Amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, The Creator follows Joshua (John David Washington ), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Gemma Chan), who is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war… and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory… only to discover the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).

We sat down with Edwards to discuss his love of genre and whether we’ll be seeing a sequel to The Creator…

You’ve done a few genre movies now – what is it about sci-fi that inspires you to create movies in this space?

I don’t know. It’s more like I want to ask everyone else ‘why don’t you want to make science fiction films?’ It seems like the ultimate genre

A story is basically a lie – you’re making stuff up. If you’re going to make stuff up, go all the way and then crank it up to 11 and that’s what science fiction is!

I think when you do that you can you can point things out that are harder to do in a normal movie.

For instance, we go through our whole lives with certain beliefs, and we never really get tested on them because everything stays the same. But in a science fiction film, you can take some aspect of life and flip it on its head and suddenly it makes what you used to think, quite difficult. And technology does that as it turns up. Like when mp3 arrived, we started to struggle with ‘what’s the concept of ownership?’ How do you own something if it’s digital? And there’s all these philosophical thoughts that normally you never have to worry about. In science fiction, I think it’s not predicting the future, it’s supposed to prevent it. It’s supposed to flag; ‘here’s a problem with what you’re thinking or the way we’re going and heading’. It’s just supposed to trip you up a bit and make you think.

Like all good sci-fi, The Creator deals with some very important issues – what do you think it is about genre that makes it a good platform to delve into some deep topics?

If you look at Star Wars say, it came along in an era (I mean, I’m not speaking for everybody), but for me and my friends, growing up in school, [we were] probably not going to church like the previous generation.

So we’re missing this quite primal desire for mythological stories and spiritual ideas about life and this thing with robots and spaceships comes along and we all flock to it because it looks cool. But then at the heart of it is this very spiritual storytelling that was missing from a whole generation.

You can get things under the radar with science fiction. My favourite TV show is The Twilight Zone. [The show’s creator] Rod Serling used to do drama – he won Emmys for amazing dramas but he got censored a lot by American corporations – they wouldn’t let him write certain scripts or do certain things. So he ended up creating a science fiction show called The Twilight Zone and no one censored him at all! He could talk about racism and bigotry and everything else, but wrap it up in a story about robots and no one noticed. But you still take the lesson. You still can’t help it. You put it in your pocket and you keep it for the rest of your life. Even though it wasn’t about literally what it was about, it still has the same impact. It’s sort of hidden.

What are you looking forward to audiences seeing in The Creator?

I don’t mind how they feel or what they think about it as long as they have a reaction, I guess. There was a very sweet thing I was sent last night that really made me go ‘oh, that’s why you do it’. Someone on Facebook had recreated the whole trailer with their family in Southeast Asia and it was this little kid dressed as Alphie. They did it shot-for-shot perfect with the music and everything.

I remember doing that; trying to copy Raiders of the Lost Ark or something and it kind of made [me] go ‘oh my god, that’s the cycle’. The most amazing thing you can do is you can hand the baton to people and then they go and do something even better. That’s what life is about, isn’t it?

Are you tempted to create any more stories set in the world of The Creator?

I really love the world. It’s frustrating that I couldn’t do so many of the things I wanted to do, but I’m not planning a sequel. Me and my girlfriend argue all the time because when we get a spare moment we’re like ‘what we’re going to watch on TV?’ She always wants to binge-watch some streaming show and I want to watch a film. At some point, she was like, why don’t you like TV? And I thought about it and my favourite part of the story is the end and TV never ends. I really like films because it’s like a joke where the best part is the punch line, and so this was designed to have an ending and kind of reverse-engineered from that.

So it’s a standalone thing and it’d be a high-class problem for the studio to tap you on the shoulder and say ‘we need a sequel’. That would be a difficult thing to deal with. But yeah, I’d happily take that problem.

The Creator will be released is in cinemas now.

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Simon Pegg and Minnie Driver are set to star in the upcoming movie Nandor Fodor & The Talking Mongoose, which tells the strange – and possibly true? – tale of a talking creature.

We’re delighted to exclusively unveil the artwork above and you can watch the trailer here…

The movie finds famed paranormal psychologist Dr. Nandor Fodor (Pegg) investigating a family’s claim of a talking animal when he uncovers a mysterious web of hidden motives. Soon, everyone becomes a suspect in his relentless pursuit of the truth…

Written and directed by Adam Sigal (Poker Face), the movie stars Simon Pegg (Shaun Of The Dead), Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future), Minnie Driver (The Witcher: Blood Origin), Paul Kaye (Game of Thrones), Ruth Connell (Supernatural) and Neil Gaiman.

