The Adams family (no, not that one…) have been making family films – literally, not the kind whose supposed absence is so frequently bemoaned by conservative critics – since 2013’s Rumblestrips, a drama about a mother convicted of growing marijuana who takes her children on a road strip ahead of her impending imprisonment. A largely self-contained unit, the family have been making films regularly ever since, including the horror films The Hatred (2018) and The Deeper You Dig (2019). Shot during the restrictions imposed by the 2020-2021 COVID pandemic, Hellbender found the family tackling that ever-popular witches-in-the-woods “folk horror” and doing so with some style.

The film revolves around a strange mother/daughter relationship – a never-named woman (Toby Poser) lives deep in the forests of the Catskill Mountains with her teenage daughter Izzy (Poser’s daughter, Zelda Adams). Izzy is kept isolated from the rest of the world because, her mother tells her, she has a rare disease that makes contact with other people extremely dangerous. They pass their days performing their self-penned punk songs while wearing Kiss-like make-up (Izzy plays drums, her mother bass guitar) but eventually Izzy’s natural curiosity and longing for companionship starts to get the better of her. In truth, the women are both “hellbenders,” witch-like women whose strict vegetarian diet is to prevent them from absorbing the lifeforce of animals they ingest and whose powers Issy is currently unaware of, and which mum uses to dispose of anyone who accidentally ventures onto their land – one such intruder is played by Poser’s partner and Zelda’s dad John Adams, who also directed the film). After Izzy befriends fellow teen Amber (played by Adams’ sister Lulu) and her friends and consumes a worm in a ridiculous drinking game, she begins to realise the power that has been lying dormant within her with catastrophic results.

Thinks get off to an eye-catching start with a prologue setting up the line of “hellbenders” in the family – out in the woods, at some point in the past, a group of women gather to hang another woman (Judy Rosen) whose mouth has been sewn-up, only for her to survive both the hanging and several gunshots, burst into flames and fly screaming into the air. It’s one of several decent stabs at CGI effects that the film somehow manages to pull off (the budget can’t have been very high at all, and Trey Lindsay’s effects are better than many films of this calibre) and the first of the its many surprises and rug-pulling moments.

The script by John, Zelda and Poser, tries out some new twists and turns on old ideas and for the most part, it works remarkably well. Technically, the photography, by John and Zelda though anyone not otherwise engaged was called on to act as crew, all of the family taking their turn behind the camera, is often gorgeous and the use of drones gives it the look of a film far more expensive than it surely was. Though there are moments where the post-production film-look slips slightly, exposing the digital video beneath. But this and other technical shortcomings unexpectedly give the film the sort of rawness that we remember from similar films from earlier decades and does the film no harm at all.

Peppered among the slow-burning moodiness (the film’s awkward pacing isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste) are some wild psychedelic freakouts that bring to mind the trippiness we see in the films of Ben Wheatley (particularly A Field in England (2013) and In the Earth (2021)) and once again one can only admire how polished and inventive these moments of madness are given how cheap the film was and the less-than-ideal circumstances under which it was made.

Hellbender is a pleasingly odd film that has a lot of familiar ingredients that the family mix in unpredictable measures to create something that’s a lot more intriguing than it may at first appear. It revisits the ever-popular generational fear of the parents losing control of their young, a theme that was immensely popular in the late 60s and early 70s when parents feared the counterculture that so many of their offspring were embracing. It brings the theme up to date, embracing fears that we might have passed something onto our children that we can’t protect them from and that they might be being spirited away not by some drug-addled hippies that might well turn out to be mass murderers, but by supernatural forces that offer a far more appealing lifestyle than you can ever offer.

Key to this working is the mother-daughter relationship and as one might expect when it’s played out by real life relatives, the relationship in Hellbender is beautifully played by Poser and Adams. Their characters make for a strange pairing – it’s not every mother and daughter that bond over playing power punk – ands their initial exploration of the powers recently awakened in Izzy is both touching and feels entirely natural. Of course, being a horror film, it’s not going to end well, and the nightmarish finale sees the film kicking up several gears while bever losing sight of that all-important dynamic between mother and daughter.

The effect of eating meat on Izzy is not dissimilar to that on Garance Marillier’s Justine, another vegetarian whose life is radically altered by the ingestion of meat in Julia Ducournau’s excellent Grave/Raw (2016), but otherwise (and the effect of Wheatley’s films perhaps) Hellbender feels entirely fresh and original, no mean feat given that “folk horror” has proliferated to such a degree that it’s beginning to feel like it’s consuming itself. A far more interesting film than you might at first give it credit for – how many more witchy “folk horror” stories are there to be told? – Hellbender is an intelligently plotted, nicely acted and technically polished film that was preceded by two short films, Hellbender: Falling in Love (2020) and Hellbender: Black Sky (2020), and which bodes extremely well for the future of this most unusual of film-making concerns. Whatever they do next, it should be high on your “must-see” list.

Hellbender is currently available top stream on Shudder.