HELLBENDER: New Trailer And Poster For Occult Coming-of-Age Horror, on Shudder in February

16-year-old Izzy (Zelda Adams) suffers from a rare illness that has kept her isolated on a mountaintop with her mother (Toby Poser) her whole life. As Izzy begins to question her sickness, she pushes back against her confinement and secretly befriends Amber (Lulu Adams), another girl living on the mountain, but her newfound happiness is derailed after she eats a live worm as part of a juvenile game and finds an insatiable and violent hunger awakened within her. To understand the hunger, Izzy must learn the dark secrets of her family's past and the ancient power in her bloodline.

Hellbender shows a huge step forward in virtually every possible arena, from writing and the performance of the leads, to effective and at times even impressive VFX, all the way through to conceptualizing a world far bigger than their meager budget should've be able to support. It's pretty astounding.

 

Hellbender is a fascinating study of the mother-daughter dynamic, the need for children to strike out on their own and essentially kill the child within to manifest their own adult power. It uses the traditionally feminine power of witchcraft and commune with the darkness to flip the Oedipal script.

 

It's fascinating, bloody, at times funny, and always interesting.

Shudder, AMC Networks’ premium streaming service for horror, thrillers and the supernatural, unveils today the first trailer, poster art, and released day for the upcoming Shudder Original Hellbender, premiering exclusively on the platform on Thursday, Feb. 24.

 

The latest film from the upstate N.Y. filmmaker family The Adams, Hellbender is written, directed, produced, scored, and edited by Toby Poser, John Adams, and Zelda Adams (The Deeper You Dig) — who also star, alongside Lulu Adams. It’s the sixth feature from Wonder Wheel Productions, the family-run production company founded by Poser and Adams and their children, and the family also produced the music for the feature with tracks from their experimental punk band H6LLB6ND6R.

 

Official Selection: Fantasia International Film Festival— Winner Best Actress, Best Score, Fantastic Fest, Sitges Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival