You’d think creature horrors wouldn’t have much room for creativity anymore. While a terrific film that checks all of the boxes in this brassy subgenre of horror is the least you’d expect from the Adams family of filmmakers, Hell Hole must’ve set an astonishingly high standard for itself. Toby Poser and John Adams have accomplished something that the majority of our horror town favourites have yet to do.
They haven’t simply given us a squiggly squid monster that offers the guys a taste of gestation, but as surprising as it may sound, the characters in Hell Hole are also engaging. Yes, not the type of fascination you’d have to invent to ignore this massive hole in the subgenre.
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What happens in the film?
John is your typical unpleasant guy who is painfully unaware of his foolishness. What do you expect when someone like him is a key member of a fracking team eager to drill into Serbia’s earth? He’s a complete idiot when it comes to being mindful of the environment that his work is ruining. And Emily, according to her nephew Teddy, has transitioned from caring for the world to managing teams that upset the environment.
It only took the failure of her entrepreneurial solar power company for her to swap teams. Thank goodness there’s an environmentally conscious scientist pair on the team to sign off on the project, right? However, Nikola and Sofija do not appear to have much say in the matter, even though neither the professor nor the parasitology aspirant are pleased with the fracking corporation violating Serbia’s natural environment.
It piques their scientific interest when a drill head emerges wet in organic matter, and Sofija can attest to the fact that the overwhelming stink in the region is also organic. But that’s nothing compared to the bizarre journey of horror and scientific discovery they embark on when one of their crew members (Danko) unintentionally unearths a man wrapped in a strange membrane-like substance. And, guess what? He stinks to high heaven. And it smells quite similar to the organic substance they dug into.
Why does the creature not go inside Christian?
When he is rescued from his “grave” and transported to their base, it is not the first time you encounter this Frenchman. As strange as it seems, the language barrier is not the primary source of tension between this individual and Emily’s crew. He was in Napoleon’s army a few centuries ago, and we observed him having bad luck with a horse while his battalion was about to starve to death.
They were probably looking forward to eating the horse. But something dwelt within it. When it exploded out of the wretched creature and attacked the soldiers nearby, it did not kill all of them. Some disgusting crawler has been living within this soldier who has defied death and survived for centuries. The majority of the group has even seen it hang a tentacle or two from this suicidal soldier’s different orifices. That’s correct, the guy wants to kill himself.
He couldn’t have asked for a better guy to do him that favour than John. But, as much as John wants to smash his knife into this poor person, he knows he’d be in trouble with the cops. Sure, they are isolated. But he doesn’t truly believe he can hide an entire murder and get away with it.
Unfortunately, the “resurrected” soldier only manages to eat a mouthful of Teddy’s dynamite-grilled cheese before succumbing to his desire to die and stealing John’s knife. But before he can push it in, John grabs him, causing the beast to leave the soldier’s body in the worst way possible and plunge directly into John. John stinks! No, literally.
The same stink that the organic matter and soldier emitted is now emanating from John. So, what do we learn from this? The creature is the original stinker. But wait. You still have more lessons to learn. John isn’t keen on keeping this strange instance of a monster living inside him to himself. But one of the local team members, Christian, clearly does not believe his assertion that something that was inside the soldier is now within him. And, given John’s hypothesis that the creature only left the soldier’s body because John overpowered him, Christian is willing to play along and suggests an arm wrestling battle.
But John was only half correct about the creature’s behaviour. It did not leave the soldier’s body because John had gotten the better of him. It decided to come into John because he was strangling the soldier.
It decided to come into John because he was strangling the soldier. The creature needs its host to be alive. So a little arm-wrestling does nothing to get it out of John’s system. But when John and Christian’s anger escalates and it appears that Christian will kill John, the monster is motivated to crawl out of him. However, it makes one bad step. It snatches both of Christian’s legs with a tentacle, causing him to lose balance, slam his head into the table, and effectively die. So you now understand why the spunky little thing crawls back inside John. He’s the only guy left in the room.
Why does the creature only target men?
It bodes well for us that Sofija enjoys nothing more than talking about science. That’s how we first got to know her when she couldn’t stop talking about pikas and their importance as an environmental indicator. There’s no shade. She’s adorable. And owing to her and Nikola’s studies on the samples they gathered from the organic stuff, the soldier’s skin, and the membrane he was in, we know a lot more about the monster than we would’ve known otherwise.
They’re so pleased about their incredible discovery that they forgot to be concerned about the fact that a man was dug up from the ground, a thing emerged from him, and he appeared decayed shortly after death. In any case, we now know that the organism shares the same DNA structure as an argonaut, a type of cephalopod. A strange big octopus thing. And, based on the results of the organic matter test on the drill, this critter isn’t the only clam-like creature in the vicinity.
There could be a whole planet of them beneath the ground that they’re mining. So, not pikas, right? But things are far more interesting than that. You see, the strange membrane that covered the centuries-old soldier was composed of Calcite and high in Magnesium Carbonate, implying that it was a mollusc egg case. And given that this individual also had a certain type of algae on him, which develops a mutually beneficial dynamic with its host, it appears that this organism (mollusc, octopus, Argonaut, whatever) required to dwell inside this soldier’s body because it lacks a shell.
