A strange toxin wipes the memories of those who come into contact with it in the new dystopian sci-fi thriller Glasshouse.

Due to be released next month, SciFiNow is delighted to EXCLUSIVELY reveal the UK artwork (above) PLUS give you a sneak peek into the film with a clip in which a young girl encounters a stranger…

Glasshouse follows a family who are confined to their glasshouse to survive The Shred, a toxin that erases memory. Until the sisters are seduced by a stranger who shatters their peace and stirs a past best left buried.

Directed by Kelsey Egan (Trackers), the movie stars Jessica Alexander (A Banquet), Kitty Harris, Adrienne Pearce (The Red Sea Diving Resort) and Hilton Pelser (Moffie).

Signature Entertainment presents Glasshouse on Digital Platforms 7 February

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A group of friends are terrorised by a Pagan cult in David Creed’s British horror movie Sacrilege which is due out later this month.

For those who can’t wait that long, we have an exclusive clip to give you a sneak peek of the film, which sees a dog definitely not acting like man’s best friend. Watch it here…

Four lifelong friends head to a remote lodge for a weekend of fun in Sacrilege. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly descends into a fight for their lives when a local Pagan cult offer them up to their Goddess as a sacrifice for the Solstice…

Written and directed by David Creed, the movie stars Tamaryn Payne (Stalled, Vendetta) Emily Wyatt (Mission of Honor, Facilty 31), Naomi Willow (NSR: The Jade, Bonded by Blood 2), Ian Champion (Property, Reconnection), Emma Spurgin Hussey (The Curse of Hobbes House, A Werewolf in England), and Rory Wilton (An English Haunting, Fisherman’s Friends).

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In Hellbender, 16-year-old Izzy (Zelda Adams, pictured above) is kept isolated on a mountaintop with her mother (Toby Poser), who tells her she has a serious illness and can’t be around other people. However, Izzy begins to question her sickness and pushes back against her confinement, secretly befriending Amber (Lulu Adams). Her happiness at finally connecting with someone is short-lived, however, after she eats a live worm as part of a juvenile game and finds an insatiable and violent hunger awakened within her. Soon, she finds out that she is a Hellbender, part of an ancient line of beings who have powers and a darkness inside them. Can Izzy confront the secrets of her past, understand her lineage and battle against the growing hunger that lies inside her before it’s too late?

Hellbender is the sixth movie created by Wonder Wheel Productions, the family-run production company founded by Toby Poser, John Adams and their children, Zelda and Lulu, and we sat down with Poser, Adams and Zelda during this year’s Fantasia Festival to discuss working as a family, creating a horror movie during lockdown and their experimental punk band H6llb6nd6r…

How and when did you first get the idea for Hellbender?

Toby Poser: There were a few things going on. First of all, we had our band H6LLB6ND6R, which kind of came first and we were doing videos for that and toying with these witchy dark visuals, and then something came up with me and I learned that I was donor-conceived at 50 years old! Which was like ‘wow, yeah, okay!’ and that kind of got some juices flowing, thinking about genetics, and we just started to play.

John Adams: We talked about it a lot. Zelda was playing soccer at the time so we were in the car all the time driving to soccer games and we were just talking about movie ideas. We had such fun making [our previous movie] The Deeper You Dig that we knew we wanted to make another horror. So we just talked over and over about different ideas, bounced them off each other, and finally came down to this idea that turned into Hellbender!

Your band, H6llb6nd6r also features a lot in the film, when did you first form the band?

Zelda Adams: We’ve played music for quite a while. We’ve just called it different bands. When I was a bit younger, our band was called Kid California, but in the past two years, we changed our band named to H6LLB6ND6R, simply just because it sounds awesome.

Then we were like, ‘we need to make a movie with this title!’ But yeah, John used to be a rock star… he still is! He’s great at playing all sorts of instruments and I love singing and Toby has a wonderful mystical voice so it’s something that we just love doing together.

So can we find your music online?

Zelda Adams: We’re on Spotify and Apple Music, our band is called H6llb6nd6r but all the Es are 6s! (Find H6llb6nd6r on Spotify here).

There is a lot of folklore included in Hellbender, did you do any research when writing the movie?

Toby Poser: Yeah, I really love taking deep dives into research and in this case, I was doing a lot of reading about Lilith, and Eve. I especially was really snagged on the Aural Burrows, this idea of regeneration, and we wanted to come up with our own mythology, which was influenced by all of these old antiquated stories of females, power, fear of power for women. We jumped off from all of that it was super fun.

