The Glorious Dead Interview: Toby Poser Lulu and Zelda Adams | Fantastic Fest 2026
The Adams Family Goes Apocalyptic: Toby Poser, Zelda Adams and Lulu Adams on The Glorious Dead
The Adams family has built one of the most immediately recognizable identities in independent horror. Their films are handmade, practical, darkly funny and defiantly DIY, created by a family filmmaking unit that seems just as comfortable turning friends and relatives into actors as it is transforming rural landscapes into places of supernatural dread.
At Fantastic Fest 2026, Horror Movies Uncut sat down with Toby Poser, Zelda Adams and Lulu Adams to discuss their latest film, The Glorious Dead, an apocalyptic horror story that takes religious fundamentalism, the Rapture and a world suddenly stripped of its familiar rules and filters them through the family’s unmistakable punk-rock sensibility.
John Adams was absent from the conversation, but the rest of the family offered plenty to discuss — from playing law enforcement officers and carrying guns to practical effects, improvisation, the film’s bizarre fissures in the earth and why having fewer resources remains one of their greatest creative advantages.
Going Faster Without Losing the Adams Family DNA
Coming after the deeply personal Mother of Flies, Poser said the family deliberately wanted The Glorious Dead to move differently.
“We wanted to make something that was different coming off of something super personal, cathartic like Mother of Flies,” Poser told Horror Movies Uncut. “We wanted to do something that was kind of fast, had a swift momentum.”
Whenever the filmmakers felt themselves slowing down, the answer became simple: keep moving.
But changing the pace didn’t mean abandoning the filmmaking philosophy they’ve developed since making their earliest films more than 15 years ago.
“We’re still the tiniest little crew, anywhere from one to four of us behind the camera,” Poser said.
That extends to casting.
Friends, relatives and nonprofessional actors are regularly pulled into the Adams family’s cinematic world because they already embody something the filmmakers are searching for.
That approach is especially visible in The Glorious Dead. When asked about the conspicuous resemblance between several characters, Poser confirmed that it wasn’t a coincidence. An entire real-life family of friends appears in the film.
“They brought so much to our film,” she said.
Zelda sees that expanding circle as part of what they’ve created.
“We’re family, but we like to build our film family,” she said, describing how people they’ve met through festivals and filmmaking have gradually become part of their work.
And apparently, membership has one particularly appealing benefit.
“If you want to die in our next movie…” Poser joked.
HMU’s answer: absolutely.
Slinging Spaghetti Until a Movie Appears
There’s an almost community-theater quality to the Adams family’s filmography. The same creative unit keeps returning, but the costumes, worlds and characters can change completely.
This time, there are badges and guns.
So how does the family decide what everyone is going to become next?
“We love slinging spaghetti,” Poser said. “We’re always slinging spaghetti to see what sticks.”
Ideas can come from virtually anywhere. Poser recalled Zelda once developing the foundation for Where the Devil Roams while the family was driving to soccer practice after she described a dream she’d had the night before.
That same willingness to chase an idea helped shape The Glorious Dead.
After making a story centered on an intimate family unit, the filmmakers wanted to widen their perspective.
“This one just felt like a good time to go from a film about a little family to more like the family of humanity,” Poser explained.
That expansion ultimately takes the Adams family into apocalyptic territory.
Taking the Rapture at Its Word
Despite its undead imagery and grotesque creatures, The Glorious Dead wasn’t conceived as simply another zombie story.
Its mythology reaches toward something much larger.
Poser said the filmmakers drew inspiration from biblical concepts surrounding the Rapture, Revelation and Matthew, asking what might happen if those ideas were depicted literally.
“What if we took fundamentalism at face value?” she said. “What if we built a story about the word taken at its word?”
Rather than invent an entirely disconnected mythology, the filmmakers became interested in presenting established religious language and imagery and then examining its implications.
“What does that mean for the rest of us?” Poser asked.
For the filmmakers, that question opened the door to ideas involving exclusion, division and what happens when the systems people depend upon suddenly stop functioning.
“There’s a lot of exclusion. There’s a lot of division,” Poser said, describing the film as a “conceptual, visual and emotional study” of that instability.
In The Glorious Dead, the collapse isn’t simply physical.
The rules themselves disappear.
“There’s no foundation of law when faith and the rules of nature are obliterated,” Poser said.
The governing principle that remains is much simpler:
“The rule of pain.”
Zelda Adams Tries to Keep the Apocalypse Under Control
That collapse creates a particularly difficult situation for Zelda Adams’ Deputy Mikey, a character desperately attempting to maintain authority while confronting events that refuse to fit into any rational explanation.
For Zelda, that contradiction made Mikey especially fun to play.
“She wants to have some control, but she really does not have any,” Adams said. “She doesn’t know what’s going on. She’s trying to rationalize everything.”
There’s only one problem.
“You can’t win the Rapture.”
Mikey keeps searching for explanations because, according to Adams, that’s probably what most people would do.
“Maybe it’s this. Maybe it’s this. Maybe it’s that. You don’t know.”
The character’s innocence also became an important part of her performance and ultimately gives later developments additional weight.
Some of Mikey’s personality emerged organically during filming. Adams said scenes between her and John Adams, particularly their exchanges inside the police car, included substantial improvisation.
