.

There was also a character that my friend Mike Elizalde at Spectral Motion created for, I believe, a magic trick he did, that really influenced us. So a tip of the hat to him, because there’s always so much inspiration on these things. We of course also looked at Rob Bottin’s stuff in THE THING, so we were subtly trying to wink at a couple of our friends, and make it appropriate. And the script was really fun, so we wanted the creatures to fit into that, and to make this a rock-’n’-roll monster movie.

Raymond, Alex Roseberry, Kiana Larson and West.

There’s definitely more humor in HELL HOLE than there has been in your previous films, so can you talk about that side of it?

POSER: This was a great opportunity to just go for it, and to not get stuck in our heads wondering, is this going to work or not? We just knew that we found certain things funny. I mean, orifices are funny, always, you know? We all have them, and we all are horrified by certain orifices, so there was a lot of built-in humor there.

Also, it was cool because we wrote this for the Serbians, and when we got there, we made sure we translated everything with someone who would catch that humor. I think there’s a lot of built-in humor for the Serbians, and then in the English subtitles, we had to also find the original humor so Americans would understand it. For instance, there’s a moment where someone explodes and Mickey says, “He blew up like a tomato!” That’s what the subtitles say.

But in in Serbian it means, “He blew up like Ajvar!”, which is their famous tomato and red pepper spread.

ADAMS: Their only food. It’s all we ate for two weeks!

Brad Proctor details the miniature stop-motion Gary monster.

You have Anders Hove from SUBSPECIES in the prologue. How did that happen?

ADAMS: He’s friends with the producers, Justin and Matt; they worked with him on SUBSPECIES V: BLOODRISE. He was wonderful, and he actually did the most stuntwork, and he never complained. We had him hitting the dirt a whole bunch and getting tackled by a monster, and he just was like, “Let’s keep doing it until we’ve got it.” What a gentleman.

MASTERS: It was an amazing group. You know, these guys are a family when they film, and they just brought it. We were all suffering from language problems and travel and food and just the madness of a smaller production, and for whatever reason, everybody clicked beautifully. The Serbians are great filmmakers, and they really enjoyed being in this family. We didn’t have a lot of equipment, you know? We all shared trucks…

ADAMS: And the beds!

MASTERS: The production vehicle was smaller than this table. I mean, they had the world’s smallest Winnebago.

ADAMS: Wait a minute–there was a production vehicle? [Everyone laughs] See, they provided one for Todd, they didn’t provide one for us!

MASTERS: But everybody really rallied. I mean, they were very used to these circumstances, but I’m used to bigger stuff. I was like, “Where are the trucks?” You know, “Where is everything? All there is is a mud field. What are we doing?” And everybody just was so much fun, when it should have been impossible. And all the effects stuff came by luggage. We didn’t want to ship it on a production like this, because one small mistake and we’d be screwed. Actually, I did lose all my clothes. I sent Justin out to get me underwear. I was wearing them yesterday in honor of Justin, in fact [laughs]!

You’ve mentioned that you shoot HELL HOLE in two weeks?

ADAMS: I think 19 days. It was super-fast.

POSER: I feel like it was 12 days.

ADAMS: Well, 19 plus the weekends and getting those days off. Then there were a couple of Serbian holidays, and a Russian holiday that we all, for some reason, took off.

MASTERS: I work on these films where they’re lining up a shot all day, and these guys have already finished and are going home. I mean, I don’t remember shooting over eight hours. We were always going home during daylight because the drive home was so scary; it was on a one-way road with a big cliff on one side. These guys would line up a shot and shoot, I would go to get a powderpuff or something, and I’d come back and they’d already moved on and gotten a couple more shots. It was just boom, boom, boom. And the quality of the stuff they would get, the images and the performances were so smooth and raw out of that, rather than getting 20 takes or lighting it for two weeks. It was really fun.

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