Nandor Fodor & The Talking Mongoose will be streaming on Prime Video on 20 October

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In the follow-up novel, George-Étienne and his children have formed The House of Styx, after finding a mysterious artefact on the surface of Venus herself. But with the discovery comes great risk, not only from a planet that kills with its very touch but also from the banks and powers of old Earth, who will stop at nothing to claim this new technology for themselves.

We sat down with Künsken to discover his process of building such epic worlds, how this duology differs from his Quantum Magician saga and what he has coming up next…

How does it feel to have concluded the story, there’s such emotion in the book, do you find yourself caught up in it at all?

First of all, thank you! Yes, I’m definitely caught up in the sweep of it. professional risk, maybe? That makes it hard to see the whole at once. I’ve noticed that I often am not able to say how I feel until I get to listen to the audiobook without any further responsibility for making changes. But as I was editing and polishing in early 2023, there were certainly moments and scenes and bits of dialogue that got to me and had me pausing to just feel, which doesn’t always happen with every story.

Knowing the story was a duology, did you approach House of Saints and House of Styx different to the Quantum Magician saga?

I totally approached it differently, but not because of the number of novels. Quantum Magician was a heist in space in the far future, so it has specific concerns and fun beats that have to happen to make it work. I approached House of Styx and House of Saints from the characters and their conflicts with each other, the government, and bank because a family saga works for different reasons and with different ingredients. The two books of the duology are a single story really, a bit like the Godfather and Godfather II are a single story. I think that the Quantum Evolution books are almost independently readable in a way that the Venus books are not.

No one in the book is safe and there are some pretty pivotal deaths, without spoilers, what’s it like having to kill off characters that you’ve spent so long creating?

I think I felt a bit of sadness though, with each death. This is why I don’t kill characters very often. To portray a character well, I think that I have to be able to imagine what it’s like being them, and what it’s like being around them. That does take time and energy and an ability to see their possibilities, and their futures, including  white picket fence endings. When they don’t get those futures, there’s a feeling of loss. I had some push back from my writers’ group, my agent, and my editor, and eventually I changed the fate of one character (they lived).

The House Of Saints takes us on an enormous journey both in terms of plot and emotional arcs, how do you approach tackling something so epic? Do you know the ending before you start? Or do things evolve naturally as you write?

Thank you for calling it epic! I actually don’t write anything without knowing the ending – novel, novella, short story, comic book. Early on, I used to pants it (the term some writers use for the process of “writing by the seat of your pants”), but I failed so often that I started writing less because I worried the effort and words were just going to be wasted. Knowing the ending gets me through moments of shaky confidence. For this two-book story, I knew where Saints had to end for Venus the colony to become Venus the capital of the Congregate by the time of the Quantum Evolution series. Who survived to the end of Saints and how they got there was a lot of puzzling and pondering with flip chart paper over days and weeks before I started writing. I usually get impatient at the outlining stage, so by the time I have a 75% complete outline, I just start writing. I trust that I’ll figure out the rest as I go.

Part of the plot revolves around building a base on the surface of Venus. What was the biggest challenge for you in anchoring such a technical process in reality while also keeping it an engaging read?

To write the two Venus books, I needed to know some chemistry, some meteorology, some naval engineering, some aerodynamics, but the rest was a lot of mechanical elements. How to drop something through the atmosphere and land it in a certain place is more of an engineering problem than a scientific one, for example. You’re right that keeping it an engaging read is the challenge – there’s not a lot of emotion in welding. I found, in pure writer trick terms, that just cutting a lot of the detail helped, as did focusing on the “man vs nature” essence of the conflict. But it didn’t hurt that the characters who built the base on the surface were also going through a difficult emotional moment too.

In The House of Saints, the political landscape created in The House of Styx becomes far more prevalent with corrupt governments, false imprisonment, murder and rebellion playing key roles. How important was it to weave these concepts into a story that could have typically just been about the exploration of Venus?

I think “man vs nature” conflicts are cool (and my first foray into Venus in the novelette Persephone Descending was very much that) but ultimately there’s only so much you can do with man vs nature. I’d always envisioned the creation of a state to be messy, and the way the Venusian state is born will determine some of its destiny in the later centuries. People on Venus want different things. Some of them are willing to go to great lengths to achieve them, sometimes down the wrong path, but for the right reasons. That’s humanity, and ultimately science fiction is about using the future to talk about our humanity in the present.