That spontaneity is another benefit of the family’s stripped-down production style.
So, Do the Adams Family Actually Shoot Guns?
Putting the Adams family into police uniforms raised another obvious question: Are these actually gun people?
Not particularly.
The family lives in an area where firearms and hunting are common, and they do own guns, but Poser said recreational shooting isn’t something they regularly do.
“We don’t go out and shoot them,” she said.
That made the physicality of becoming law enforcement officers another part of discovering the characters.
“The minute you put those costumes on, you feel kind of what it feels like to walk with a heavy gun,” Poser said.
Even carrying prop weapons initially felt strange.
Once the uniforms, equipment and characters came together, however, that awkwardness became part of the transformation.
Lulu Adams and the “Assholes” in the Earth
Then there are the holes.
Or, in The Glorious Dead terminology, something considerably more anatomical.
Lulu Adams’ character is among the first to bring attention to the bizarre openings appearing in the ground, leading to one of the film’s particularly memorable descriptions: assholes in the earth.
Adams said much of the character emerged on the day they shot the sequence.
“It was kind of all discovered the day that we shot that scene,” she explained.
The performance evolved as she worked through it. What initially began more mildly became increasingly irritated until the absurdity and frustration collided.
“There’s fucking assholes in my fucking yard.”
That escalating irritation fits perfectly into the Adams family’s particular sense of humor: characters confronting impossible situations while treating them with absolute seriousness.
The Joke Works Better When Nobody Is Joking
The Glorious Dead can be grotesque, apocalyptic and deeply absurd — sometimes simultaneously.
Poser believes the comedy works precisely because the actors aren’t performing as though they’re delivering jokes.
“My theory is, if you believe everything you’re saying and let the natural humor come out…” she said. “When you’re saying, ‘This is going to be a great joke,’ it falls flat.”
The family’s approach is to treat even the most ridiculous material seriously.
“For me, the best humor comes out of just taking something really fucking serious.”
Festival screenings have also demonstrated how subjective that comedy can be.
The family has watched audiences at Fantastic Fest, Fantasia and Portugal’s MOTELX react to entirely different moments.
“Everywhere we go, the humor goes over totally differently,” Zelda said.
For filmmakers whose movies thrive on the collision between sincerity and absurdity, those changing reactions have become part of the fun.
Why More Money Isn’t Necessarily the Answer
As the Adams family’s profile has grown, so has the possibility of larger resources.
But bigger isn’t automatically better.
The handmade quality of their films — practical creatures, imperfect environments, homemade blood and tiny crews — isn’t something they’re necessarily trying to escape.
They consider those limitations an advantage.
“These limitations to us are our gifts,” Poser said.
When someone asks whether they’d like more money or additional resources, she sometimes finds the question difficult to reconcile with how the family actually works.
“If you’re liking what we’re serving, then if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Fewer resources can force more imaginative solutions.
Poser recalled recently shooting something in Paris with John Adams when they needed fake blood but didn’t have conventional effects materials available. The solution involved leftover beets, ketchup and raspberry sauce mixed together in a bathroom.
The improvised concoction worked.
“It was like the most beautiful blood,” she said.
That freedom extends beyond practical effects.
Zelda pointed to their ability to shoot something, return home, immediately put the footage into Premiere Pro and determine whether they need another shot.
“We go home and throw it into Premiere Pro the same day to see: Did we get everything that we need? What else do we need to get?”
If something is missing, they simply go back.
A large production might require schedules, approvals, crew availability and significant additional expense to accomplish the same thing.
“We just need one more pickup shot,” Zelda said. “It’s so great.”
The family also continues to prioritize practical effects, supplemented when necessary by visual effects work from frequent collaborator Trey Lindsay, whom Poser described as their “fifth family member.”
It’s an ecosystem built around immediacy rather than scale.
Breaking Their Own Mold
After years of filmmaking together, the Adams family now has a genuine body of work — and a style audiences can recognize almost immediately.
The obvious question is whether the future means pushing deeper into that identity or deliberately destroying the formula.
For Poser, both possibilities are appealing.
“I love the DNA of how we work, and I’m always willing to go deeper,” she said. But moving in an entirely different direction “doesn’t necessarily need more money.”
More importantly, she teased that their next project may do exactly that.
“What we’re doing next really breaks the mold.”
Zelda was equally enthusiastic about continuing to experiment.
“I’m all for trying new stuff, because you’re not going to grow as an artist if you don’t.”
Whatever form that takes, the Adams family doesn’t appear interested in polishing away the peculiarities that made its films distinctive in the first place.
The crew may remain tiny. The blood might occasionally be made from whatever happens to be available. Friends and relatives may continue turning up onscreen. And sometimes an apocalyptic fissure in the earth is simply going to look like an asshole.
That’s the point.
The Adams family has created a filmmaking language built around limitations, spontaneity and trust — and with The Glorious Dead, they’re once again finding new territory without sacrificing the punk-rock independence that got them there.
Horror Movies Uncut spoke with Toby Poser, Zelda Adams and Lulu Adams during Fantastic Fest 2026. Stay tuned to HMU for more interviews, reviews and coverage from the festival.
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