Blood & Guts is the best kind of bio-doc: a film about artists that is inviting to those unfamiliar with their work while offering insights for longtime fans.
Shot over the course of several years with the the Adams family (helpfully distinguished from the fictional Addams family in writing by the difference of a "d"), Blood & Guts charts the making of two films, the departure of younger daughter Zelda to college, the start and abandonment of a project, and the start of production on what would become their 2025 film Mother of Flies.
It's a lot of ground to cover within 80 minutes, and Blood & Guts manages to do it while also weaving in individual and family histories through what can be called flashbacks within the ongoing "narrative." In those looks to the past, we learn that dad John was a successful fashion model in his early adult life, featured in campaigns for Armani, Valentino, Calvin Klein, and Gucci, among others. Mom Toby Poser was a successful working actress with a lead role on soap Guiding Light and appearances on three different Law & Order shows. There's some sweet reminiscing about how they met in New York and John fell for her immediately, but it took her until she saw him playing with his band Banana Fish Zero.
These sections, as well as the portion about the family's first film Rumblestrips, are full of archival footage and pictures that draw the audience into the lives of these people. More than simply listening to them tell their stories, we're invited to see their home videos and family photo albums.
It's an intimacy that becomes more meaningful during the more difficult parts of their story. Both John and Toby survived cancer at different times in their lives, and they speak about it with candor. During some of these moments, directors Tina Grapenthin, Katie Green, and Carlye Rubin make the powerful choice to stop the montage archival footage with voiceover and let us sit with the subjects as they talk, or don't talk.
Perhaps the most striking moment in the film comes when John talks about how his lack of insurance made him fall from being a well-paid top model to being broke in the wake of his diagnosis. He says this, struggles to find what to say next, begins to cry a little, smiles and says: "But it was the best, because it made me know what's important about life."
And what's important about life to John is his family and his children. Lulu, the older of the two girls, has been out of the house for years already when the doc begins, during the filmmaking of 2023's Where the Devil Roams, while the younger Zelda is in her senior year of high school.
Lulu's life has taken her all over the world as a teacher, and for much of the filming of Blood & Guts, she's living primarily in Korea. We're told that she's always invited to be a part of whatever movie is being made, and it's respected when she sometimes has to say no. Zelda on the other hand, says she's never known a time when they were not making films, ever since she was six it's been "that one ended, now let's make another."
Toby says the family can "make one for $10,000, but it helps that we involve our kids and neighbors." There's talk about how their small town of Roscoe, New York, is full of people who have allowed the family to use their stores and restaurants as locations, and all want to be killed in their next movie (several already have been).
John's parents have also been in their films, and his father, John Sr. appears in Blood & Guts with many words of praise for his son. Some of which, very charmingly, aren't quite accurate. During the section on John's career as a model, his dad says that John was the highest-paid model in America and the film hard cuts to John clarifying "I was not the highest-paid model in America."
That scrappiness is a central issue in the doc, as established Hollywood producers have been offering the family larger budgets and professional crews for years due to their success. Historically, John has been tempted, while Toby has maintained, with support from John Sr., that the intimacy of their films is what makes them special.
When Zelda leaves for college, though, the parents take an invitation to shoot their next film, the satirical creature feature Hell Hole, in Serbia with a professional crew. The result is a film they are proud of but doesn't feel authentic to who they are, and ironically, given their stances before taking on the project, tests John's patience more than Toby's.
In its wake, they set out to make their own similar creature feature, Fairy, during Zelda's first summer home. They begin filming, but quickly abandon it. John and Toby acknowledge that it wasn't a movie they needed to make, it had nothing to say anything about their lives or their family, and it was a movie they were making to prove a point, a point they didn't need to prove.
Which leads the film to end on the note of production beginning on Mother of Flies, a film about a young woman turning to magic to rid herself of cancer, conceived after Zelda was diagnosed with Lynch Syndrome, a genetic syndrome that makes people more susceptible to certain cancers. Like the best of the family's work, Mother of Flies draws from their reality to create something cathartic.
In its final moments, Blood & Guts shares footage of the family reaffirming the power of horror to face and exorcise fears, and remarking on the inextricability of filmmaking and family in their world. It's a lovely end to a wonderful portrait of this family unlike any other who are some of the most interesting filmmakers working today.
The film screened at the 2026 Chattanooga Film Festival.