John Adams: Toby writes this stuff down and it’s very important. It’s really cool because it’s great that she keeps it organised, because there are definite rules and laws to Hellbenders and Toby made sure we followed them!

Toby Poser: Nobody can read my handwriting but me. That just adds to the mysticism!

John Adams: It’s so true, but there’s no code so when she’s gone, no one’s gonna be able to know what the hell that was!

Did you shoot the film during the pandemic?

Zelda Adams: Yeah, this was shot during the pandemic. After we finished The Deeper You Dig we were thinking, ‘oh, we kind of want to make our production size a little bit bigger, maybe have a bigger crew hire, more actors…’ and then COVID came along and put us in our place and we’re like, ‘yeah, that’s definitely not happening!’.

Where did you shoot the film?

Zelda Adams: We went back to our small roots and I’m really happy that we did. We actually bought a truck and a trailer and decided to travel around America, so that we could still see the world during COVID but still be isolated.

So a lot of the film is actually shot around the United States of America, a lot of which is in the north west. A lot of the dream sequences are just shot in mid-America and the deserts. So yeah, this is a COVID film! In a lot of the scenes Amber’s character is played by my sister Lulu (Adams), and we’re actually social distancing in all the scenes that we have together, pretty much. Ot was interesting social distancing with my sister while filming!

All your movies are family affairs, how do you manage to keep work life and home life separate?

John Adams:  Well I think at this point, this is our sixth film and I think we know what each person does best. We work very seamlessly and we rarely have any kind of arguments because one of the things that we can do since we shoot on a Canon 5D is if somebody has an opinion on how they want to direct the scene or how they want to seem to unfold, we just shoot it their way. Then we shoot someone else’s way. We can shoot it three different ways, and then we let the editing process tell us which way wins.

All three of you take on multiple roles when making movies, are there any roles you particularly like and any you particularly don’t like?

Toby Poser: I love writing, and I love directing actors too. I come from a theatre history so for me, it’s fun to be on the other side, and then to talk with actors and try to get my thoughts in, filtered through their performance. So writing and directing I really love.

John Adams:  I love cinematography and I love music. I’m not a huge fan of acting so luckily I was dusted really early [in Hellbender]!

Zelda Adams: Cinematography is my favourite too, because when viewers look back on a film, they’re picturing the visuals. So I love trying to leave a visual impact. My least favourite is probably writing but luckily we have Toby to do all the writing work!

Speaking of the visuals, there are plenty of beautiful shots in the film. Do you have a particular favourite?

John Adams: My favourite is this shot of Toby, making the first totem out in the dark blue woods. For me, everything about that I just love. How about you Z? What’s your favourite?

Zelda Adams: There’s a shot of me going down the river with blood all over me that is I think it’s just so visually appealing!

Speaking of that totum scene Toby, did you pre-rehearse how you would move your hands to create the look of casting a spell?

Toby Poser: We didn’t really plan it, we knew we wanted her to be casting a kind of spell, but once we got into nature, which is pretty typical for us, we let nature sort of guide us on what to do. There were these amazing orange fungi, and cool mushrooms and we shot that in the Pacific Northwest. It was just incredible.

John Adams: We did work on the rhythm of her hands [though]. We started working on the rhythm of her hands so that they had a spell-like quality that had a nice rhythm. We knew there was going to be some cool sounds over it. I think that was one of the things that we shot twice, because the first time we didn’t think we captured it the way we wanted to. The first time we shot it turned out to be a rehearsal!

Seeing as you’re all there from the film’s conception to its completion, do any aspects of the filmmaking process happen organically?

Zelda Adams: A lot of our film happens organically. Like the scene with the carcass. When we come across that huge deer carcass. We were actually going to shoot another film in the forest, and we’re walking, and we see this gem of a dead deer and we’re like, ‘wow, we have to make an entire scene around this’. So, a lot of it is improvised based around nature.

John Adams: Yeah, one of the dream sequences, was shot in the White Mountains and it all came together because a storm rolled in. We were out in the middle of nowhere, we didn’t really know exactly what we were doing but a storm suddenly rolled in, and the elements really determined how that dream sequence was going to unfold. So I think organically a lot of stuff just happens off the cuff.

Toby Poser: Speaking of elements, often the nature of where we’re shooting informs what our story is. The more we were steeped in nature (and we live in a very rural area too in the mountains), we realised, ‘oh, Hellbenders are just a beautiful parallel to what nature is’. It’s brutal, it’s beautiful, there’s life, there’s death. It was really informing our mythology. Nature was like: ‘Let me give you a hint.’

Is it similar when it comes to the editing process? Or are there still surprises at that point?

