Directing trio John Adam, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser have another horror film to terrify and thrill audiences with: Mother of Flies, which screened at Fantastic Fest 2025. The story follows a young woman facing a deadly diagnosis as she seeks alternate methods to cure her, eventually arriving at a witch in the woods who offers dark magic as the solution.
Adams and Poser sat down with The Direct's Russ Milheim at Fantastic Fest to discuss their new film and how Mother of Flies represents finding that hidden magic in the world.
Mother of Flies is expected to hit Shudder in 2026. Shudder also had plenty of other horror gems at Fantastic Fest, including the anxiety-filled ride that is Crazy Old Lady.
Directors John Adams & Toby Poser on Finding Hidden Magic Through Mother of Flies
"We Love the Idea of Hidden Magic."
- The Direct: "Obviously, there's a lot of witchcraft and folklore in this film. Can you talk about some of your inspirations there, and then how you weave that throughout the DNA of the movie?"
Toby Poser: I love researching like historical witchcraft, or, in this case, hermeticism. And then, you know, theories of correspondence. I mean, that's fun, but it's more for inspiration, really. In the end, I find, like all of us, are witchy. John's incredibly witchy.
And I think we just find inspiration, but then reach into ourselves to really like work with the ambient, like magic, nature around us, the death decay. You know, decay of nature is a toll. It is total death magic, and we live in the woods. And so you just need to mind that for inspiration.
John Adams: I think she pretty much nailed it. I mean, you know, we love the idea of hidden magic. You know, you go out into the woods, you take walks, you see fungus that glows red. You see all this stuff that you say to yourself, there's some magic in that. And when you make movies, you get to decide what that magic is.
- The Direct: "Well, how much did you guys immerse yourself ahead of time in researching that kind of witchcraft and folklore and all that. Like, yeah, how much did you get into all that?"
Toby Poser: Like, every free second of the day, I might be reading something about witchcraft. But in this case, too, we were also really interested in exploring the magic that exists, like through medicine.
I mean, we've both had cancer, so there's great magic just in surviving, having modern medicine help you to. Whether it's like chemotherapy or radiation or just someone ripping an organ out of you so you can live. There's so much magic and faith just in the art of survival when you've been facing something deadly.
- The Direct: "There's a lot of poetry in this movie. So I'm curious, what does that embody narratively, and what do you feel that that adds to the experience, because it's strung throughout, and it's like a repeating motif throughout?"
John Adams: Yeah, two things, we wanted to make a fairy tale. We wanted to make a modern fairy tale. And all fairy tales have a cadence to them. And so we wanted to have that. Toby has a great voice. She's got a great delivery.
The other thing about doing a narrative, or that fairy tale kind of voiceovers, is that you can get through storytelling without having to do a lot of, like, dramatic acting, a lot of talking, you have that narration over. And so we love doing that, and it was a lot of fun to write that stuff, because you can really get to the truth of everything very quickly.
Toby Poser: And there was a slight difference between the narration and the diegetic, like spell work, which has a little rhyme. So we just had fun. It was kind of like playing with music on another level.
View the entire interview from Fantastic Fest here:
For more Fantastic Fest 2025 coverage, horror fans should get familiar with Ben, the rabies-infected chimpanzee that causes endless chaos in Primate.
