The Glorious Dead Review | Fantastic Fest 2026
FANTASTIC FEST 2026 REVIEW
There are movies that require a few minutes before you recognize the filmmaker behind them.
The Glorious Dead is not one of those movies.
This is pure Adams Family filmmaking, a grotesque, handmade collision of death, folklore, dark comedy and punk-rock energy that feels unmistakably connected to the strange cinematic world John Adams, Toby Poser, Zelda and Lulu Adams have spent years constructing.
For anyone already invested in what they do, that familiarity is part of the appeal. It may also be the point where the filmmakers eventually have to decide how much they want their formula to evolve.
Coming into Fantastic Fest 2026, The Glorious Dead was one of Horror Movies Uncut’s priority films. The Adams Family has carved out a particularly unusual position in independent horror by remaining committed to an almost folk-punk approach to filmmaking. Their movies can feel simultaneously homemade and carefully constructed, operating outside many of the conventions governing the genre films surrounding them.
That has been evident since Hellbender, and watching Zelda and Lulu Adams continue growing up within this filmmaking environment only reinforces how genuinely familial the entire operation remains.
The Glorious Dead may make that connection more visible than ever.
Toby Poser (Deb) once again provides a strong center for the movie, while Zelda Adams steps into the role of Deputy Mikey. Around them is an ensemble that makes the production feel like an extended family theater company that happens to specialize in the macabre.
That comparison isn’t an insult. It is part of what makes their movies interesting.
The Adams Family can seemingly become anything their latest story requires. One movie can transform them into witches. Another can send them toward sickness and mortality. Here, badges come out and law enforcement enters the equation. Give them enough time and they could probably become archaeologists excavating some cursed object from the ground.
The costumes and occupations change. The identity underneath rarely does.
These filmmakers love the grotesque, the visceral and the strange, and The Glorious Dead gives them another playground.
Its central concept is also considerably more interesting than simply calling it another zombie movie.
The undead are obviously important, but The Glorious Dead feels more like a movie about a culture of death than a conventional zombie outbreak. The idea of something returning from the grave becomes a doorway into broader questions about why the dead might return, what could draw them back and how the living would attempt to rationalize something that refuses to obey conventional explanations.
Deputy Mikey's repeated attempts to understand what is happening become part of the joke.
There is always another possibility, another explanation and another way to categorize the impossible. That gives the movie a satirical edge reminiscent at times of Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, where the absurdity of characters processing the apocalypse becomes almost as important as the undead themselves.
The Adams Family still approaches that humor through its own particular sensibility.
This is not conventional horror comedy. The jokes exist alongside bodily horror, death and the bizarre imagery that has become central to the filmmakers’ aesthetic. That collision creates moments where The Glorious Dead can be funny, disgusting and oddly beautiful within the same sequence.
More importantly, the underlying interpretation of the dead feels fresh.
Rather than simply introducing another variation on infection, resurrection or zombie mythology, the movie treats death almost as its own ecosystem. There are different reasons something might return and different forces that might interfere with the boundary separating the living from everything underneath them.
Once that concept fully establishes itself, The Glorious Dead becomes much more interesting.
But familiarity cuts both ways.
One of the pleasures of following filmmakers across multiple movies is seeing their artistic language develop. The Adams Family has established that language so clearly that you can almost immediately recognize its rhythms, performances, imagery and tonal instincts.
The question now is what happens next.
Coming after Mother of Flies, The Glorious Dead doesn’t necessarily feel like another significant evolutionary jump. There are elements here that work better than they did in Mother of Flies, while that film contains other elements that feel stronger than what appears here.
That creates something closer to lateral movement than progression.
There is nothing inherently wrong with filmmakers understanding exactly what they want to make. In fact, the creative freedom surrounding the Adams Family remains one of their greatest strengths. Few independent horror filmmakers appear as comfortable simply following their imaginations wherever they lead.
But that freedom can eventually become restrictive if the construction surrounding those ideas remains too familiar.
The issue isn’t imagination. There is plenty of that in The Glorious Dead. Nor is it a lack of new narratives. The family continues finding strange worlds to explore.
It is more about structure.
When filmmakers are productive enough to deliver work this regularly, eventually the question becomes whether another movie needs to arrive every year or whether allowing additional time between projects might produce a more substantial evolution in how those ideas are assembled.
If anyone can sustain that pace, however, the Adams Family has made a convincing argument that it might be them.
They have the collaborators. They have the visual identity. They have the imagination, and most importantly, they appear genuinely interested in continuing to make movies together on their own terms.
That authenticity remains difficult to manufacture.
The Glorious Dead isn’t the Adams Family reinventing itself. It is the Adams Family embracing what it already does well and finding another bizarre corner of death to explore.
For established fans, there is plenty here to appreciate. For audiences unfamiliar with their work, it may provide a particularly strange introduction to filmmakers whose movies operate according to their own rules.
Fantastic Fest has always been an appropriate home for that kind of filmmaking.
Night one ends with the dead rising, the Adams Family getting weird and another handmade nightmare joining their increasingly distinctive body of work.
3 out of 5
Reviewed as part of Horror Movies Uncut's Fantastic Fest 2026 coverage in Austin, Texas.
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