By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Continuing our in-depth chat that began here, writer/director/stars Toby Poser and John Adams and creature creator Todd Masters spill more stories about their offbeat monster movie HELL HOLE, now streaming on Shudder. RUE MORGUE spoke to the trio at Montreal’s Fantasia festival following the world premiere of the film (reviewed here), in which Poser and Adams play the leaders of a Serbian fracking team infiltrated by a tentacled, possessive monster. It’s a change of pace from their previous, more down-to-Earth horror films THE DEEPER YOU DIG, HELLBENDER and WHERE THE DEVIL ROAMS, and the first in which their daughters Lulu and Zelda were not deeply involved in the production or on screen.
Can you talk about why Lulu, after her early scripting work on HELL HOLE, and Zelda didn’t take part in the shoot this time?
TOBY POSER: Lulu, I think, was living in Korea at that point, and Zelda had started college.
JOHN ADAMS: We asked Zelda, when this came up, because Lulu had written a role for her, “Do you want to go [work on HELL HOLE]?” She said, “No, I want to go to college,” and we were like, “Great, OK.” And off we went.
Out of everything involved, what was the biggest challenge on this shoot for each of you?
POSER: For me, we’re used to being anywhere from one to four people, just the little family–including Trey Lindsay sometimes, our visual effects wizard, who was also on HELL HOLE, thankfully. So to be on this set with up to 50 people, I was a little blown away at first. I mean, I’ve acted in lots of bigger projects, but I’ve never directed on that kind. So the first day, someone plunked something down in front of me, and I was like, “What’s this?” “This is your monitor.” “What? Why do I need that?” So it was just about getting used to the dynamic of having other people wear the many hats that we’re used to wearing. I’d say, “I want to do that.” “Oh, you don’t need to, or you shouldn’t,” you know [laughs]. But in the end, I was like, “This is awesome.”
Seager Dixon puppeteers the creature (“Gary”)
ADAMS: For me, it was a great learning experience, because like Toby said, we’re used to talking through the stories, picking up the camera amd the microphones, putting it all in place, shooting everything, then editing it and putting music in. And on day one of HELL HOLE I realized, oh, that’s not going to happen here. I have to rely on everybody to do what their jobs are. That was difficult, because I was not used to it.
But I think that challenge also, in a sense, makes it easier, because you’re like, OK, I can’t do anything about that. I can’t do anything about the costumes, the makeup, the camerawork. I have to do the directing. So the biggest challenge was also kind of the biggest gift, maybe, and it taught us so much that we never would have understood about filmmaking, because we had always made movies on our own. We only knew our rules, which were, there are no rules. And so now we’ve seen the rules, and we can ask, “Do we want to apply any of those things we’ve been taught to our filmmaking, or leave them behind?”
TODD MASTERS: I was the complete opposite, because like I said earlier, I showed up like, “Where is everybody?” [Laughs] You know, “Where are the trucks?”
POSER: Wait till you come to our next set [laughs]!
ADAMS: Yeah, you have to work a week with us.
Trey Lindsay with the hero animatronic monster.
MASTERS: And what you just said is very true, because I sort of relearned filmmaking too. I love being on smaller movies, but so many of those kind of crush you under the experience of the production. Our company has certainly done a variety of different-sized movies, and we got started doing the smaller stuff, but it was so funny showing up on your set, and you guys were just so cool. I was like, “Wait a minute, you guys write, direct, act, shoot, edit music in your own place with your own family, and you do the food and the craft service, and you make the costumes…” Obviously this is nothing new, I guess they call it DIY filmmaking or whatever, but you guys are the frickin’ kings and queens of this kind of thing. It is so exciting to be part of your family, because that other feeling kind of sucks–you know, in the big productions. I love ’em, but it’s so much soul-crushing. You end up doing more memos and meetings. On this one, it was like, roll up your sleeves, let’s go. And it was so much fun.
And I’ve also got to shout out to Trey Lindsay. I actually had heard of him before HELL HOLE, but I hadn’t really seen a lot of the stuff. He came in, a very unassuming, cool guy, and told me, “Oh yeah, I’m just going to do this in my basement.” I said, “What?” [Laughs] I was counting all these shots, and in prep I was a little worried about how we were gonna pull this off. He said, “Oh yeah, no worries,” and I was like, “Oy…” because you always hear that in production. And then he wanted to do it in stop-motion, and I love stop-motion, but still, I thought, “Really? That’s not really of today,” you know? But this audience loves practical effects. They have a great appreciation for things not looking digital, and Trey loves that, I love that, and you guys seem to really embrace it. And it was great to do a quick rethink and go, “Fuck, this is gonna be great.”
Trey and I have similar backgrounds; we love Ray Harryhausen’s stuff, and we actually have a couple of shots in HELL HOLE that we called our Harryhausen shots. Trey delivered so much quality work. I mean, I was watching it last night on the big screen, and seeing all these shots that I was worried about, one after another after another, just beautiful work. And I believe he did it all himself.