John Adams: Oh editing always gives you surprises. Editing always seems to edit itself. The three of us will sit, I’ll push the buttons but they’re over my shoulder, and each scene edits itself.

Zelda Adams: It’s also really nice working as a family because we can shoot that scene, go edit it, see how it looks on the computer and if we don’t like it, we’ll just go shoot it again right there in that moment!

What would you say are the main themes in the film?

John Adams: It’s a story of a mother who is watching her daughter become an adult. And that is exactly what’s happening in our family. It’s beautiful and it’s painful, and one of the great things about horror movies is you can take just a regular drama, something as simple as a mother watching her daughter become an adult, and you can dress it up with blood and witchcraft and it just explodes with fun!

Zelda Adams: It’s also a story of nature versus nurture because the mother is raising Izzy to be like a human, but that’s not her nature. Izzy’s nature is to be a Hellbender and is that okay? Is that okay to live out her nature like that? So I think that’s one of the things that we cover.

Toby Poser: I would just say that life is just rough, whether you’re a Hellbender or a human, and we wanted to show what it means to be a family, but within this strange supernatural lens. For me it was about nature and it was about families and we were just hoping that we could fuse them.

Why did you decide to focus the film on a mother/daughter relationship?

John Adams: We noticed a lot of reviews from The Deeper You Dig had said, ‘oh, I really would have loved to seen, the mother/daughter relationship get filled out a little more’, so it seemed like a nice piece of advice to us as moviemakers. Ot’s something that we enjoy doing so we got to fill out that relationship, we got to build up those two characters.

It’s [also] kind of a celebration of Toby and Zelda. We’ll be able to look back as a family and look at Toby and Zelda together on screen, and it’s kind of like a family album!

Zelda Adams: Toby and I are mother and daughter so it’s really nice just getting to naturally play out our relationship on screen.

What is it about horror that appeals to you and audiences?

Toby Poser: Horror is just so much fun and it’s just an endless candy shop of possibilities. I think we’re very happy people and so I think [with] horror, it’s just natural sometimes to gravitate towards the opposite of what you are. I mean if you’re happy all the time it gets a little boring writing movie about happy people! It’s like, ‘now let’s play on our deepest fears’ and we’ll be happy doing it!

John Adams: We’ve also noticed the horror community is really accepting of taking chances as a filmmaker. They want you to take chances. They want to see more art. A wonderful thing about making horror films is that acceptance to push the boundaries.

There are two ways to get through life, you can cry or you can laugh, and horror fans have chosen to laugh. I love the horror community because mostly they’re laughing. Now, occasionally some of them slip and are really dark and mean, but generally we’re all laughing at Friday The 13th, in a sense. We love being scared and it’s a terrifically joyous community I think.

Toby Poser: I have great trust in people who love horror! A lot of people say, ‘I don’t do horror’ but horror people just go there. They’re in touch with their most primal fears and they can laugh.

 Zelda Adams: Yeah, and fear is fun, like that’s why we go on roller coasters, it’s exhilarating. So I think horror films are another way to get that exhilarating feeling!

Without going into spoilers, the ending of Hellbender certainly stays with you after the credits roll, was this always the plan?

Zelda Adams: We definitely didn’t know how the film was going to end actually [haha]! It could have gone so many different ways, and we came up with that line, right as we were shooting it. That was pretty much improvised right on spot. Then when we were going through the editing process we were like, ‘that’s it, that’s the line, that’s how this movie has to end’. It’s fun because it really loops back to a beginning scene, and they really tie together well.

What would you like for audiences to take away from Hellbender?

John Adams: I think we all have different goals and we started out with different goals. My main goal with Hellbender was I wanted people to walk out and look at each other and say, ‘that was fun’.

Toby Poser: I think I’d like people to feel that there was a balance between escape and familiarity, which is something that I really appreciate. I’d like to think that people got to escape into this witchy world but also recognise something about the humaneness of their own families.

Zelda Adams: Yeah, I really hope that people can relate to it because I think that there’s a lot of things that the audience can relate to in the film, whether it be parent-kid relationships, coming to terms with your identity and isolation, especially during COVID, I think they can relate to Izzy’s character.

Hellbender was seen at Fantasia Festival. Audiences will be able to watch Hellbender when it is released on Shudder in early 2022.

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Explosive and cerebral, Plurality is the new action-packed whodunnit cyber-thriller from director Aozaru Shiao and we can exclusively reveal its artwork (above) and trailer. 