As a result, it was forced to rely on eukaryotic algae to sustain the soldier. But, why the egg case? That’s because this creature’s goal is more than just survival. Do you remember the beast from the opening sequence? Okay, that’s not the same one that was inside the soldier.
Female Argonauts create these egg cases to keep their eggs until a male “deposits” his entire you-know-what within the case. Yep. It must be the entire business, not just the sperm. And if we’re assuming that the creature from the opening shot was the mama who locked the soldier inside her egg box, then some interspecies fertilisation of her eggs had to happen for this new thing to grow inside him.
So he is the creature’s biological father, and it is most certainly the first human-mollusk hybrid. Does this imply that it will reproduce with its species? That does not appear to be the case. When Danko points a gun at John, he nearly explodes like a blood-filled balloon. How did this circumstance come about? Well, being the solid man that he is, John went ahead and attempted to dispose of Christian’s body before being apprehended by Filip and Danko.
Filip freaked out and pointed his gun at John, and instead of calming the situation down, Danko snatched the gun and accidentally killed Filip. With two of the males dead, Danko is the only one the thing can enter. So this is what it does. When the group discovers a suicidal Danko with the creature inside him, the slimy thing shows no interest in the women. Does this imply that this one is not only possessing these men’s bodies but also mating (or preparing to mate) with them? To Danko’s horror, it appears to be what is happening.
Is the creature inside Teddy?
What’s wonderful about a film that recognises that corporations don’t always have traditional hierarchies and that the top executives aren’t necessarily utter narcissists? All you truly get are pleasant small surprises. And Emily is a delightful surprise if ever there was one. She isn’t as righteous as her nephew Teddy. But she isn’t the cold, unloving, not-too-motherly woman that many people imagine her to be.
She exemplifies steadiness and moderation. A more wholesome matriarch, if you will. So, when everything has gone wrong and she needs to regain control of her spacecraft, she doesn’t want to scare anyone by disclosing too much. Danko has become a comfortable habitat for the species. And, although being well aware that this would most certainly result in his death, Danko hasn’t completely lost his sense of humour. Who knows, maybe that is his coping strategy.
However, Emily’s strategy to keep the team in the dark has a minor flaw. Luka and Mickey have witnessed what happened to Danko. And, while they don’t fully understand what’s within him, they know it’s not a party, and they certainly don’t want to catch it. There is even debate among the team that it could be a virus. Luka and Mickey would rather play it safe and kill the host. Bye-bye, Danko. Not if Emily has something to say about it.
However, it turns out that she is not the only one who does not want to kill Danko. Nikola, on the other hand, wishes to prevent the crew from killing Danko for entirely other reasons. He’s all heated rants about nature’s miracles and evolution, which they’ve been fortunate enough to witness. He’d rather Danko be a good little mother and let the one-of-a-kind creature develop inside him.
Oddly, Emily’s change of heart is most likely prompted by the moronic scientist’s point of view. She realises she can’t save Danko, and as he doesn’t mind being slain by his friends, she lets Luka and his group lead him into the woods to kill him. Not that I believe it would have made a significant difference in the outcome, but the group is arrogant enough not to listen to Danko’s warning since they are not certain that the thing will hurt bodies. Danko’s death sets off a chain reaction of deaths, some caused by the beast and some for which the gang must accept responsibility.
Ultimately, it is Luka who returns to Emily and company with the thing inside of him. No matter how desperately Nikola tries, he can’t persuade himself to murder himself since he’d rather die than endanger his family by returning home with that monster. When he steps into the water for a peaceful death, you know the creature will slip out of him. But it’s hilarious to watch Nikola eat his remarks when he’s chosen as the next host. Didn’t he say he’d be honoured to host it inside himself? It doesn’t feel like it now that he’s pleading with Sofija to cut off the tentacles wrapped around his tummy.
Unfortunately for him, an anxious Sofia accidentally disembowels him. Were you concerned that the creature did not have a gender preference when it attacked Emily? I’m not going to lie, I was worried. However, it is Hell Hole’s sick sense of humour that perplexes the creature over Emily’s gender, most likely due to the way she dresses. Hey, don’t come at me. I did not compose the script. But wait until I tell you the next joke that Hell Hole’s ending pulls. You’ve noticed the beast getting dangerously near to Sofija and Teddy. Ah, to flee into the sunset with your new crush as a parasitic thing pursues you!
The last sequence of Hell Hole does not provide a clear explanation. When you see a sad Teddy sitting in a bathtub, comforted by a droopy-faced Sofija, you know they’re destined to form a strange little family. The newspaper’s foreboding front-page story about the oil rig deaths tells Teddy and Sofija just what to anticipate. It’s a parody of Teddy and Sofija’s flirtatious personal objectives.
He stated that he wanted to find someone, settle down, and be a father. Sofija stated that she wanted to investigate parasites and their interactions with their hosts. So, the beast entering Teddy and his shacking up with Sofija is essentially a horrific wish fulfilment for both of them. Before I go, I want to leave you with some food for thought. Why? Because I can. Do you recall the frightening Roma woman who handed over the “infected” horse to the soldiers in Hell Hole’s opening sequence?
She had this strange smirk on her face, almost as if she knew precisely what she was doing. So, could we expect a prequel that explains the creature’s origins and whether the woman was a Serbian nationalist who wanted to kill the rest of Napoleon’s platoon? However, if you have any other theories concerning the woman, please share them in the comments.