Lindsay and Todd Masters set up a creature drop.
ADAMS: He did, in his basement.
POSER: Just his little room downstairs.
MASTERS: He didn’t have a department…
ADAMS: Well, he had you. You sent Trey a little stop-motion puppet that was an exact duplicate of the big monster, and a lot of tentacles. And you let us go home with one of the monsters; I think he just wanted us to get it through the border so he didn’t have to deal with it! “Here, take this big, bloody tentacle!”
MASTERS: Well, I think you used it, right?
ADAMS: Oh, we sure did! So we had Todd’s puppet monster…
POSER: In our basement. You have no idea of the joy of saying, “We’ve got a monster in our basement!”
MASTERS: It was really frickin’ heavy, too. It was a pain in the ass.
Masters and Lindsay set up the hero Gary.
ADAMS: I have to also say that what Todd taught us that was really great was craft–the detail of beautiful craft, taking the time to build a monster that’s gorgeous, down to making it iridescent. This wasn’t just a rubber monster. It had iridescence, it had wrinkles, it had translucency, so the craft of it was amazing, and all we had to do was film it. It wasn’t like, “Now we have to shoot it and then fix it.” It had an eye that blinked–and looked kind of like an asshole [laughs]. It was like a crinkle-tart eye.
MASTERS: Yeah, there’s some subtle shit in there [laughs] that we were having fun with. It was like, “These guys seem to love everything, so let’s just keep doing this stuff.”
ADAMS: And the mouth looked organic sexually, but it had teeth, which is so metaphoric for what this movie is.
MASTERS: Those teeth were glued on about four hours before we flew out.
ADAMS: And it was genius, though, and it plays so well in the film.
POSER: I learned a lot from Todd, because on set, he was so hands-on. He had K-Y Jelly and other things I could buy in a store. And recently, I was bowing at the altar of Todd and his practical effects, because I was making snake embryos for a project, and I stayed up all night for a week mastering what ended up being super-simple, because I was taking a page from his book. “I can buy this shit in a store, let me just use my imagination and make it work.” When I was watching you on set, Todd, those monsters were already made, but what you did with them was very simple and hands-on. So thank you, because it worked.
MASTERS: Well, this story kind of goes back to the food statement. They had these rolls on set that were rock-hard. Toby and John came to me during one of the days of madness and asked, “Can we have an early-stage monster, just for a quick shot under the truck?” And Trey and I just looked at each other like, “We’ve gotta make something here, this will be too much fun,” because we came with a couple of extra tentacles. So we took one of those rolls and turned it into the monster you see underneath the truck for a brief moment. Trey designed it on a napkin; he just quickly scribbled it out. We used a bunch of leftover skins, some condoms, a lot of slime. And I have this great shot of [producer] Seager Dixon, all in green spandex, wheeling that bun monster.
We should also give a shout-out to Cinergy, the local group that did some terrific blood and gore, all the splatter stuff, and were just a ton of fun to work with.
ADAMS: And there’s another story: We were on set and it was after the monster explodes out of one of the victims, and we were wondering, “Well, how do we re-bring it into the scene?” We hadn’t figured that out, and we had about half an hour to film something. So we were standing around, and then we said, “OK, we’ve got an idea. We’ll have the monster curl up and roll into frame, and we’ll just have a blurry roll in the frame, and that way, the audience will understand how it gets back into the story.” But the problem was, we didn’t have anything to roll. So we looked around, and our AD was wearing a red jacket, so it was like, “You! We need that red jacket, give it to us!” We tied it up into a ball and rolled it in front of the camera.
That’s when we called you guys on the radio saying, “OK, now we need you to make up the monster in an hour, because we have to film the front view of this.” And it worked great; it was one of those examples of everybody just hustling. It was three different teams putting that one section together, because then Trey took all that footage home and took your stop-motion monster and had it race into the shot.
MASTERS: All that works because you’re the eyeballs as you write it, as you edit it, so you knew you only needed a fuzzy rolling thing for that shot. On most productions, you have to bring everything to set, and it has to almost be blessed when you get there. And if it isn’t a museum piece, they just tell you, “Go home.” I couldn’t show up and say, “Hey, let’s use this red jacket!”
ADAMS: “Where’s the monster?” “Oh, it’s this loaf of bread!”
Lindsay with a tentacle.
The heavy-metal score is another thing that sets HELL HOLE apart from other movies of this kind. Is that kind of a carryover from HELLBENDER?
ADAMS: No, that was another way to say, “This is a fun movie.” It’s a mix of Euro-style music with American heavy metal, because it has those electronic jump tracks. It’s got that electronic feel, which is super-big in Euro-influenced music. The whole movie is about a clash of cultures, so that music is a clash of sounds. I loved putting it together. And also, the heavy metal against the staccato cuts in the movie, I just felt that was appropriate, and hopefully the audience enjoys that.
