{"id":243690,"date":"2026-01-21T03:35:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T03:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/243690\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T03:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T03:35:10","slug":"meet-shudders-mother-of-flies-filmmakers-adams-family-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/243690\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Shudder’s ‘Mother of Flies’ Filmmakers: Adams Family Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Streaming on Shudder<\/a> this Friday, January 23, \u201cMother of Flies\u201d<\/a> is a lo-fi ethereal nightmare unafraid to ask some of necromancy\u2019s most brutal, existential questions. But the new indie horror film<\/a>\u2019s trio of co-writer\/directors \u2014 Toby Poser, Zelda Adams, and John Adams \u2014 say audiences and even some interviewers hesitate to do the same when they learn just how personal their family\u2019s latest nightmare really is. Inspired by actual experiences with cancer<\/a>, \u201cMother of Flies<\/a>\u201d produces an arresting intimacy that could give even seasoned genre fans pause.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the dialogue comes from our reality,\u201d said Zelda. \u201cWe\u2019re a very open family.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"KPOP<\/a> \"Nadja\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cHorror lets you talk about anything,\u201d agreed John, summarizing the Adams\u2019 approach to connection, both on and offscreen. \u201cYou can talk about unorthodox subjects, disguise it in blood, and it\u2019s great. The horror community is very open-minded and very open-hearted with art.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That belief runs straight through \u201cMother of Flies,\u201d the dreamy, dreadful folk allegory that IndieWire has championed since it premiered at Fantasia Fest 2025<\/a>. Last summer, the Adams became the first Americans to win the festival\u2019s top prize \u2014 the Cheval Noir for Best Film<\/a> \u2014\u00a0but they weren\u2019t a new discovery. Already beloved within the Canadian genre community, they\u2019re a Catskills-based family whose horror operation in upstate New York has become an institution.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Explaining how she, sister Lulu, and parents Toby and John went from garage band to filmmaking unit, Zelda said, \u201cI was lucky enough to be born into this family. My sister and I were raised by two wonderful creatives.\u201d Filmmaking entered the girls\u2019 lives early and stayed. \u201cWhen I was around six, we made our first film and decided that we loved it from there,\u201d Zelda continued. \u201cAfter four drama films, we made a horror movie and fell in love with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MOTHERToby Poser as Solveig in \u2018Mother of Flies\u2019 (2026)\u00a9AMC\/courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

Music was never far behind, and remains essential in their latest, most high-profile film. Zelda started on drums in their family band, formerly known as Kid California. That group evolved into H6LLB6ND6R, whose punk sound serves as both score and texture in the Adams\u2019 films.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur band and our movies are just brother and sister,\u201d Zelda joked. \u201cThey\u2019re just hanging out.\u201d<\/p>\n

That dual identity \u2014 musicians and directors, family and collaborators \u2014 defines the Adams\u2019 creative DNA. Their first stretch of features saw them leaning into straight dramatic acting, but then the realm of horror storytelling beckoned.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re making dramas, you\u2019re a little locked down to real life, reality,\u201d John said. \u201cIn horror, you can talk about any subject\u2026 to an audience ready to meet those topics head on.\u201d<\/p>\n

That willingness mattered when the family turned toward mortality in \u201cMother of Flies.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cJohn and I have both had very different cancers,\u201d Toby explained. \u201cJohn\u2019s was in 1994. Mine was six years ago. And then Zelda, right before we started shooting \u2018Mother of Flies,\u2019 learned that she carries the same genetic predisposition, Lynch syndrome, that I have.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Toby continued, \u201cWe\u2019ve been talking about cancer, and we talk about life and death all the time. Sometimes with great humor and power. And we decided, now\u2019s the time that we should be talking about it through the beautiful lens of horror cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MOTHERJohn Adams as Jake in \u2018Mother of Flies\u2019\u00a9AMC\/courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

Making the film in the Catskills allowed the Adams family to shape that conversation on their own terms. For Zelda, shooting the movie while she was back in her real childhood home after college was grounding. \u201cIt was very comforting,\u201d she said. \u201cAll of our films are very therapeutic for us because we\u2019re constantly dealing with themes of family, love, loss, grief. We know the Catskills like the back of our hands. That\u2019s what makes our films all the more special to us. It really is just a sort of diary for our whole family.\u201d<\/p>\n