For The House of Styx, you cite Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars as a source of inspiration, what books were touchstones for you in concluding the story?

It’s weird. I often have books in mind for loose inspiration, but I don’t know if any particular book helped frame my thinking in Saints. I do think that the Godfather movies informed some of the feel and the family dynamics I wanted to dig into. Maybe it’s just that to me Styx and Saints are a single story?

Last we spoke you were re-reading all of X-Men and blogging about it. What are you reading now?

I have a new baby, so time is at a premium. I listen to a lot of podcasts about comic books (as always). Some great ones are Marvel by the Month, Bronze Age Monsters, Graymalkin Lane, Cerebro, X-Men Unraveled, Voice of Latveria, Oh Gosh Oh Golly Oh Wow, and some others. I tend to start at episode one and listen to the whole podcast corpus, and on some of them, I’ve stalled on because I haven’t caught up on the Krakoa X-Men (I want to read all of it), and I’m avoiding spoilers. On novels, I listen to a number at once and pick them up depending on mood. I’m reading Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee, Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, House of Chains by Steven Erikson, rereading A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, Comfort Me With Apples by Cat Valente, and Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tasmyn Muir. Obviously, it takes me some time to finish a book…

The House of Styx and The House of Saints both fall into the same world as the Quantum Evolution series (with a very helpful timeline in the back of the book). Do you have plans to fill out the entire timeline? Or are you looking to step away from this universe for your next adventure?

I want to write The Quantum Temple—I’m outlining it right now. Temple will conclude the Quantum Evolution series. I’m not sure what to do afterwards. I’ve got a couple of novels in editing phase – an epic fantasy and a horror novel. I have ideas for other things like novellas, but I think it will take some time for me to figure out what will be best. And, somewhere in there, I’d like to write comics as well. I’m done some comic work for small press, but comic books are a deep and abiding love since I was ten years old.

The House Of Saints by Derek Künsken is out now. Order your copy here.

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In a tale of intertwined destinies, Toba Peres, is gifted with linguistic prowess and immerses herself in translating books while concealing her unconventional abilities. Meanwhile, Naftaly Cesques, burdened by his family’s tailoring legacy and plagued by enigmatic visions, embarks on a journey unknowingly entwined with Toba’s fate. As their shared community faces turmoil and persecution, Naftaly defies the Queen’s decree to expel Jews from Sefarad, their homeland, escaping with an enigmatic book, while Toba is drawn to a mysterious figure with piercing orange eyes…

In order to escape, Toba ventures through a pomegranate grove’s enigmatic portal, guided by the orange-eyed stranger where she enters an ancient realm entwined with her own. Here an age-old conflict threatens to shatter both worlds and determine the fate of her and Naftaly. Lost in separate realms, the interwoven perspectives add depth to this richly layered narrative, blending Jewish folklore with fantasy.

We sat down with the book’s author Ariel Kaplan to find out more…

When did you first get the idea for The Pomegranate Gate?

I’ve wanted to write a fantasy about Sephardi Spain for probably 20 years, and I had the idea for Toba’s part of the narrative several years ago. I realised pretty quickly that her story didn’t stand well on its own. It felt like half a novel, and it took me a long time to figure out what the other half needed to be. Once I had Naftaly, the story—well, it didn’t write itself, but the direction of it became clear.

How much research did you do before writing the novel?

That’s difficult to quantify—I have been reading Jewish folklore pretty intensively since I was young, but I spent several months before I started drafting The Pomegranate Gate going through and rereading the stories I knew I wanted to draw from (anything to do with the city of Luz, or the Ziz, or demons).

In terms of the historical aspects, I did a summer-long research project on Sephardi Spain back when I was at university, so that’s another long-standing interest. I did do a lot of refreshing my knowledge before I started writing— I still have all my old history books from that period, and I did a lot of additional reading to fill in the blanks for what I might have missed.

How would you describe the Maziks and their world?

The Maziks are immortal magic users who view themselves as extremely civilized. At the time of The Pomegranate Gate, they live in 11 cities, most of them Mediterranean-adjacent, each of which is cantered on a gate that opens to the mortal realm.

The world itself operates on a principle the Maziks call The Mirror, by which events in the mortal world are reflected in their own — sometimes disastrously. Whether the Mirror is something the Maziks can make use of, by influencing events in the mortal world, is an ongoing question.

The novel is incredibly expansive, and is set in two worlds – how did you go about creating the worlds in the novel?

