Editor’s note: Mild spoilers for Hellbender below.
Culture divides naturally occur between incumbent and succeeding generations. It’s the nature of change: The incoming class carries with them their colloquialisms, styles, and politics into their role as the new ruling body once their elders scoot aside to make room for them at the table. It’s the circle of life. The boomers ditched their parents’ swing and jazz music for rock and soul; millennials traded rock and soul for a rotation of pop icons. We all find our own way, in our own time, through our own traditions. So it goes.
But some traditions and preferences cross over from one generation to the next. Take the family in Hellbender, Mother (Toby Poser) and daughter, Izzy (Zelda Adams): They’re in a metal band together. In fact, it’s where the movie gets its title. Sure, they’re the only two members, but they don’t need a third to know how to thrash. Oh, also, Mother is a witch, and Izzy is a witch, and they both do witchy things together until they suddenly arrive at a difference of opinion over how best to comport oneself as a witch in a public space. Regular mother-daughter stuff. (It’s normal for mothers and daughters to fight over whether or not it’s okay to bisect and consume the neighbor, right?)
Hellbender is the latest movie from the Adams Family. This is neither code nor a clever moniker. They are called the Adams Family because Adams is their last name, Poser the exception, and they are a family: John, Toby, and their daughters, Lulu and Zelda. For horror fans with aspirations of parenthood, the Adams are family goals. Watching horror movies with your children is great. Making horror movies with your children? That’s how you punch your ticket to parenting’s highest echelon. Prior to Hellbender, the Adams made The Deeper You Dig, a ghost story that, like Hellbender, revolves around the relationship between a mother and her daughter; prior to that, they made The Hatred, Halfway to Zen, The Shoot, Knuckle Jack, and Rumblestrips here and there across the 2010s.
You could argue that what’s being passed down from John and Toby to Zelda and Izzy is more generically a love of making movies instead of a love of making horror movies; the Adams didn’t dip their toes into horror until The Hatred, then fully submerged them on The Deeper You Dig. But films like these and Hellbender don’t happen sans abiding love for horror. More importantly, they don’t happen without the bond between parents and their kids. The Deeper You Dig invests in family as plot. So does Hellbender. Hellbender goes to a very different place than The Deeper You Dig, though, the uncomfortable place where the generational divide functions more like an arena where mores are fought over by progenitors and progyny.
Izzy lives a sheltered life. Mother doesn’t let her go to town, refusing even to chaperone her for routine errands. Izzy, Mother says, is terminally ill with a rare disorder; contact with other people, any other people, would be fatal. Mother only feeds Izzy flora sourced from the immediate surroundings of their isolated woodland home. It’s a suspect living situation. But Mother has her reasons, namely that consumption of flesh and blood fuels Izzy’s latent magical power, inherited from Mother, who in turn inherited them from her mother in an unbroken chain dating back centuries to Hellbender’s opening sequence: A colonial-set witch’s trial and execution.
Mother and Izzy have a strong bond by virtue of their domestic circumstances; their two-piece band is one (safe) way they express their maternal-sororal intimacy. Witchcraft, on the other hand, is extremely fucking dangerous, and Mother’s line of witches apparently has – had – a minor habit of massacring regular folks. While Mother shares her love of kickass music with Izzy, she denies Izzy her heritage. Magic is power, but power is a responsibility, and if there’s one thing teenagers are allergic to, it’s responsibility. This is reason enough for Mother to withhold from Izzy all knowledge of her family history. The bloodlust, the high of having power that makes all others before you powerless, comes a close second.
In another film, this choice would make Mother the de facto villain. In Hellbender, she’s just doing her best as a parent. Lying to Izzy about her health, granted, isn’t the usual lie moms and dads tell their kids; we lie about Spot going to live with grandma on the farm; we lie about how much it’ll hurt when we yank that looth tooth from their mouth; we lie about Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, and depending on how we feel about religion, we lie about that, too. We tell them everything will be okay even when it won’t, but that’s a lie we also tell ourselves. It all evens out. But Mother puts the fear of death in Izzy, and keeps her from making friends or seeing the world beyond the borders of their property. When by chance, a stranger (played by Papa Adams) does wander through the backyard, Mother unceremoniously vaporizes him to keep Izzy safe.
“Safe” is a loaded word. “Safe” from harm, perhaps, but mostly “safe” from discovering that deep down inside, Izzy has the knack necessary for slinging spells, which for Mother is a mixed bag. What Hellbender does so well, though, is drawing a clear line that separates fear from joy; the film suggests that, perhaps, Mother’s fear is unfounded and that Izzy is mature enough to handle the burden of family lineage. Magic can be fun, too! Mother and Izzy sit in the forest practicing casting, developing Izzy’s talents, and the happiness baked into these moments is as palpable as the Adams’ FX are tactile. To think, Mother hesitated. Hellbender gives the audience a reason to pause and wonder what might have been if Mother had been open with Izzy about their background to begin with.
If nothing else, Mother might have avoided the supernatural teen drama that awaits her once Izzy starts stepping into her power. Turns out that, yes, witchcraft is that seductive to a lonely teenager forbidden from human interaction for her entire life. When you tell a child they can’t have what they want, they tend to go overboard when they inevitably do get it. Izzy, for instance, makes the basement of her house into her personal abattoir. It’s the place where the feared outcome Mother struggled for years to stave off becomes a gruesome reality: Izzy usurps her as the head of the household, which is worse than imprisoning and torturing their neighbor, Amber (played by Lulu), but only slightly. The roles reverse. All Mother’s efforts to break the cycle of bloodshed are for naught.
Mother is afraid of the same thing every parent is afraid of: Who their child will grow up to be. We all worry about our kids’ happiness, their security, their future, and to a lesser extent, we worry about obsolescing. No one likes to think of themselves as replaceable. But Toby and John clearly have, and that thought filters into Hellbender on a molecular level. Generations clash. That can’t be helped. Hellbender imagines that clash in rare nightmarish terms, where there’s a clear winner and a clear loser, where what parents most dread for their kids comes to awful fruition.
Check out our exclusive Hellbender Convo X Fango with the Adams family. Hellbender is now streaming on Shudder.
