A Family project, Hellbender is a 2021 release that was written and directed by John Adams, Toby Poser and Zelda Adams (being, in order, a dad, mom and daughter team). They also star in the film and were also behind the interesting horror The Deeper You Dig. Hellbender has a folk horror feel but is also a clever take on the witch movie. It also, as you can tell with me featuring it here, uses tropes familiar in the vampire genre.
It begins with a hanging – having seen the victim bloody and, one might suggest, feral, we see her (a sack over her head) hung from a tree – interestingly those doing the lynching are all women. She appears to die and then starts twitching again. One woman pulls a gun out and starts shooting her, once in the head, but the woman doesn’t seem to die. A dagger is drawn when suddenly the woman launches into the air and seems to set on fire.
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| property line |
In the modern day, a mother (Toby Poser) and her daughter Izzy (Zelda Adams) have their own band, Mother plays the bass and Izzy is the drummer and singer. After their rehearsal Mother suggests she is going into town, Izzy asks to come but is ignored and so asks for some new drumsticks and art charcoal. We see mother reach their property line (they live on and own a wooded mountainside) and signs warn people away. In town an elderly man suggests he knows her, she was his grandmother’s nurse – she denies it. Izzy meanwhile is in the woods and follows the sound of a laugh but can’t find the source.
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| magical drone |
Izzy, we discover, is home-schooled and has been told she can’t meet people due to an auto-immune condition. We see, on another day, mother create a symbol in twigs, hair and blood – she causes it to fly into the air (I imagined it to be something like a magic created drone). Meanwhile Izzy, walking in the woods, finds a man (John Adams) who is lost whilst hiking. Mother comes along and, sending Izzy home, offers to take him back to the road but, when out of sight, she uses magic to grab the man, levitate him and then turn him to dust – the effect somewhat like dusting in some vampire films.
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| Lulu Adams as Amber |
Izzy eventually finds Amber (Lulu Adams) at a summer house and befriends her. Amber and her friends use the pool when the owners are away and, when Izzy is introduced to them, one of the friends pulls a prank by putting an earthworm into a tequila and forcing the vegetarian Izzy to swallow it. Thinking of films such as Raw, this is the trope where a person who is brought up vegetarian is (through hazing in Raw and prank here) forced to eat meat/a creature and this awakens something. In this case she involuntarily screams (though it is primal and not one of terror) but then the owner returns and the friends have to run.
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| Hellbender face |
The eating of the worm unseals her power and heritage as a Hellbender. Hellbenders are witches (or, as Izzy later describes it “kind of a cross between a witch, a demon and an apex predator”). Their power comes through feeding on blood, or more accurately the fear infused in it – again Izzy states, “they live off the fear that pumps through human blood” and whilst we know that they can feed on any living creature (and Mother states it is specifically the magic that comes from the fear), Mother specifies that the larger the creature the more power and confirms that human blood offers the most power. It is this use of the blood that is the base of recognisable tropes in the film. As well as this we see their inner faces emerge and there is much in the way of fangs – a look that skirted both the demonic and the vampiric.
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| the monstrous feminine |
The Hellbenders present as female and they reproduce asexually. Of course the repression of the feminine is also an underlying trope within the film and it is telling that Izzy builds a fleshy tunnel, her “happy place”, this was vaguely reminiscent of the constructed cave in We are the Flesh. There is also a thread the explores nature vs nurture – Izzy is brought up to be ‘good’ but her nature will out and she resents the choice being removed – her mother, of course, did not hide her away because she is ill but rather because she is dangerous – and there is much to be said here of the othering of the dangerous female. It is interesting that the film choses to have those who repress the feminine to be women (be it the women who hang the Hellbender at the head of the film, through fear, or Mother who does so to try to be protective). Speaking of mother there is also a discussion of the aging female body being replaced by the younger and this is cyclically drawn.
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| finger food |
The film is character driven, rather than gore driven, and much of what the Hellbenders do is off-screen and revealed after the fact. There is a psychedelic aspect to the film that works very well also. Some of this is magic (such as a room opened by a key that emerges from the flesh), and some of it hallucinatory such as Izzy daydreaming that the wood she eats (their vegetarian diet consists of forage from the forest) is actually a finger or the forest bending as power courses their body. With the primary leads being actually mother and daughter, the dynamics feel natural. A slow burn, for sure, but I liked it.
The imdb page is here.
On Demand @ Shudder via Amazon US
On Demand @ Shudder via Amazon UK
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