Check it out here…

After a bizarre bus accident, Ming Ze awakens from a coma to discover that his mind now shares the consciousness of four fellow passengers – all of them dead; all of them suspects in a serial kidnapping and murder case. To prove his own innocence, Ming evades capture by the police and tries to track down the killer’s only surviving victim. But in order to unmask the murderer’s true identity, Ming must first fight the monster within himself.

Written and directed by Aozaru Shiao (Wake Up), with additional writing from Benjamin Lin, Plurality stars Tony Yo-ning Yang and Sandrine Pinna (The Rookies).

Signature Entertainment presents Plurality on Digital Platforms from 19 July.

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Investigating an abandoned holiday destination is all fun and games until what you wish for looks like it might come true in upcoming horror The Resort.

Check out the trailer here…

The Resort follows four friends who head to Hawaii to investigate reports of a haunting at an abandoned resort in hopes of finding the infamous Half-Faced Girl. When they arrive, they soon learn they may have bitten off more than they can chew…

Directed, written, and produced by Taylor Chien, the film stars Bianca Haase (Hot Tub Time Machine 2), Brock O’Hurn (Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween), Michael Vlamis (Roswell, New Mexico), and Michelle Randolph (5 Years Apart).

The Resort is releasing on digital and on-demand from 30 April and will be available on Sky Store, Virgin, iTunes, Amazon, Microsoft Store, Google Play, and Chili for digital and download.

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Written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, Possessor is a visual spectacle with complex characters and frighteningly believable and devastating technology. We spoke to Brandon about creating those visuals and what he has in common with Vos…

When did the idea of Possessor first come to you?

It was during the process of going through my first film press tour actually, which was is totally trivial. Of having that strange experience of building a public persona or suddenly living a very different kind of life, and in my personal life for other reasons. I was feeling as though I couldn’t see myself in my own life. I was getting up in the mornings feeling as though I were getting up into someone else’s life and having to scramble to create a character who could operate in that context.

I wanted to initially write a film about someone who may or may not be an impostor in their own life as a way of discussing how we build characters and narratives in order to function as human beings in a basic way. Because I think that kind of storytelling is just inherent to how we operate.

The science fiction, thriller and horror elements actually grew out of that initial idea, but it was more of the quieter dramatic scenes that were the seed level.

How do you go about creating such complex characters?

They are, in some ways, amalgamations of people I know. I don’t know anybody who’s a body swap assassin [haha] but I honestly just feel them out. There’s an initial arc from a story perspective that I think they need to take, but then in a scene-by-scene way, I like to let them speak and let them guide the action to a certain degree as I’m writing.

What were your thoughts and inspirations behind the character of Tasya Vos?

Again, it was in a scene-by-scene away. In an early version of the film, an outline that I did for her was actually male because I had come up with the idea just through my own personal experiences being on the road with the film and of creating a public persona. [It] was very strange seeing videos of myself online performing another version of myself for interviews. It was completely surreal so I guess I defaulted to a male character who is somewhat like me. But then I thought that was boring for a number of reasons. I had already done a male character for [my previous film] Antiviral, plus I think we’ve all seen so many films where this husband and father is unable to relate to his family because of the horrors of his job. You know whether it’s The Hurt Locker or any of these kinds of police films, so I thought it would be more interesting to have a woman.

She isn’t given much of a backstory, did you write one for her?

There were a few more details, but I don’t want to tell you what they are because she’s meant to be open. The film is designed in some ways to leave space for the audience to be creative. Although I had my own very specific ideas about the characters in the story, I like filmmaking where there’s room for interpretation and disagreement. I don’t want to preclude the possibility of people having those conversations and hopefully even disagreements by telling them what to think.

She’s an elite assassin but in her latest assignment, things go terribly wrong. What is it about this case that affects her so much?

Again, I don’t want to lean too hard into interpreting the film, but to me, it’s less just this case and more of a process that she’s been going through. Because you see her in the opening sequence also struggling for control and so this is a process of losing control.

What were your inspirations when creating the film?

I watch a bunch of movies and read a bunch of books as I’m working, and then I sort of mash them together into a kind of loaf that I just leave at the back of my head. There were some films that I watched with my team. We spent a lot of time looking at things from a filmmaking perspective, less in the writing process and more leading up to the shoot. For instance, we looked at opera a fair bit and some other films that were interesting to us from a technical and a visual perspective.

Possessor has a lot of unique visuals, how did you go about creating those?

I left it open to a process of experimentation. There were certain things that I knew, very specifically, I wanted in the film. For instance, in the scene where it flips to red on and off (which is the internal world versus the external world) – that was an image that I had specifically.

