Death is a Mother: The Adams Family Returns with ‘Mother of Flies’ [Digital Feature]
In this Dread Central Digital Feature interview, I’m exhuming Mother of Flies, the striking new Shudder release, by speaking with its filmmakers and horror’s most exciting living dynasty, the Adams Family. They’re a real blood-tied creative collective making indie genre films that often feel more like cursed footage found in a tin in the woods than traditionally produced fictional narratives.
The film sees the family return with a profoundly personal interrogation of death, love, and decay. To unpack the making of Mother of Flies and the ideas that brought it to life, I sat down with its filmmakers and stars John Adams, Toby Poser, and Zelda Adams to talk about mortality, matriarchy, music, and more.
Death and the Family
For Zelda Adams, who plays Mickey, a young university student facing unimaginable news, death in Mother of Flies is something frightening yet important. As she puts it, the film is about “the fear of death, but also the power in belief that everything is going to work out whichever way it goes.”
Zelda explains that this perspective stems directly from how death is discussed in their family. “It’s a reflection of all these conversations that we have together as a family,” she tells me. “Death is a topic that we talk about and how, yeah, it’s scary, but it’s also a beautiful thing. Because life is. So, I’m sure death has to be just as beautiful.”
Co-star, co-director, and Zelda’s dad, John Adams, traces that openness back to his own lived experience. “Death is one of those things that both Toby and I had to confront. I had to confront it in 1994 when I got lymphoma and had to do a year of chemo and radiation. I was given a fifty-fifty chance, which was very interesting,” he tells me, sharing that the bluntness of that phrasing stayed with him.“That line is even said in this movie because it’s such an odd thing for someone to look at you and say.”
That confrontation shaped how death was addressed at home. “I had to form a relationship with death,” John admits. “So we talked to the kids about this kind of stuff, and because they’ve heard about all these things from such a young age, it’s not so shocking.”
When the conversation turns to belief, and what might exist beyond death, Toby Poser reflects. “I was raised in a very conservative Jewish family … I don’t follow any kind of structured religion, but I love thinking about eternity. I guess more so, I love believing in the invisible existence of love. That’s the best word I can use for it.”
“It’s similar to what that magic is that makes our hearts tick and then stop,” Poser adds, leaving the rest of us quiet for a moment. Then John points to the horror community as a rare space where conversations like these can exist openly.
“That’s what’s great about the horror community,” he says. “We talk about it, and we’re much more open-minded and open-hearted about these kinds of things.” His relationship with death, he adds, is rooted in certainty. “My feeling about death is I just have faith in it 100%. And that’s just straight faith. It’s not God faith, it’s death faith. Because just like life, death is going to work too.”
They Say She’s a Witch
As the witch Solveig, Toby Poser sits at the center of Mother of Flies, both as an ancient figure of power within the story and as a mother within the creative family behind it. The performance is stripped of trope or cliché. It’s elegant, restrained, funny, and deeply unsettling. Like a wolf spider, Solveig watches, waits, and studies, sometimes with a dry humor that lands with real weight. Her every movement is deliberate.
“I loved playing Solveig. I just loved her, and I miss her, and I guess she’s still in me,” Poser says when asked about the role and whether the performance brought her increased visibility as an actor. “I have noticed, and I’ve been so grateful for any attention that the role has gotten, because I’ll be honest, as an almost 57-year-old woman, it’s nice to be seen. I admit that. Particularly for something you loved making and put your heart and soul into. So I’ve been grateful for any words of kindness.”
When I ask if the role ever pushed her into frightening territory, Poser frames acting not as something threatening, but as an act of self-care.
“I find acting therapeutic,” she tells me. “I jump at the opportunity to rail and wail and to cry or to laugh. I love it all.” Much of her process, she explains, came from the people around her.“I also seek inspiration from my colleagues, particularly acting opposite Zelda in this, and seeing her brave performance, and how she channeled a lot of the very true stories she’s heard within her own family. It just made me want to be better.”
Toby extends that same admiration to John, whose role grounds the film’s emotional weight from a different yet vital angle.
“And then with John, who was equally important in this movie, honoring those who love the person who’s facing death. Their journey as the caretaker, as the lover, as the partner, as the child, as the friend is equally powerful and deserves consideration.” She points to the quiet desperation in his performance as essential.
“I love what John did, showing his performance as the father and the desperation on that side.”
It’s What Scares You the Most
Since all three filmmakers and performers in front of me are major genre fans, I ask which horror films could’ve gotten their hooks into them when they were young, leaving them both spellbound and traumatized, a tradition familiar to many fans. John doesn’t hesitate. For him, it was “Phantasm.”
Poser reaches further back, remembering that it was “something by Anthony Lanza from 1971 … I saw it on Creature Double Feature on Sundays called The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant,” she says with a smile.
And as for Zelda, she points to an everlasting phobia-inducing classic: “I watched Jaws at a really young age, and ever since I’ve had a fear of the ocean and the deep side of swimming pools.”
Mother of Flies lands on Shudder January 23, 2026.
Categorized: Dread Central Digital Feature Interviews News