The production stretched across several months, followed by extensive editing \u2014 long by microbudget standards, but inseparable from the Adams\u2019 daily life. That diary-like quality feeds directly into Zelda\u2019s performance as Mickey, a young woman facing a terminal diagnosis who seeks out a witch\u2019s dark magic. Asked how she sustained that emotional intensity, Zelda framed it as translation rather than invention.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI got to have a lot of wonderful conversations with my parents,\u201d she said. \u201cI got to translate their experiences into that character, which was empowering as their daughter and as an actor. We talk about really dark things,\u201d she added. \u201cBut we\u2019re always bringing in humor and light. We didn\u2019t want to make a sad movie. We wanted to make a more empowering movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

John, who plays Mickey\u2019s father in the film, described watching Zelda and Toby inhabit such fraught roles without sentimentality. \u201cWe wanted to celebrate tough times,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to say, \u2018Let\u2019s get out a violin and play through the tough times.\u2019 Tough times are beautiful.\u201d For John, the heroism of \u201cMother of Flies\u201d lies in its ordinariness. \u201cWe\u2019re not superheroes,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re just regular old people that have to deal with massive events, and that\u2019s heroic.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"MOTHERZelda Adams as Mickey in \u2018Mother of Flies\u2019\u00a9AMC\/courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

Toby\u2019s central role as the witch Solveig \u2014 a necromancer who treats death as something to be welcomed rather than feared \u2014 embodies the script\u2019s most provocative ideas. \u201cI have an innate deep love of nature and honoring and even loving the darkness in life,\u201d Toby said. \u201cAs a necromancer, Solveig has an intimate relationship with death and an understanding that death craves warmth and light. It\u2019s a transaction. I give you warmth, and I want something back.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nature itself isn\u2019t a backdrop in \u201cMother of Flies,\u201d it\u2019s an active collaborator. Because they travel light, the Adams could respond immediately when nature offered something unexpected for their film. \u201cThere was a dying fawn that we came across,\u201d Toby recalled. \u201cThe flies were just starting to be drawn to it, and we immediately shot.\u201d <\/p>\n

For IndieWire, Zelda broke down their lean setup: a Canon C-70, a tripod, and two Sennheiser microphones. \u201cWe have the ability to improvise,\u201d she said. \u201cIf nature brings us a wonderful gift, we can shoot it immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

That flexibility is inseparable from the Adams\u2019 low-budget ethos, one they treat as leverage rather than limitation. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt limited by our small pool of resources,\u201d Toby said. \u201cI think the opposite is true.\u201d Big budgets, she argued, can flatten imagination. \u201cIndependent filmmaking is like kids who can have a fantasy life with just mud and sticks and trash.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked what audiences still avoid talking about, the Adams didn\u2019t hedge. \u201cThere\u2019s a scene involving a difficult childbirth,\u201d Toby said. \u201cThere are Christian characters who are very happy to turn their back on their faith when it comes to saving a life, and they turn to the necromancer instead.\u201d Viewers, she said, haven\u2019t wanted to ask about that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"MOTHERLulu Adams in \u2018Mother of Flies\u2019\u00a9AMC\/courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

\u201cThese silences aren\u2019t accidental,\u201d John said. \u201cThat\u2019s why we made the movie.\u00a0 We love it when somebody cuts right in and hits the hard stuff.\u201d For Zelda, that fearlessness is inherited.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat suicide conversation?\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s from a car ride to soccer practice. We\u2019ve always been very transparent about death, drugs, sex, love \u2014 anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMother of Flies\u201d ultimately reads less like a singular film than a statement of method. Toby spoke about keeping a rejection letter from the National Endowment for the Arts on her desk as a reminder to continue working on their own terms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re standing together in rooms and talking about shared hearts,\u201d John agreed. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing more important now.\u201d <\/p>\n

At a moment when American independent cinema is being squeezed \u2014 priced out of cities, softened by branding, and increasingly asked to explain itself into corporate safety \u2014 the Adams family offers a different model. They make horror at home, contemplating illness, faith, death, and love without sanding down the edges.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIndependent cinema,\u201d Zelda said, \u201cis the most sustainable thing right now, and the most meaningful.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cMother of Flies\u201d streams on Shudder Friday, January 23. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Streaming on Shudder this Friday, January 23, \u201cMother of Flies\u201d is a lo-fi ethereal nightmare unafraid to ask…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,593,594,142811,409,111,139,69,27452],"class_list":{"0":"post-243690","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-interviews","11":"tag-mother-of-flies","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-shudder"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}