Hell Hole: A hybridised evolution for the Poser/Adams family

Hell Hole had its world première at Fantasia 2024, 29 July

It is 1814, and a platoon of Napoleon’s soldiers has strayed from the Illyrian Provinces into a remote part of Serbia. Lost and starving, the French Captain (Anders Hove) and his Lieutenant (Marko Filipović) approach on foot to a lone Roma woman (Marina Gunjača) who, recognising the threat (implicitly of rape) to her person at the hands of these armed men, lets them have her horse. A Trojan horse, as it will turn out. For as the Lieutenant, back with the other men, raises a knife to kill the beast for food, the horse suddenly, bloodily explodes, and from within emerges a squid-like monster that chases down the Captain not so much to kill him as to violate him painfully from behind. The tables have truly turned and the shoe is on the other foot, with this invading masculine force now itself invaded – and when, mid-assault, the title Hell Hole immediately flashes on screen in red, an associative link is forged between those two words and the Captain’s anal cavity, entered very much without consent.

In fact Hell Hole is full of male arseholes (both literal and metaphorical), and references to farting, defecation and the smell of butt – but the title also denotes both this part of Serbia, still very much a backwoods in the present day when the rest of the film is set, and the hole that an American fracking company and its local crew are now trying to dig in the vicinity. Here there are forced entries at the political, the ecological and the biological level. For this is a place that has seen several invasions come and go, as is evidenced by the vast, derelict Soviet-era building in whose shadow the crew is working. That work too is conceived as a penetrative act, raping the earth. When the phallic drill first enters the ground, causing something underneath to scream and bleed, the operation is temporarily halted, leading the American manager Emily (Toby Poser) to describe this pause in activities with the decidedly sexualised expression “frackus interruptus”.

The crew will unearth a part of this area’s buried history: both the French Lieutenant, filthy and stinking but very much alive and as young as before, and something else inside him, tentacular and defensive, forming a strange symbiotic union with a man who should be long dead – which is certainly what he would rather be. Earlier the site foreman John (John Adams) had said earlier that his wife MaryAnn regarded pregnancy as being “like growing a monster inside of her for 9 months” whereas he saw it as “like the beauty of being a woman, you get to do something magic like that.” His words, eliciting a sceptical look from his happily childless boss and friend Emily, are about to be empirically tested in the field. For the creature that the Lieutenant is carrying within him like an embryo will soon come out of his body, leaving him instantly desiccated and a ‘mummy’ (as Emily describes it) in a different sense.

Entering only the males of the species, and making them its maternal hosts, the creature will engender a crisis of masculinity, while reintensifying the already incendiary life-vs-choice debate by playing it out in the bodies of men rather than women. On site by chance to ensure that the dig does not disrupt the local environment, science professor Nikola (Aleksandr Trmčić) and his intern parasitologist Sofija (Olivera Peruničić) are conveniently on hand to provide requisite biological exposition, but they also flesh out between them a discourse on the conflicting – or perhaps complementary – rights of man and mollusc, whose survival has now become interdependent. Maybe, after all, living with a smelly octopus inside you is not so bad. And maybe Emily’s young nephew Teddy (Max Portman), who has always dreamed of being a stay-at-home dad, can, in his evolving relationship with Sofija, find accommodation for a new, progressive, unconventional yet flexible model of family that embraces its own otherness rather than fearing the freakish monstrousness within.

That last point is what makes Hell Hole unmistakably the progeny of the Poser/Adams family, as they dig deep once more into kinship structures that subvert the norms of gendered, embodied identity. Also instantly familiar is the hard-rocking score, to which John Adams at times heavily punctuates his edits. Nonetheless this is different from their previous forays into genre. Perhaps it is the absence of daughters Zelda and Lulu, both off studying (although Lulu did co-write the screenplay with her parents), perhaps it is the setting outside of America (and the not always great English-language performances from the local Serbian cast), perhaps it is the handing over of the camera (typically the province of John and his daughters) to cinematographer Sean Dahlberg (Eight Eyes, 2023), or perhaps it is the resort to elaborate practical effects work and creature puppetry, but this feels like something new – a hybridised evolution, if you will, splicing together the family’s own recognisable genetic materials with the DNA of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage (1988) and even Jacob Vaughan’s Bad Milo! (2014).

“There’s a whole world under the ground we can only imagine.” Sofija tells Emily and John. In so doing, she is also addressing two of America’s foremost underground genre filmmakers, and encouraging them to explore further afield. Hell Hole is the result – less intimate than their previous works, but far more overtly silly and over the top, even if their usual serious, seismic themes (about nature, relationships, history and gender) can still be found hidden deep below all the noisy surface tremors.

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