The Glorious Dead (Frightfest 2026)

John Adams, Toby Poser and their daughters Zelda and Lulu have become something of an anomaly in American indie filmmaking as they’ve carved out a genuinely self‑sustaining creative ecosystem: shooting everything themselves, sharing duties across the family, and building films from the ground up with a DIY ethos that never feels compromised. Within that model, The Glorious Dead has their biggest cast yet, expanded by friends, collaborators and members of their local community — a small recurring theme across several American indies at this year’s FrightFest, where the Adams family’s latest had its International Premiere.

On the surface, the plot is simple; underneath, it’s anything but. This is a classic “one bad day” movie, where things keep getting worse the longer the day goes on, moving from incident to incident with escalating absurdity. It’s a favourite subgenre of mine, and here it’s blended with an interpretation of the rapture that’s as dryly funny as it is apocalyptic. Toby Poser plays Sheriff Deb and Zelda Adams her deputy, Mikey, who wakes up her superior on her day off asking for help as things are getting weird in their jurisdiction. This happens at 5AM too, so you know things are really hitting the fan. Once they set off, they travel from situation to situation trying to work out what exactly is happening to their small hamlet.

This version of the rapture has a strange comedic zing to it. Holes begin appearing all over town — holes the locals refer to, with perfect rural bluntness, as “bloody arseholes”. Near these arseholes lurk creatures impervious to gunfire, devouring people, livestock, anything they find. Or perhaps the livestock were raptured; the film never explains it, and that ambiguity is part of the charm. The incidents range from life‑threatening — the dead technically rise, they aren’t so much walking the earth though — to utterly trivial, and the cast frame all of it in a deeply sarcastic register. There’s a realism there: the end of the world not met with hysteria, but with sarcasm, sly digs and exhausted humour. Through that, this is the Adams family’s funniest film yet, aided by this vision of upstate rural New York having a comparable dry wit to the likes of the UK, Ireland, NZ and Australia.

There are suggestions as to what is going on. The first call of this increasingly odd day sees a strange resident selling the entire contents of their home with a level of foresight, like they knew something was going to happen, and later the “Mother Exposition” character, Deb’s mum, drops scripture regarding their plight. The character whose job is to drop exposition is always awkward, and making them feel like characters rather than informational transactions is a challenge for filmmakers across the spectrum. This is why I collectively call them Captain Exposition — or in this case Mother, given that character’s role here.

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Toby and Zelda’s band H6LLB6ND6R provides the grunge‑soaked score that punctuates Toby’s patrol‑car sequences. Sometimes it fits perfectly, sometimes there’s an awkwardness of a square peg being forced into a round hole, but it always feels unmistakably Adams family – raw, handmade and without pretension, just authentically themselves.

There’s the one word I’d use to describe an Adams family film: authentic. Their acting style is simply them being themselves — genuine, unshowy and without the usual indie‑film varnish. Some viewers less willing to meet their films at face value may frame this as “bad acting”, and that’s their prerogative, but I see it differently. Their naturalism placed against outrageous situations is entirely in key with the rest of their work, and it works in the context of The Glorious Dead too, as the project is hell crossing paths with the mundane everyday. Any other register would be incompatible with the film’s tone. The only real absence from the family on screen is John Adams — unless he’s inside one of the impressive homemade creature costumes.

Crossing off members of the family, we have Toby Poser as the put‑upon and increasingly fatigued Sheriff Deb; Zelda Adams as her deputy, Mikey, who is going through the same things but processes them by making fun of the situation, doing what so many people do when things get dark — deflect with humour. John Adams may or may not be one of the walking cadavers, but as far as his practical role, he is Deb’s deceased husband, Hank. The last of the brood is Lulu, who pulls double duty. By her own admission in our FrightFest interviews, she is inside the gluttonous monsters made from bits of practical’s from earlier films, and she imbues them with a body language and unbothered swagger that really elevates their uncanniness. She really sells the nonchalance of the idea that humans are little more than food to these demon-like creatures. Lulu is also one of the locals becoming increasingly agitated at how things are unfolding and becomes part of a local militia. That group and their increasing impatience are used to tap into the mood in America right now — that things are more volatile than at any other point in the living memory (of most).

An otherwise new level of action presentation, complete with shootouts in the woods and insatiable abominations climbing out of red‑raw arseholes in the ground, sits alongside dialogue that fits into the family’s consistent surreal rhythm and ideology. That’s all still present here, but The Glorious Dead pairs it with a genre patchwork that taps directly into my personal fascinations. It’s a one‑two punch of daytime horror, and its in the snow — it’s pandering, and I’ll absolutely stand for it. Sure, they will continue to divide opinion as any truly singular creative force within the film world does, but that’s fine, doing what they are doing is pretty punk rock. And let’s be honest here, you aren’t doing punk rock right if everyone gets on board, no question asked, sometimes you have to ruffle a few collars.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – THE GLORIOUS DEAD