Horror Calling with Zelda Adams

For Zelda Adams, horror is a calling. Born the day before Halloween and into a curiously infamous last name, Zelda makes horror movies with her family under the name Wonder Wheel Productions and has already attracted a cult-following from horror fans all around. Her role as a filmmaker is expansive, spanning that of a writer, director, actor, musician, and any extra hand needed on set. Her most recent family production, Mother of Flies, will be screening in October at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, just in time for spooky season. 

Besides acting, Zelda is also a professional model who has starred in campaigns for major luxury houses and fronted various magazine covers from Vogue Greece to The Collector Magazine. These days, she takes to the camera as a photographer herself, organizing intimate photo shoots with friends and family. Like her films, these photos have a haunting, pensive lyricism to them and are unmistakably Zelda-esque.

Walking across the Columbia University campus for our on-location photoshoot, Zelda wears the black paper crown I crafted for her, haphazardly stapled together a few minutes before leaving my dorm. When I ask if she’d like to take it off to discourage inquisitive onlookers, she tells me with a charming grin that she prefers it on. It’s only our second time meeting, but I feel as if I’ve always known Zelda—perhaps due to her status as a quiet “it” girl on campus, but more so because of her down-to-earth nature and warm professionalism during our time together. 

When we first met for the interview, we sat on a bench near a loud ventilator and Zelda was the first to graciously suggest we move elsewhere. After the voice recording hit stop, she turned the questions around, asking about my own creative interests and aspirations as a fellow student. In our second rendezvous for the photo shoot, Zelda gave me free reign, fiercely collaborative and open to anything my vision called for. In moments like these, Zelda comes through as a force of care, of a people-first soul that cements her brand of cool both inside and out. 

You truly are a multi-hyphenate. Between being a model, actor, filmmaker, musician, photographer, and student, where do you feel most at home right now?

Right now, I feel most at home being in New York. I was just gone for a year. I did a whole year abroad, first in Paris and then a semester in Cambridge. And that was beautiful. But in the end, I knew that I wanted to go back home to New York, because I feel this city is really a place where I’ve built my home and my family. I have so many creative friends that I’m excited to work with. I love the modeling industry here. I love the music scene, and I also feel like there’s a future for film here. 

Tell us about your time abroad at Oxford and Paris!

I studied in Paris. I’m an art history major, and that was so amazing for me—just to be surrounded by so much art, taking classes in the Louvre, participating in the fashion industry there and doing magazines and going to the south of France for photo shoots. That was just so exciting. 

Studying in Cambridge was beautiful. It was a little bit isolating and hard to make friends, but that caused me to turn to art as a sort of comfort, and it really pushed me to expand my horizons as an artist. Someday, I would love to go and make a movie in England. 

Modeling and acting are an interesting dynamic because they require such different objectives—where modeling is often about being self-aware of how you look, acting is more about expressing an emotion regardless of appearance. How do you navigate those differences? Have they informed the way you approach each discipline?

Absolutely. I’ve grown up acting. I’ve acted ever since I was six and that has definitely helped me with modeling because it’s made me really comfortable in front of the camera. I really don’t mind feeling stupid, whether that means doing weird poses or acting as some sort of character that the photographer wants me to play. 

I also feel modeling has benefited my acting, too, because it’s taught me how to be very aware of my angle towards the camera or my lighting. But it’s also been something I’ve needed to unlearn in my acting because for modeling you are posing to sell a certain device of clothing or a product. Sometimes, I’ve had to strip that part of myself away so I can be more authentic and real as an actor. 

I’d also love to talk about your role as a musician, particularly with the Hellbender soundtrack. I was listening to it this morning, and there’s such a beautifully ethereal, haunting quality to the vocals. Could you share more about your involvement in H6LLB6ND6R, who else is part of the project, and the meaning behind the “6” in the band’s name? 