I tried to keep Naftaly’s world in line with late-fifteenth century Spain so much as I could (though obviously, the geography and other details have been changed: this is a fantasy, not an historical novel).

Toba’s Mazik world sprang very much from that, except you have a king and an Inquisition who can use magic and who don’t regularly die. I had to ask a lot of questions as to what certain things would look like in a world in which regime change is unusual, because the same king might be running things for a thousand years or more, or what would a world look like where immortals are being threatened with death?

What was it like writing the story from two very different perspectives and did you prefer writing for Toba or Naftaly?

Writing in both perspectives allowed me to expand the story to include both worlds, but it did present some challenges when keeping the timeline straight when events happened in both of them, like a full moon.

As for which was easier, it actually had to do with who else was in the scene; anything with Barsilay, for example, was very enjoyable to write because it’s so much fun to write his dialogue.

The Maziks have a lot of incredible magic – if you could choose one piece of magic that the Maziks have, what would that be?

Immortality would seem to be a good choice. Apart from that, I would very much like to be able to make a shade to do all my chores.

What can you tell us about the book’s sequel?

In The Pomegranate Gate, the characters are pretty much confined to the city of Rimon in both worlds. In the sequel, they get to explore the wider world—particularly the Mazik world. The scope of the story expands a lot, so if you’re wondering what the other Mazik cities look like, you’ll get to see them in the next book.

What are you reading right now?

I just started The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, which I am enjoying very much!

What’s next for you?

I have some events coming up to promote the US edition of The Pomegranate Gate in a few weeks, and I’m actively revising the Pomegranate Gate sequel as we speak.

After that, it will be time to start the third book in the trilogy. I expect to be pretty immersed in this world for the next few years. After that, who can say?

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Solaris has announced a new edition of Helix by the late Eric Brown, with a redesigned cover and a new introduction by Stephen Baxter.

A classic first-contact novel from a preeminent voice in British science fiction, Helix is a pacy sci-fi adventure following the plight of four humans who crash-land on what they think is a desolate planet. Dealing with climate change in a way that is even more pertinent now than it was upon its original release in 2007, Helix is a tale of survival that Solaris has said that they are “enormously proud to be bringing to a new generation of readers”.

“Eric had a vivid, creative imagination and the worlds he created come to life through his fiction,” said Finn, Eric’s wife, on the reissue. “An essential aspect of this is Eric’s engagement with his characters. He predominantly wrote science fiction, but not from a scientific or technological perspective (he never even had a mobile phone).

“Instead, it is the lives and loves of his characters that predominate, a focus that reflects the importance of friendship, love and compassion in Eric’s own life. He will be greatly missed.”

Eric Brown was the award-winning author of a huge number of SF novels, children’s books, radio plays, articles and reviews, including Helix, Helix Wars, the Bengal Station trilogy, the New York trilogy, Kethani, Engineman, Guardians of the Phoenix, Kings of Eternity, The Serene Invasion, two Weird Space novels and The Fall of Tartarus. Eric passed away in 2023.

“When I heard the news that Eric Brown had left us, I was honestly devastated,” added Editor Amanda Rutter. “I had read a couple of his novels and always felt that Eric had a deft and compassionate view of humanity – and the publishing team at Solaris believed that the best way to celebrate Eric’s life and to honour him was to bring his writing to those who perhaps hadn’t had the opportunity to enjoy his stories in the past.

“Therefore, I asked Stephen Baxter to provide an introduction for the novel we felt reflected Eric the most clearly, and am incredibly pleased to announce that we are re-releasing Helix in October with a beautiful new cover.

“We hope that you enjoy the novel and will join us in commemorating the astonishing SF career of Eric Brown.”

Helix will be re-released in October 2023.

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Hands up those who have been enjoying Season Two of Foundation! We certainly have and if you’re anything like us and can’t wait for each episode to arrive on Apple TV+, we have a sneak peek into Episode 9 with our exclusive clip before it airs!

For those in need of a quick recap – Episode 8, ‘The Last Empress’ not only saw us starting to realise a few unsettling thoughts about Demerzel (Laura Birn), but after the botched assassination attempt on Poly (Kulvinder Ghir) and Constant (Isabella Laughland), Brother Day (Lee Pace) has vowed to visit Terminus to extinguish the Foundation and take all their technology.

This is something that hasn’t been done before, but Day is determined, and perhaps even a little curious about the religion that Foundation has become…

In our exclusive clip taken from Episode 9 – ‘Long Ago, Not Far Away’ – we see Day angrily confront [Vault] Harri Seldon (Jared Harris) and subsequently Harri offering him something extraordinary: psycho-history.

