Mother of Flies (2025)

College student Mickey (Zelda Adams) fights a recurring battle with cancer. This time around, neither chemo nor radiation therapy are helping, and she has reached the point of desperate measures. So Mickey, accompanied by her father Jake (John Adams), goes to the proverbial witch in the woods for help. Solveig (Toby Poser), as she is called, promises her rituals can cure Mickey during the course of three nights and days at her home.

Mickey desperately wants to believe, and Jake can’t get himself to, despite wanting his daughter very much to survive. Both don’t realize the kind of prize Solveig might ask, or what Solveig truly is.

By now, the Adams family – as usual this was co-directed by Zelda Adams, John Adams and Toby Poser – have developed such a strong, personal style in their low budget indie filmmaking, they are to me on the level of individuality people like Rollin or Franco achieved, if in ways free of fetishism and very much their own. Their films are certainly more easily relatable to the more mainstream viewer, but they are also lacking compromise for easier digestibility and show a personal aesthetic sense of the kind that comes from love (for movies as well as for one’s co-conspirators), working with instead of against financial constraints, and by now very well developed technical chops most filmmakers working on this private a level simply can’t achieve.

Mother of Flies is dominated by a sense of poetry that merges with the film’s recalibration of witch tropes and the impact cancer had on the family in real life to become something very special – life-affirming in its love for the macabre and deeply affecting in its genuine emotionality. Authenticity does get a bad rep sometimes, but I find myself drawn to this kind of truthfulness.

Being genuine seems a central concern to the Family’s filmmaking. These are not films trading in irony or distance of any kind, which might be a problem for some viewers.

But then, how could it be otherwise in films where every tiny detail you see on screen is created by the same handful of people?

Where the Devil Roams (2023)

A family consisting of Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams) and Eve (Zelda Adams) work as a very minor sideshow act on the carny circuit during a stylized version of the depression. For Maggie and Seven, their act isn’t really the point of their lives, but only an official reason to travel. In truth, they are serial killers, roaming the backroads, murdering mostly pretty nasty customers (and their families, squeamish, they are not). Maggie takes on the active part during the murders, because Seven, traumatized during the Great War, crumbles at the sight of blood. Eve just makes photos of the corpses.

Maggie believes there might be a future for Eve in stage acts instead of acts of murder, for while the young woman can’t speak, she sings in a very post-Depression era manner. In their way, the family appear to live an at least satisfying and loving life, if you overlook the murders.

That is, until one of their little murder sprees goes wrong. Seeing her family ripped, well, hacked, apart by victims fighting back, Eve turns to the Devil’s magic to save them.

By now, the Adams Family – mother Toby Poser, father John Adams, and daughter Zelda Adams – have really found their stride as filmmakers. There’s a very independent kind of individuality to their filmmaking that’s carried by high technical chops, and a love for the gothic and macabre as filtered through the last few decades of US alternative culture.

In truth, this should look and feel like a Rob Zombie movie – the filmmakers certainly appear to share some of the same aesthetic fascinations – but where Zombie’s movies always feel like products of a man who doesn’t have the talent or vision to turn the things he loves into worthwhile art (or entertainment), this family really manages to create a world of their own imagining on far less money.

There’s a growing sense of ambition to the family’s films, and Where the Devil Roams with its period setting, a larger canvas of locations and even some flashbacks to the Great War continues that trend. This is never an attempt to actually recreate the period, or a real carnival of the era – which would be doomed to failure on the budget - but instead turns the idea of the Depression and what a carny of the time might have felt like into an aesthetic that can then be combined with the other visual hallmarks of Adams/Poser movies.

In pacing, this is a calm and quiet film that knows when to increase its tempo and never overstays any idea’s welcome. The filmmaking is excellent, some of it clearly influenced by still photography and perhaps painting, but while the film does love tableaux and strictly composed shots, it isn’t static. Instead, everything on screen seems beholden to the very conscious creation of very specifically thought through moods and atmospheres of the macabre, the sad, and the grotesque.

Despite all of the film being deeply American, this doesn’t just remind me of some of the best regional filmmaking of the 70s from the US, where sometimes strong aesthetic ideas won out over narrative or budgetary constraints much more than is usual in North American art, but also of the great visual stylists of European fantastic cinema. This never actually looks like Rollin or Franco, but the film’s commitment to a personal aesthetic does suggest kindred spirits.

Of course, if you’re looking for a straightforward movie about serial killing carnies, this won’t make you happy at all. Butt then, I don’t think Where the Devil Roams wants to be that movie.

Three Films Make A Post: 7 Directors. 7 Tales of Terror. 0 Working Cell Phones.

Scare Package (2019): In part, my dislike for this 7-segment omnibus movie is not the film’s fault. I’m not the biggest fan of meta comedies at the best of times, so the film’s meta tendencies would not have been ideal for me at the best of times. However, my problem with this particular film isn’t that the humour is meta, but that it is that lazy kind of meta that does little else than point at a trope, go “har-har, look at that trope!” and then not actually does anything of interest with that discovery, certainly nothing that will provide you with any kind of insight into the whys and wherefores of a trope, leaving it at the pointing out of that fascinating fact that a trope indeed does exist, and it will now subvert it by, um, pointing at it. Also, aren’t jokes supposed to be funny?

The Deeper You Dig (2019): Now, this sort of thing on the other hand warms the cockles of my stony heart, what with it being made by a mother-father-daughter trio (Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams) from the Catskills making their very own indie horror film together. It’s a tale of guilt and revenge from the grave with a big element of the surreal and the Weird, creating just the right mood of strangeness out of snow and found locations. It ends on a wonderfully macabre note, with a perfectly fucked-up happy end much superior to your usual horror bullshit happy ending.

It’s indie horror, so you’ll have to live with pacing that’s sometimes just a bit slow (ending scenes is always a bit of a problem in this area of the art), and some strained acting in the minor roles, but the rest of this is so creative and convincing, these really are only minor flaws.

Filth (2013): And then there’s this pretty insane and messed up bit of very Scottish crime filmmaking based on a novel by Irvine Welsh. The film does a lot of what one is tempted to call stunt filmmaking with an unreliable narrator perfectly played by James McAvoy in one of his best performances, incessant breaking of the Fourth Wall, and scenes that may or may not be dream sequences, but does it so well this feels like the most sensible way to tell this particular tale, perhaps the only way to understand the broken mind of its protagonist.


For the film also manages something very difficult extremely well: showing us a terrible human being doing terrible things, but also showing us his pain and suffering as a fellow human being, his suffering from mental illness, causing compassion for a man without ever wanting to use our empathy to excuse him.