I have grown up around music. I’ve heard my dad play music ever since I was born. I had a band with my dad when I was eight. It was called Kid Kalifornia out when I was living in California, and I played the drums. When I turned 12, I was more interested in singing and my dad was like, Hell yeah, why don’t you sing? and I’ll do the drums and the instruments. A couple of years later, probably around when I turned 15, we formed our band H6LLB6ND6R and that’s when we brought in our more ethereal, haunting tone because that’s when we also stepped into the horror genre for movie-making. It really went hand in hand because we started making music for our horror movie Hellbender, and our music felt like the spine of that movie, like it was holding it all together. 

So my dad and I make the music together. He composes all of it on his computer and plays the guitar and stuff like that. We’ve started writing lyrics together, and my mom and sister sing back up. I’m the lead vocalist.

As for the sixes. They’re three sixes, so it’s just like the devil. Six. Six. Six. We’re not satanic or anything like that. We just love everything horror. I will say, though, I have been accused of being a satanic person by modeling clients. So I’ve had to delete horror content before because they thought I was a Satanist. 

It’s not often that we see an entire family creating films together, especially in horror. How did that idea begin, and what about horror keeps drawing you back into the genre?

The horror genre is so great because you have so much artistic freedom. You can make whatever rules you want, break whatever rules you want, and the horror audience is gonna love it and go watch it. Also, you don’t need a huge celebrity in your film for it to receive a lot of support. That was something that we struggled with when we were making drama movies when they went to festivals. It was hard for them to gather a lot of attention. But now, with horror, if you’re just testing the limits, people are excited to see that. 

My family and I also use horror movies very much as therapy. Our last movie Mother of Flies is about a girl with cancer who sees a witch that can apparently cure her of cancer. That was a really therapeutic story to tell because both of my parents have had cancer and survived it. I have something called Lynch Syndrome, which makes me more susceptible to getting these cancers. So we all just had this huge weight on our shoulders and were like, Let’s just make a movie about it and turn it into a horror movie. 

What are some of the unusual challenges (or even unexpected joys) that come with working so closely with family?

My parents and I are best friends. I know that sounds cheesy, but we really are. We know each other like the back of our own hands.

I think our drives have confused a lot of people. When I used to go to soccer practice, the drive there would be like a business meeting where we’d just be talking about our next movie or what we’re going to film tomorrow. So I guess it’s kind of a confused family interaction, but in a wonderful way. 

We really don’t fight. The biggest thing that we disagree on is maybe what cut to use for our edit in a film, but it’s like a healthy competition. 

What has been your most rewarding or surprising project process-wise, and why?

I’m honestly really proud of our last film Mother of Flies because it’s probably our most personal story to date and also my favorite film we’ve made to date. It’s being received really well right now on the festival circuit. Also because it includes our music, too—some of my favorite songs we’ve made from H6LLB6ND6R. I’m going to shout out one of them. It’s called “Murder” and it’s out on our streaming services. It’s my favorite song we’ve made. 

So Mother of Flies is set to screen at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival this October, and tickets are already sold out. How did this project initially come about, and could you share any memorable back stories from the filming process?

We knew we wanted to tell a personal cancer story, but we also wanted to go back to our folk horror and witchy roots because we had made a film called Hellbender, which is our most popular film as of right now. It’s a witchy story about these creatures called Hellbenders. It’s very rock and very female-power oriented. We wanted to go back to that and create something in a similar universe. 

We shot this film upstate in the Catskills, where we’re really comfortable and we used our own soundtrack. It was really fun because I cut my hair for this movie, for my character who has cancer. It’s grown out a bit. It actually benefited my modeling too—a lot of my modeling clients changed after that choice. 

Looking ahead, what’s next for Wonder Wheel Productions? Is there anything you’d like audiences to know as they prepare for your future projects?

I think people should just know that we’re constantly excited to keep pumping out new things and improve. We’re curious about working with other people while maintaining the power of our unique voice as a family, and also just excited to make new music and hopefully music videos. We really want to try and make more music videos and short-form content on social media. But it’s so hard because none of us have that mindset. As the twenty-one year old in the family, I feel I need to be the one to figure that out. 

Zelda Instagram Links:

Main: @zeldadams

Photography: @zeldastarry