The Adams Family Talk Witchy ‘Mother of Flies’ and Finding Beauty in Life and Death [Interview]

The Adams Family, Toby Poser and John Adams and their daughters Zelda and Lulu, have been making movies together as a family for over a decade under their production company Wonder Wheel Productions.

They made their first horror movie, The Hatred, in 2018 and have since been embraced by genre fans for their unique style of independent horror. Their horror films include The Deeper You Dig (2019), Hellbender (2021), Where the Devil Roams (2023), and their first creature feature, Hell Hole (2024). Every member of the family participates in every aspect of the filmmaking process, and they also have a band called H6LLB6ND6R.

The Adams Family’s new film, Mother of Flies, which won Best Film at Fantasia International Film Festival in 2025, is a multi-layered story about a young woman named Mickey, played by Zelda Adams, who has cancer and seeks out a mysterious woman named Solveig (Toby Poser), who lives deep in the woods. Mickey travels with her father (John Adams) to see Solveig, hoping she can use her dark magic to cure Mickey’s cancer. The film features gorgeous cinematography and focuses on rituals, Solveig’s relationship with nature, and the permanent bond she forms with Mickey in attempting to make a deal with death. Mother of Flies also stars Lulu Adams.

Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of sitting down with Toby Poser, John Adams, and Zelda Adams over Zoom to discuss Mother of Flies, magic, finding beauty not just in life but also in death, and the symbolism in the film.

Zelda Adams in John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser’s MOTHER OF FLIES. Courtesy of John Adams. A Shudder release

Bloody Disgusting: Mother of Flies was written and directed by Toby, John, and Zelda. Is it based on any particular folklore, and did you have a specific inspiration for the story?

Zelda Adams: As far as inspiration, it really just revolves around something that is a big part of our family. Cancer is a big theme in it, and that’s something that is part of our family history. John and Toby have had cancer, and I was tested for something called Lynch syndrome before we started making this movie, which means that I have a certain proclivity to specific cancers, one that my mom had. So, after this bad news, we were like, “You know what? It’s time, so I’m going to make a movie about this and therapize ourselves.” [laughs] It definitely was very therapeutic, and we kind of wanted to go back to our Hellbender roots and create something witchy, folky, and the way of going about that was kind of developing our own rules, and that’s when we started doing a lot of research on witches. But I’ll let John and Toby speak more about that because they’re the ones who did a lot of research.

John Adams: We were excited about necromancy because this is a movie about life and death, and kind of the beauty of both of them. That’s why we have a witch doctor, who is basically a representative of science and real doctors and real medicine. I was saved by chemotherapy and radiation. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a magic potion and a magic wand that got waved in front of me and saved my life. Toby was saved by a doctor reaching into her body and taking out a deadly tumor, a couple of them. This is what we celebrate. We wanted to celebrate the world of science, but we wanted to dress it up as this beautiful, conflicted witch doctor that was skilled in the art of necromancy, which basically is just someone who has a love relationship with both death and life.

BD: I am sorry to hear that you’ve all had to deal with this personally at some point. I hope everyone is okay now.

JA: I really appreciate what you’re saying, but none of us are sorry about anything that happened to us because it is life. We’re hoping that Mother of Flies is a real celebration of that life. A celebration of fighting for your life, but also a celebration of accepting and knowing that what’s coming is beautiful, too.

BD: That’s such a good way to look at it. I love that. Toby, you play a woman named Solveig, who lives in a house in the woods that looks like it came straight out of a fairytale. How did you find this house?

Toby Poser: That is our house, minus the roots coming in and out of it. The structure is our cabin up in the Catskill mountains of New York, and then our wonderful FX wizard, Trey Lindsay, is so brilliant at compositing and painting. He painted all the trees and the roots with the interior of the house. We used the interior of the barn that someone in the family owns, and we carried up the bark from trees that had just been logged, and we just put those up against the interior of the barn space, and that was the interior.

JA: And we brought up moss and ferns.

TP: We just brought nature inside.

Zelda Adams in John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser’s MOTHER OF FLIES. Courtesy of John Adams. A Shudder release

BD: Is the tree we see growing up through the middle of the house real?

TP: No, that’s just our FX wizard, who was able to doctor it in so beautifully with composition, and sometimes he just paints things.

BD: Wow, it looks amazing!

JA: We wanted it to look like a fairytale, so the fact that that’s what you said is really great.

BD: Mickey is a young woman who has a history with death. Solveig is an older woman who has a history with death. It’s interesting how these two women come together to conquer death. Solveig reminds me of a sin-eater, except she consumes death. Can you talk a little bit about that?

TP: I love that! That’s so cool. I think that, as a necromancer, Solveig does have an intimate relationship with death in a way similar to how Mickey does. It’s neat that you’re talking about sin-eating and consuming, because we do have a lot of consummations in this film, both with death literally, and also with Solveig consuming snakes and wild poisonous herbs, but I also kind of think of Solveig’s death work as a kind of sex work because it’s transactional. It’s also a distraction. Even in the poem at the beginning of the movie, she says, “To woo death, one must love it, lie with it. For three days, give your beating, bloody heart to it until death grows warm.” I feel like that’s a way of distracting. So, it’s transactional for Mickey, who has a death device, a tumor growing inside of her. Then the necromancer, I think, knows how to work with that tumor because it is a death device.