But I have a particular process that I go through with Karim Hussain, the cinematographer. We’re quite close friends and actually, we lived down the street from each other during the years of Possessor development. So we would spend a lot of time in his living room playing with various projection feedback and lenses and gels, and finding ways that we could distort the image. So in the script, there are these very short paragraphs that basically say ‘the image deforms into nightmarish flashes’ (everything goes crazy) and that’s a code for me, Kareem and Dan Martin the effects artist to treat that section almost like a music video or experimental video. Those stretches are entirely practical effects, there’s no CGI involved, so when you’re doing this kind of hands-on filmmaking, you discover all these happy accidents that take you down different visual paths and I like to leave it open to that process.

We particularly like the wax ‘melting’ effect when Tasya transcends from her body into Tate’s…

Using that kind of practical effect was something I’ve been interested in for a while and it seemed like a good excuse to play with that. I brought it up with Dan and he did some experiments with melting blocks and played it in reverse in order to melt and reform. These early experiments looked fantastic, so that was something we incorporated. He just made these fantastic wax figures that were incredibly well painted. They look almost like CGI sometimes because of the paint job, but they’re actually completely practical.

On the last day of shooting, the final thing that we did was melt all that stuff we had. We had three massive heat cannons and we were in a warehouse and we were just melting them very slowly. Half of the crew was fixated on the melting wax, the other half of the crew was watching the Toronto Raptors game because it was when the Raptors were in the finals, so you could really tell where people’s loyalties were!

The film has futuristic technology but there are a few elements that feel old. What time is Possessor set in?

In my mind, and I think it made it into the film as an Easter egg, it’s set in 2008 in Toronto, in an alternate timeline. The reason I did that was, although the technology could exist, and although I did a fair bit of research into neuroscience and found that that kind of physical brain control is possible to get to, it would have to be set in the very distant future.

We’re not near that point yet (even though there’s been some incredible interest – it was even done back in the Fifties and Sixties, with wires implanted for electrical stimulation of the human brain), so it would have to be a distant future film. But I didn’t really want to make predicted science fiction [film].

It wasn’t that technology was intended to show what the future will be. It was really intended as a metaphor to talk about how we function and talk about things that are going on now. I wanted the world to feel more familiar and more current, so I set it in an alternate timeline where that technology has advanced at a different pace and that freed me up to essentially do whatever I wanted with the world and then keep it natural.

Possessor’s ‘futuristic’ tech has an analog aesthetic to it. Why did you go down this visual route?

Part of it is just an aesthetic thing because there’s something very tactile about that, but it’s less exciting to me, visually, to see a lot of screens and touchpads. Also that’s been done in Black Mirror and a lot of other predictive science fiction that’s trying to imitate the real world. So in order to give it a different look and a different feel, I didn’t want to go in that direction.

Although actually when you look at a lot of the real-world equivalents, when you look at brain-machine interfaces, the technology does tend to be pretty analog because a lot of it’s in the prototype stage. A lot of the touchpads and the gloss come later when products are being made for consumer production, but a lot of the actual neuroscience that experiments are done with very are analog-looking!

Speaking of future technology – the company that Tate works for uses spy software (using webcams to look into people’s homes) for market research. Why did you include that element?

Well, maybe they do that right now, you know! It’s the entire business model for Google. A lot of these companies there’s this, on the one hand very alarming invasion of privacy or tracking of people’s actions on social media and using various apps, but a lot of it is just used to advertise to people and to track their buying habits. So that was an exaggerated version of what’s already happening.

But the surveillance element really entered into it because the Snowden leaks happened during the early stages of writing. So I was feeling very depressed about the death of privacy through technology and wanted to address that. So I think the zoom-through scenes with the webcams and the VR office all work as an on-the-nose satire of some of the stuff that’s happening right now.

But also, I think the surveillance angle can function metaphorically [when] looking at the body possession elements of the film. Instead of someone activating your microphone on your computer or your camera on your cellphone, they’re actually inside your body, experiencing the most intimate details of your life – first hand through your own nerve endings or [through] the body of someone close to you and that person is actually someone else. Some outsider who’s functioning as a kind of full-body organic surveillance device…

What is it about sci-fi that appeals to you?

I think that sci-fi is a fantastic way to discuss the real world because you take things, thematically, that are very real and relevant to people, but you caricature them. You send them in the [near] future to discuss where we’re going or you send them to an adjacent world to discuss where we are now.

Sci-fi really frees you up to talk about a lot of things and puts the audience in a place where they can examine the world from a fresh perspective…

Possessor is on digital platforms from 27 November.

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