Watch the clip here…

Based on the classic sci-fi books by Isaac Asimov, Foundation has always been said to be unadaptable. But after a successful Season One, Season Two has continued that impossibility and has become one of the most successful shows for Apple TV+.

We sat down with the series’ showrunner David Goyer recently to discover how…

“I think the secret to that, and it’s why I’m so excited about season two and why I think we’ve improved upon season one, is by making the themes as accessible and universal as humanly possible,” Goyer says. “It’s one thing to have grand ideas about the future of civilization, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t actually care about who lives and who dies.

“So something that we were very cognizant of when we were adapting the show was making sure that this would appeal to people who haven’t read Asimov, who don’t consider themselves to be fans of science fiction, just making sure that the characters are vivid and that we care about their fates.”

We know that Season Three is already in the works for Foundation, and with six Foundation novels from Asimov to play with, Goyer knows a way to stop the show from going too wayward or off pace – he writes the season endings first.

“It’s a trick that I picked up from James Cameron,” he nods. “He likes to come up with a really crazy idea and then write towards that. So I like to say to my fellow writers ‘what’s something that would seem to absolutely break the story?’ Something just wild like the dissolution of the genetic dynasty at the end of the first season. And we’ve done a few things like that at the end of season two of Foundation.”

Can’t wait for the season finale of Foundation? The last episode will air on 15 September on Apple TV+ and you can catch up with all episodes here. Read our FIVE STAR review of Foundation Season Two here.

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However, as they delve deeper into their research, they encounter an ominous freestanding door which leads them on a dark journey through the dimensions behind it. Determined to uncover the truth the pair soon realise they have stumbled across something far more terrifying than they could have ever imagined…

We spoke to Hughes about his favourite found footage movies, finding a pyramid in Scotland (?!) and whether we’ll be seeing anymore multiverse adventures via freestanding doors…

How did everything begin for you with Hostile Dimensions?

I was developing a project with Blue Finch, the sales agents on Hostile Dimensions, and trying to get financing for that. Everything moves really slowly in film and I realised I could squeeze in another smaller film in between getting that bigger one off the ground.

So I thought I’d do something similar to my last film, Death of a Vlogger, keeping the mockumentary format, using the same cast and crew. Also because it’s so difficult with all the other producing skills going on and trying to make things as simple as possible, the key thing was that most of the film [could be] shot here in my flat!

So that was the jumping-off point but I also wanted it to be different from Death of a Vlogger. I was looking at ways to expand the idea so the idea of a portal to other worlds came into being and everything spiralled from there.

What’s the writing process like for you?

Usually it [starts with] a high-concept idea. I’ll think of something that’s just combining two things and then it’ll just sit in my brain for sometimes months or years. Until it grows enough to be an idea that’s worth taking down.

Then usually I’ll start with a spreadsheet. Just thinking out loud, writing down ideas that come to me. I’m more of a set-piece director than a story director. So usually I’ll write a list of scenes that I would want to see within this idea. I’m all about structure and I love structuring things and that’s kind of how it gets put together.

The pub helps as well – it loosens me up. I’m less critical. Then the next day when I sit down sober and look at the ideas I can throw out all the shite [haha]! I still have a full time job so going from sitting at a desk till five at home, then having dinner and coming back to the same desk to write is sometimes a bit intimidating. So getting the laptop and going somewhere makes it a bit more fun and appealing.

What are the positives and negatives of directing a found-footage mockumentary movie?

So a positive is I think that it’s a much more visceral and immediate kind of medium. I find that most of the scariest films I’ve ever seen are found footage. It’s just much more of an immediate connection with characters for me.

It’s also a massive win for low-budget productions. You don’t need to worry about coverage so much. For instance, if you’ve got a dialogue scene with two characters, usually you’d have three setups and you would need to get coverage from different angles. Whereas in fiction mockumentary, usually there’s only one camera in the scene.

That can be very useful for production but there can also be a lot of problems in the edit if your single setup isn’t particularly good. The genre has so many rules – you’ve probably seen some of the worst found-footage examples where cameras are always glitching. I don’t think I’ve ever recorded any video that has a glitch in it. Yet in so many bad found-footage films the cameras are glitchy and they use it to cover edits.

Obviously, I want to set the rules for myself where I want it to be realistic – it’s obviously a sci-fi film but the parts of the world that we will connect with, I want it to be realistic, I just want it for the audience. But that can cause some issues with production.

