There’s an earned confidence running through the more recent films from the Adams Family, a sense that the indie filmmaking crew has nothing to prove to anyone but themselves. That’s both true and an excellent asset to have when far too many indie filmmakers have a tendency to play it safe and cater to the broadest possible audience with genre films that often pull back just as they’re getting really interesting.
It’s not that the Adamses don’t care what we think, or that they don’t hope to please their audience. It’s that there’s a certain level of trust between audience and filmmakers, a sense that the family can get weird with things, and we’ll follow them. The result is The Glorious Dead, an intimate small-town horror story that goes cosmic while never losing touch with its quirks or the trust it has in us as viewers and horror fans.
It’s a freezing cold Sunday, and Sheriff Deb (Toby Poser) is about to have a very bad day. It’s supposed to be her day off, but her deputy, Mikey (Zelda Adams), is at her door bright and early with a laundry list of problems. Strange disappearances have started around town, blood’s running from a neighbor’s faucet, someone comes into the sheriff’s office talking about a hole in their yard made of “meat,” and to make matters worse, the power’s out, so Deb can’t even have her morning coffee.
It all feels like too much to take, and the more Deb cruises around her small Northeastern hamlet, the more it seems like her own private hell.
Tonally, the film first sets out to put a horror spin on the Cop Having a Bad Day genre, layered with echoes of Fargo and Mare of Easttown, and Poser’s clearly having a ball playing the Sheriff in way over her head. The script, by Poser and John Adams (both of whom pull double duty as directors), leaves lots of room for air, not just to build suspense over what exactly is going on, but to create a sense of familiarity surrounding Deb.
If you’ve ever spent time in a small town, you recognize this dynamic, where everyone knows everyone, and therefore it’s much harder to just blow off a concern. Instead, Deb must take them all on, a snowball rolling down, growing as she goes, gaining momentum on a collision course.
Amid all the charming small-town quirks, the film also finds time to get delightfully, irrepressibly strange, sending monsters shuffling through the trees even as it leaves space for Deb to argue with her neighbors over where all the cows seem to have gone. The film juxtaposes not just the normal and the strange, but the odd and the horrific, creating an environment of unpredictability that sustains The Glorious Dead through the moments when it starts to drag.
You truly never know if you’re about to witness something gruesome, funny, or both whenever Deb pops out of her truck to investigate something. The film’s cinematography and often kinetic editing add to this sense of the unpredictable, building up a feeling that starts in your head as slight unease, then blossoms into a kind of comic dread.
It’s a very tricky tonal line to walk, but it works because when the Adamses and visual effects wizard Trey Lindsay go for the horror, they really go for it. There are visuals in this film that will persist in my head for quite some time.
It’s all so much that, as the film wears on, Deb starts to wonder if she really is in some kind of private hell, an eternity of problems stacking up, people turning on each other, and weird shapes shuffling through the snow. The verisimilitude this creates – even when the low budget shows in some places, particularly when the film gets into gunplay – is remarkable, in part because the script is so good at conjuring little vignettes of small-town confusion, and in part because Poser is simply so relatable in the lead role.
But the film’s real achievement – stutter-stepping plot, choppy action and all – lies in its ability to reflect this particular American moment. We feel overwhelmed alongside Deb because the world is, well, overwhelming. We feel her sense of hell because we have our own. The Glorious Dead is about many things, and while it doesn’t have the thematic tightness of prior Adams Family successes like Mother of Flies or Hellbender, it works best when it’s about a woman simply trying to grapple with an increasingly nightmarish reality, not by denying it or explaining it, but by just trying to get on with the day.
It’s that feeling, that nagging sense that everything needs to slow down just a little bit so you have a moment to breathe, that sits at the core of the film, and it makes it another success for some of indie horror’s finest.
The Glorious Dead screened at Fantastic Fest; release info TBA.
