One of my most anticipated films at this year’s Chattanooga Film Festival was Blood and Guts, a feature-length documentary portrait of DIY indie-horror darlings The Adams Family. For those unfamiliar, the Adams Family is exactly that—an actual family. Parents John and Toby Adams, along with their daughters Lulu and Zelda, who have built a reputation in the horror trenches as a fiercely independent filmmaking collective, sharing directing, writing, acting, and producing duties across 8 films in the past 13 years.
Documentarians Tina Grapenthin (When God Sleeps), Katie Green (The Family I Had), and Carlye Rubin (The Family I Had) chronicle the making of Where the Devil Roams, Hell Hole, the unfinished Faires, and the development of Mother of Flies. But its emotional core centers on the impending departure of the family’s youngest daughter and creative collaborator, Zelda, as she leaves for college. While bittersweet for any family, her absence is felt even more acutely within a filmmaking collective so deeply intertwined with one another’s lives and creative identities. As the family moves forward with new projects, they are forced to navigate both personal change and artistic reinvention for better or for worse.
This struggle is brought to life through a series of candid and often emotional interviews that explore not only the Adams Family’s unique creative process, but also the foundation that fuels it: family itself. The joys, hardships, and tragedies they experience together frequently become the inspiration for their work. What I found most surprising about Blood and Guts were the origin stories of parents John and Toby, both of whom had careers in show business long before they began creating these DIY horror masterworks. That creative foundation stretches back decades, even encompassing a family road-trip film called Rumblestrips, which would later come full circle when Zelda, then just 14 years old, challenged her father to make a horror movie “where she gets to kill a bunch of people.”
Blood and Guts is a sincere and surprisingly wholesome portrait of a family that just happens to spend its spare time making delightfully gnarly horror films. As a fan, it was fascinating to see just how collaborative and DIY their filmmaking process truly is, both on and off camera. Equally compelling was the glimpse into their creative evolution, with each film reflecting a specific chapter, challenge, or tragedy in their lives. While longtime fans will find plenty of behind-the-scenes insight unavailable elsewhere, I also see this as a film that transcends the horror genre altogether. At its heart, Blood and Guts isn’t really about horror filmmaking at all—it’s about a family finding a way to process life together through art, one bucket of fake blood at a time.