What are your favourite found-footage movies?

The Dirties is one of my favourite. And I like Lake Mungo, Hell House LLC, Savage Land…

I liked a few before making Death of a Vlogger but it was The Dirties that really opened my mind to the possibilities of it as an art form. After watching that, I just dived into the rabbit hole and started devouring everything I could get my hands on.

There are just so many – some of the best horror films ever made [are found-footage] like REC, Troll Hunter and Chronicle and some of the bigger ones like Cloverfield, there’s such a variety.

There are some stunning locations in the movie – what were they like to source those?

That was really fun. Because of the nature of how the film was made (being that it was low budget and the cast and crew were set and we had all these elements in place), there was quite a bit of flexibility with the other worlds and what they could be because as long as they fit the story then it was fine!

A lot of the time the only headline for our location would be that it needs to be kind of alien or interesting. The other restriction was the catchment area – we couldn’t really travel much more than three hours out of Glasgow, just for logistical reasons.

A lot of the sourcing was done on Atlas Obscura, just scrolling for ages looking for distant known locations that I’ve not seen on film and that people maybe aren’t aware of.

I think my favourite was the pyramid location. A few people already have been like ‘the effects of that pyramid are really good’. They’re so good because it’s real! It’s not an effect. It’s a real pyramid that’s in Scotland. When I saw it, I was like ‘Why has no one ever mentioned this before?’ [haha]!

What is your favourite world that Sam and Ash visit?

I think just in terms of location [the pyramid world] was a favourite because it was so surprising to me. I do like the soft play [world] as well. That initially came from a particular scene I wanted to do. A backroom kind of piece, like Kane Pixel’s short, Backrooms, [which] I absolutely loved. It got me into Liminal Horror on Instagram. I was just like, ‘oh, this is such a great horror idea’, like new lore.

I wanted to do something with that. So I was looking for white boxy locations and they’re really difficult to find.

So that led to just being on Liminal Horror Instagrams and they’d have abandoned swimming pools or swimming pools at night, schools at night, and soft plays as well.

Soft plays are pretty creepy. Inherently. And there’s loads of them around Glasgow so I just started getting in touch with folk and [soft play] Pandamonium wrote back and said they would let us film there.

Then weirdly enough, I’d always planned for the backroom scene to have a giant teddy bear in the corner. It was just a total coincidence that we booked Pandemonium and I saw that they had a big panda suit. It was one of those great, nice coincidences of an improvement to the film coming from something that was just a surprise and something I hadn’t planned for.

It’s much better than a brown bear in a backroom space. It’s a nice example of being flexible and letting your ideas go when something better comes in.

The ending leaves the movie open – would you ever be tempted to come back to the world(s) of Hostile Dimensions?

I don’t think so. I think there’s a very latent, if ambiguous, message in the film and I think exploring that world anymore might just dilute that.

What do you want audiences to take away from the movie?

The general state of the world has put me in a state of anxiety. It’s also put me in a feeling of helplessness and it’s breeding apathy in me. I think maybe on the sides of the political spectrum, most people don’t really have much control. For me, I feel almost like I just want to disengage and look after myself – I can’t help anything anyway, so I may as well just give up.

That was kind of where the central idea came from. I just wanted to explore and then I didn’t want to say one way or the other, which is better. I just wanted to explore these two characters. They’re both given the option of leaving this world and landing right into their perfect world.

If you were given that option, would you stay in this place and try and fix it? Or would you jump ship to the place where you fit? I don’t want to land on either side of that [but] I do want to just ask that question. And that’s something I’m still asking myself. Do I want to continue banging my head against the wall and fight for what I think is right? Or do I just keep my head down and look out for me? That’s the struggle that I was trying to get into the film, but I don’t want to tell anyone what to think.

Hostile Dimensions will have its world première on 26 August FrightFest 2023. Get your ticket here.

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“A lot of my nightmares growing up were about clowns,” Zelda Adams reveals when we ask her about her new movie, Where The Devil Roams, “especially after I watched season four of American Horror Story!”

We’re feeling you Zelda – clowns and carnivals are a staple in the horror genre, and Where The Devil Roams follows a family of carnival acts as they journey around the US, committing a murder or two along the way…

The family we follow are mother Maggie (Toby Poser), father Seven (John Adams) and their daughter Eve (Zelda Adams) and indeed Toby, John, Zelda and eldest daughter Lulu Adams comprise their own act – of the filmmaking kind. 