JA: You said something great, sin-eater. I think one of the things that we want to flip on its head is that Solveig takes a dead baby and brings it back to life, and that’s a sin, but she would gladly eat that sin for true love. It’s very unorthodox, and it’s sacrilegious, but is it if you really love something? If you could bring back the dead and love it as payment for saving someone’s life, is that sacrilegious? Is that unorthodox? I think that’s what’s fun about this movie, but Solveig doesn’t think so. That’s true love, and she will go to the ends of the earth for that.

ZA: Yeah. I’ll also just add that your point about the sin-eater is so interesting, especially when you think about the use of this serpent in our film. That’s so clever, and I just love that reflection.

TP: And Michelle, going back to you thinking of that, this film shares some DNA with Hellbender. In Hellbender, we start the movie with a group of women who are hanging a female witch, or someone they consider a witch. Similarly to this, Solveig is another maligned woman, who is maligned for the knowledge she carries, the science, the honors, and people are willing to turn their backs on their faith and be hypocrites when it comes to using her dark magic for their own convenience. So, I think this is another love song to the women who have been maligned simply because they know a hell of a lot and are powerful, and Hellbender is about that as well.

John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser’s MOTHER OF FLIES. Courtesy of John Adams. A Shudder release

BD: The cinematography is stunning. I love the imagery of nature—the snakes, the flies, and the trees. Without getting into spoilers, can you talk about some of the symbolism in the film and Solveig’s relationship to nature?

TP: The snakes are my favorite of her many tools. Symbolically, for us, they represent her science, which is renewal. She’s all about finding beauty in rot and ruin and the renewal of nature and living in the wilderness, as we do, we’re so influenced by the nature around us. Each season consumes the last; the beauty of the birth of spring and the death of trees in the fall, and then the coldness of winter, and then once again rebirth. Snakes with their shedding skin are perfect emblems of that. They also live beneath the earth and the rocks and crags, like Solveig. They symbolically, too, if you think about the symbol of medicine, it’s the snake curling around the staff, so that’s just one of them.

JA: The snake is just such a loaded symbol. In Western religion, it’s the crux of everything. It’s both knowledge and sin, which in Christianity is the whole thing, because once we get knowledge, we become sinful. But are we? I think that’s what we want to ask, those questions. Are we really sinful, or are we just knowledgeable, and is science and knowledge good? It also has a sexual connotation. Sperm moves like snakes, and it looks like snakes. So, there is all this imagery in there that is really important about life, about death, about growth, about transference of knowledge, or transference of disease; it’s just a loaded symbol, and it’s perfect. For me, the reason magic works is that the watcher believes it. And we wanted to talk about magic in this film. The reason magic works for the young girl, and she says it, “I am going to believe.” With many people, when they go to the doctor, they believe in the doctor. I think that helps. When you go to a doctor, and you don’t believe, it does not help. So, we wanted to talk about these issues. The transference of the snake from Solveig to Mickey is transference of knowledge; it’s transference of belief; it’s transference of strength; it’s also transference of something that Solveig needs to be born out of this person. It’s a deal that’s being made. It’s a transaction. It’s heavily loaded with symbolism.

BD: The music is by your band H6LLB6ND6R. Did you write new songs specifically for this film?

ZA: It’s half and half. It’s funny because just like our movies, which are very much a representation of what’s going on in our lives, so is our music. So, some of our songs we had already written, and because they do kind of revolve around what we’re experiencing in life, and certain themes, they translate really well into our movies. For example, I think “Barren” was written before the movie, and another song in it, “Murder,” we might have written during the movie. So, it’s half and half. It’s just so fun because music is such a big part of our movies, and sometimes, we put in a song that we’ve already made, and it’s like fate. It just works perfectly and is able to help tell part of our storyline without us having to have extra dialogue and extra scenes. We just have a montage with certain music and lyrics that can tell a story in itself.

BD: Congratulations on winning Best Film at Fantasia International Film Festival 2025! What was that like?

JA: Thank you! That was beautiful. Fantasia changed our lives with The Deeper You Dig. They opened doors to us that we never expected to be opened and Mitch Davis and his whole crew at Fantasia opened those doors to us, and he continues, and they continue, to support us and other independent filmmakers. It’s a fantastic festival that pumps out a lot of beautiful art. We’re just so thankful that we’re a part of that community.

TP: It really felt like a big love nod to all the really independent, gritty people out there. It felt like an award for all of us.

JA: That’s what’s great about all the horror festivals. They very much keep all filmmakers on the same ground, whether it’s a hundred-million-dollar movie or whether it’s a ten-thousand-dollar movie. All these horror festivals everywhere, from Telluride to Fantasia to Frightfest, they treat everyone the same. There’s no hierarchy, and it’s really great about the horror fests. So, anyone out there making horror movies, you’re lucky.