Mother of Flies queers family, death, and witchcraft in this aching, dark fairytale

That their films come from a deeply personal place is also immediately clear. They are rife with themes of family—sometimes families created to form queer and chosen bonds; other times, it’s the terror of those units being torn apart. Sometimes this fracture in the family comes by supernatural means, or, here in Mother of Flies, by something more innate: cancer. This, again, is deeply personal to the Adams family. Both John and Toby have fought and survived cancer, and Zelda reckons with her own genetic predisposition. “We're very drawn to creating family storylines because we are a family, but also because filmmaking is such a therapeutic act for us,” Zelda tells PRIDE. “Especially this topic of cancer, it's something very personal and vulnerable to us.”

What better way to process those anxieties and traumas than through the lens of a necromancer?

In the film, a young woman, Mickey (Zelda), who is terminally ill with cancer, is accompanied by her father (John) in a last-ditch effort to secure a miracle treatment from a mysterious woman in the woods named Solvig (Poser). The woman promises that she can treat Mickey and save her life in three days—but there will be a cost. There always is when you’re clawing a life back from the grip of Death; a concept Solvig, a necromancer, knows all too well.

“[Solvig’s] death work was really akin to sex work,” Poser tells PRIDE. “As a necromancer, she understands, intimately, the nature of death as something to both love, to fear, to defy, to distract, to lull, to betray. Her particular death work...that it was a transaction, but also a distraction, depending on her will and what she wants. So, in that opening scene where she's naked, covered in blood, writhing in that viscera, it is erotic. She's giving death some comfort in life...sometimes she holds death's hand, sometimes she lulls it, gives it warmth, gives it a glimpse of light, but sometimes that is used to distract death so she can get what she fucking wants from it.”

It's a fresh and even queer take on the trope of bargaining with death, and speaks to this collective's penchant for thinking outside the box and infusing even the darkest concepts and themes with acceptance and love—something that they hope their queer audience feels when watching their films.

“In every movie we've made — starting with The Deeper You Dig and Where the Devil Roams, and every movie — it's just so painfully obvious to us that love is love. That's the end of the sentence,” John tells PRIDE. “This is our community, a community of humans that understand and cherish love and don't put judgment on it, because that's ridiculous, and so all of our movies celebrate that.”

“We are a family that happens to be a man [and] three female-identifying cis women, but we welcome the everythingness and strangeness of ourselves and the world,” adds Poser. “This is really a film about choice, the family that you choose, the children that might not share your DNA, but that you choose to love and will wait centuries to be united with because you love them. That’s the crux of everything.”

Mother of Flies is streaming now on Shudder. Watch the trailer below.