The latest indie effort from the Adams family brings their homemade horrors to the forests of Serbia
In the depths of rural Serbia, a fracking crew eager to hit an oil-rich deposit instead stumble upon something far more terrifying and intriguing. A dig reveals a dazed survivor from the Napoleonic wars, begging in French for the crew to kill him. Inside him, it turns out, is an ancient parasite–one that gruesomely burrows into the men of the oil crew searching for the ideal incubating host.
With a keen eye for comedy as it does for stomach-churning visuals, Hell Hole is another clever homegrown banger from the Adams family. It may tread familiar territory explored in other classic creature features, but a love for icky practical effects, rapid-fire dialogue, and a fun, skewering marriage of machismo and motherhood ensures the Adams family’s DIY spirit carries through their ambitious latest effort.
The Adamses have solidified their horror credentials through a lauded series of scrappy indie features–with the haunting The Deeper You Dig, the witchy metal mayhem of Hellbender, and the bonkers circus slasher road movie Where the Devil Roams, John Adams, Toby Poser, and daughters Zelda and Lulu Adams have proven that the family that scares together stays together. Here, Lulu, John, and Toby spread their wings far from the stateside farmland where their past features hail from–finding a bigger budget and a more polished style across the Atlantic in Serbia. For Hell Hole, they’ve assembled a crew of both classic names (including Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Child and Slither FX-pert Todd Masters) and local Serbian indie filmmakers, and keep their bloody mayhem limited to a hell of an abandoned factory location. As the madness increases alongside the buckets of blood, Hell Hole elevates what this DIY family is capable of while sticking true to their grassroots filmmaking spirit.
At the film’s core, Adams, Adams, and Poser craft a creature feature whose structure echoes such body-snatching antics found in The Thing and The Faculty; however, what sets Hell Hole apart from the classics it pays homage to is its sharp observations regarding the gender norms of body horror. Hell Hole’s parasite, trying to find the ideal specimen to inhabit, eschews female-presenting hosts for male ones–allowing the Adamses and Poser to place this ragtag team of stoic, bravado-waving oil drillers in an experience equivalent to unwanted motherhood. As a counterpoint, Poser’s headstrong Emily is a leader who’s child-free by choice, acting as the tough-as-nails surrogate mother of the team with the bonus, as she says, of “checking out” whenever real responsibility rears its ugly head. What’s refreshing is how the film doesn’t place Emily on a journey of discovering her maternal instincts–in fact, it celebrates her choice. Rather, that maternal energy finds a natural outlet in being a leader, making tough decisions and sacrifices where necessary, something celebrated when men hold her position but one that society expects to be tied to child-rearing when the tables are turned.
Instead, it’s the men who place the ability to create life on a pedestal who have their patriarchal expectations subverted in a delightfully gruesome fashion. Their slimy surrogacy is fittingly messy, with the film’s title cheekily pointing to the creature’s signature method of violation, as well as the constant rank smell the creature gives off when inhabiting a human. In a year where films like The First Omen and Immaculate effectively dramatize the alienation of gestating a life inside oneself without one’s consent, Hell Hole takes a chaotic sledgehammer to idealized patriarchal demands of motherhood, seeing just how men might like having their own bodily autonomy seized from them.
It’s also worth noting that amidst Hell Hole’s love for classic creature features, its equal condemnation of fracking’s parallel violation of Mother Earth makes it an intriguing successor to Larry Fessenden’s underrated eco-horror The Last Winter. Where that film rooted its horrors in senseless destruction that was just as cultural as it was environmental, Hell Hole’s sharp insights regarding bodily consent find a natural pairing with the natural world. Whether it’s destroying the Earth via fracking or strengthening a bloodthirsty parasite, we reap what we sow, exposing the horrors of what consequences we’re forced to take to term against our will.
For all of Hell Hole’s gruesome insights, it bears to mention that the film retains the Adams family’s witty, down-to-earth gallows humor. The chemistry between the blended American-Serbian crewmembers is a highlight as they trade clever, roughneck bilingual barbs at one another in both English and Serbian. The chemistry between Emily’s nephew Teddy (Maximum Portman) and environmental scientist Sofija (Olivera Perunicic) is also wonderfully nerdy, showcasing how unexpected connections and romance can be found in the geekiest of bonds.
This exciting leap forward for these grassroots filmmakers is still a bit rough around the edges, as CGI blood bursts at times undercuts the visceral practical effects that accompany them. However, these drawbacks certainly don’t undermine the continued inventiveness of one of horror’s finest families–and signal a growing ambition that I hope carries into their subsequent projects.
Hell Hole had its world premiere at Fantasia Fest 2024. It hits Shudder on August 23, 2024.