The Adams family write, direct, produce, edit, star and even create their own music for their movies and Where The Devil Roams is their seventh feature in a long and varied career of making films, jumping different genres.

Lately, though, the Adams have been playing in the horror pond, with their fifth feature, the dark ghostly tale The Deeper You Dig taking the family into the supernatural horror direction, followed by witchy and magical HELLBENDER and now Where The Devil Roams. Their movies are made via their production company, Wonder Wheel Productions and it’s no accident that their latest focuses on carnivals, given their company’s namesake 

“I mean, the name of our production company is after a big Ferris wheel!” Toby laughs when we delve into horror’s association with carnivals with her. “I think the kind of carnivals that we’re attracted to are the little side carnivals that are an equal hybrid of seedy and thrill. That you never know if you’re going to die on those little rickety rides but you have to go on them,” she tells us. “And the lights and the bad foods that smell so sweet and good and the strange possibilities of sideshow strangeness is very romantic…”

“There’s magic in circuses,” John agrees. “There’s also magic in the romance of us all looking back at the 1930s or anytime in the past. I think it was the perfect place to set this film of these characters that we wanted to bring to life because there is already a built-in dark romance to that time and that part of society.”

Indeed, the movie is set during the great depression of America in the 1930s and sees the family travelling around in a rather impressive 1931 Chevy (we’ll come back to that later), which is pretty ironic seeing as the journey the Adams take on their road to moviemaking, too, usually happens in the car: “We have long car rides to soccer practice or drives to the city and we are always just talking, bringing up little ideas,” reveals Zelda. “Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s Toby, sometimes it’s John, just bringing up something like: ‘Hey, what do you guys think about this?’ We like to call it throwing spaghetti; start throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks about the idea. And then sometimes this wonderful monster is formed.”

The beginning of their journey for Where The Devil Roams was no different: “I was sitting in the car with John,” Zelda remembers, “and I was thinking to myself: ‘Hey, what if the clown actually wasn’t the bad guy?’ That’d be a really interesting movie.

“So I brought this idea of a clown on the carnival circuit that’s the protagonist and John and Toby did a wonderful idea of warping that into a story that didn’t end up being about a clown, but it was about a group of carnies that were flawed, but were the protagonists of the film.”

Flawed is a pretty attenuative way of describing the three complex central characters in the film. First up we have Maggie, who we first see in the movie as a child joining her sister in the murder of their parents and who grows up to have a penchant for much of the same. At the same time, she’s a loving mother and supportive wife, who goes above and (murderously) beyond protecting her family and who we see at points lovingly touching children’s shoes that she sometimes finds – a throwback to a traumatic childhood memory. “I just thought that Maggie should be lovable and horrible and deeply, deeply flawed, like all these characters,” Toby reveals. “I don’t think she’s the sharpest tool in the shed but I wanted her to know how to use those tools. I wanted to play Maggie and she kind of just came out of the desire to play someone who was both horrible and lovable.”

Maggie couldn’t be more opposite to John, who balks at the very sight of blood after suffering from PTSD as a result of being a war doctor. Luckily for him, Maggie always makes sure to gently blindfold him before carrying out her deadly deeds. Meanwhile, Eve takes a more voyeuristic role in Maggie’s murders, carefully photographing each terrible tableau after the event.

Eve is also a mute, which was actually handy for Zelda when it came to shooting the movie: “I was pretty happy because I didn’t have to learn any lines!” she laughs. “I could just show up and go ‘let me give a couple of different expressions’. So that’s it. But I actually really did love it because she’s one of the main characters and she has to tell a lot through her emotions. So I did feel like it was a fun acting challenge for me.”

Though she’s mute, for their carnival act, Eve sings on stage while her parents perform with her and in another delightful twist of life imitating art, the family is also in a band together in real life – H6LLB6ND6R, which is what their sixth movie was named after. Oh and the band is awesome and you can listen to them on Spotify here. 

It’s not surprising, then, that music plays an integral role for the family during the filmmaking process. “I think that music is actually a lot of our backbone when we’re making a film,” Zelda reveals. “It’s something that we can rely on and it’s something that can help guide us through the story.”

The family didn’t listen to H6LLB6ND6R on the set of Where The Devil Roams mind you, and went for a heavier vibe of music to fit in line with the tone of the movie. “Through our process, we’re always recording and listening to music,” John reveals. “So we’re all very aware of what the musical tone of our film is going to be.

“We were going for a more heavy stoner-rock vibe [in the movie] and so on car rides and stuff we were listening to bands like Pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs pigs, pigs or Slomosa.”

Oop! We’re back to the car rides again. Travelling has certainly been central to the Adams’ career, and they tell us that this whole filmmaking adventure actually started when John and Toby decided to take a year off and travel around in an RV, while home-schooling the children, who were about 11 and 6 years old at the time. 

“Instead of waiting for others to give us permission, [we were like] ‘let’s just do something we want to do’,” Toby says. “The kids were interested in acting. So we just set off on the road in 2010 for a year and we shot our first film Rumble Strips and we were just absolutely hooked!”

Rumble Strips follows a mother who is arrested for growing marijuana and takes her two young daughters on an RV trip before she’s sentenced, so they can be prepared for her absence. Though their movies all have very different tones and fit into different genres, that central theme of family is always present, whether it’s the uncle/niece dynamic in their fun 2014 drama Knuckle Jack or the incredible bond between mother and daughter in The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender, family is key. And for the Adams, that’s both in front of the camera and behind. 

Indeed, for Where The Devil Roams, even the extended family and their community were called into arms. “We live in a very small rural town and a lot of times people just come up to us and say ‘will you please kill me in your movie?’ And so who are we to deny them?!” Toby laughs. “It was so much fun and that’s very much in our DNA – we love to use what is around us. And there were a lot of enthusiastic people who were wonderful.”

Another honorary family member who appears in the film is the Chevy that the central family drives (we told you we’d get back to that) – which is actually John’s dad’s car and was a linchpin in the filming process: “[Filming] began with the 1931 Chevy,” Toby nods.”There were times we had to give it a little push, but that baby just was our star.”

“Everybody was up for Christmas,” John continues the story. “There was a snowstorm and we were like ‘oh my god, this would be great, let’s give it a try’, so we put the Chevy up on a flatbed and my brother-in-law drove the truck pulling us all along. I sat in the back filming and these guys were in the car and it was great!” 

Though Where The Devil Roams is a slightly bigger production than some of their previous movies, the community and family vibe in creating it was still very much apparent. “This film was still like a small Adams Family Film,” Zelda nods. “Maybe we had an extra dollar or two to pay for the clothes and the wood that would build our sets, but it was still John, Lulu and Alex sweating their balls off making those sets. It was still us with a broken tripod and two tiny little mics. So it still felt like it was very true to our Adams Family Films style, which almost resembles the family travelling on the carnival circuit, just trying to get by with the little things that they have.”

Speaking of that Adams Family Films style, it truly is unique and we can’t help but ask them how they would define that style: “I tend to think of us as like a band of misfit filmmakers,” answers Toby. “I guess I like the word misfit. I think there is something that feels a little bit like an outsider for us, but we are very much a ragtag team.”

“I hope people think that our films are honest,” John adds. “Like with Hellbender we tried to be honest about a mother-daughter relationship, with The Deeper You Dig we tried to be honest about guilt and loss, and in this film, we’re trying to be honest about what true love is, which is no matter how fucked everything is, love is always being able to forgive. But this really takes it to a dark place…”

Speaking of going to a dark place, Where The Devil Roams certainly broaches those murky corners, especially when the movie delves into Seven’s past as a war doctor (in one scene, Seven even decapitates a fellow soldier), which is told via flashbacks. “I love the World War One flashbacks, I think they’re really cool,” says Toby. “I think that’s where our most brutal violence comes. I think it’s the most brutal any of our films have ever been, particularly in the last World War One flashback [with the decapitiation], which is actually Zelda’s boyfriend. I feel so bad because when his mother sees that she’s just going to hate us!”

“It’s perfect for me because people say ‘how did you deal with Zelda’s first boyfriend?’ and I’m going to say ‘I cut his head off’,” John laughs. “That’s going to be it. The end of the conversation, so that people are very uncomfortable…”

What the Adams are finding uncomfortable right now (in a good way) is the wait for the movie to be released to wider audiences: “We’re very nervous because nobody has seen it until just now so we’re all excited but definitely nervous!” Toby laughs.

“This is our horror movie. Now when we roll it out, we’re just fucking terrified!” John says. “This is where it’s fun for us.”

The movie will be showing at this year’s FrightFest and the only people who will be terrified are audiences because the Adams have hit the nail on the head once again with Where The Devil Roams  – bringing horror, heart, and humour all into one glorious genre rollercoaster of a carnival ride.

Where The Devil Roams will be showing at FrightFest in London on 25 August. Get your tickets here.

The post Where The Devil Roams: Discussing clowns, horror, music and filmmaking with the Adams family appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.