You’d think that creature horrors wouldn’t have much scope left for originality anymore. But while a darn good film that checks all the boxes when it comes to this brassy subgenre of horror is the least you’d expect from the Adams family of filmmakers, they must’ve set the bar impressively high for themselves with Hell Hole. Because Toby Poser and John Adams have done something that most of our favorites from this side of horror town haven’t quite pulled off yet. They’ve not just given us a squiggly squid monster that gives a taste of gestation to the dudes, but as shocking as this might sound, the characters in Hell Hole are actually interesting. Yup, not the type whose intrigue you’d have to imagine in order to be in denial about this gaping hole in this subgenre.
Spoiler Alert
What happens in the film?
John’s your usual absolutely obnoxious guy with a painful obliviousness to his own stupidity. What do you expect when someone like him is holding an important position in a fracking team dying to drill into Serbia’s earth? He’s a total buffoon when it comes to being aware of the environment that his work is destroying. And Emily, well, if we’re to go by what her nephew Teddy says, she’s gone from taking care of the world to leading teams that disturb the earth. All it took was for her entrepreneurial solar power company to go under, and she’d switched teams. Thank heavens there’s the environmentally sensible science duo on the team to sign off on the project, right? But Nikola and Sofija don’t seem to have much say in the matter, even though neither the professor nor the parasitology aspirant is very happy about the fracking company invading Serbia’s nature. It does tickle their scientific curiosity when a drill head comes out soaked in organic substance and Sofija can vouch for the fact that the overwhelming stench in the area is organic too. But that’s nothing compared to the strange ride of horror and scientific discovery they’re taken on when one of their crew members (Danko) inadvertently unearths a man wrapped in a weird membrane-like thing. And guess what? He stinks to high heaven. And it’s pretty similar to the smell of the organic matter they drilled into.
Why does the creature not go inside Christian?
When he’s rescued from his “grave” and taken to their base, it isn’t actually the first time you see this French guy. Weird as it might sound, the language barrier is hardly the main cause for conflict between this man and Emily’s team. Because about a couple centuries ago, he was in Napoleon’s army, and we saw him having terrible luck with a horse when his platoon was dreading their imminent death from starvation. They were likely looking forward to eating that horse. But something lived inside it. When it exploded out of the poor creature and attacked the soldiers around, it didn’t actually kill all of them. Some creepy crawler has been living inside this soldier who defied death and survived for centuries. And most of the group have even seen it hang a tentacle or two out of this very suicidal soldier’s various orifices. That’s right, the guy wants to off himself. He couldn’t have asked for that favor from a better guy than John. But however much John might want to jam his knife into this poor guy, he knows he’d be in trouble with the law. Sure they’re isolated. But he doesn’t really think that he can bury a whole murder and get away with it.
Sadly, though, the “resurrected” soldier doesn’t get to take more than a bite of Teddy’s bomb grilled cheese before his urge to die gets the better of him and he nabs John’s knife. But before he can stick it in, John grabs him, only for the creature to leave the soldier’s body in the worst way imaginable and goes straight into John. John stinks! No, literally. The same stench that the organic matter and the soldier emanated is now coming from John. So what do we learn from that? The creature is the OG stinker. But wait. There are lessons left for you yet. John’s not too keen on keeping this weird case of having a monster living inside him to himself. But one of the local crew guys, Christian, is obviously not buying his claim that something that was inside the soldier is now inside of him. And seeing as John’s got this theory that the creature only left the soldier’s body because John had overpowered him, Christian doesn’t mind playing along and proposes an arm wrestling match. But John was only half right about the creature’s MO. It didn’t leave the soldier’s body because John’d gotten the best of him. It chose to get inside John because he was strangling the soldier. The creature needs its host to be alive. So a little arm-wrestling match does nothing to prompt it to leave John’s body. But when John and Christian’s aggression does escalate and it looks like Christian might kill John, the creature’s motivated to crawl out of him. It makes one wrong move though. It grabs both of Christian’s legs with a tentacle, which makes him lose balance and crash his head on the table and effectively die. So now you know why the spunky little thing crawls back inside John. He’s the only guy alive in the room.
Why does the creature only target men?
It bodes well for us that Sofija doesn’t like anything better than to go on and on about science stuff. That’s how we first got to know her really, when she wouldn’t shut up about pikas and their significance as an environmental indicator. No shade. She’s adorable. And thanks to her and Nikola’s research on the samples they took from the organic matter, the soldier’s skin, and the membrane he was inside, we know a lot more about the creature than we would’ve known otherwise. They’re actually so excited about their remarkable discovery that they forget to be freaked out by the fact that a guy was dug up from the earth, a creature came out of him, and he basically looked decomposed right after dying. In any case, we now know that the creature has the same DNA structure as that of an argonaut, which is a kind of cephalopod. Basically a strange giant octopus thingy. And judging by the result they get from testing the organic matter found on the drill, this creature isn’t the only clam-like thing present in that area. There might be a whole world of them underneath the earth that they’re digging. So, not pikas, huh? But things are way more interesting than just that. You see, this weird membrane that covered the centuries-old soldier was made of Calcite and was high in Magnesium Carbonate, which basically means that it’s an egg case belonging to a mollusk. And seeing as this guy also had a particular type of algae on him, something that forms a mutually beneficial dynamic with its host, it looks like this creature (mollusk, octopus, Argonaut, whatchamacallit) needed to live inside this soldier’s body because it doesn’t have a shell. So it had to keep the soldier alive with the help of the eukaryotic algae. But why the egg case? Well, that’s because survival isn’t the only thing that this creature is after. You remember the creature from the opening sequence? Yeah well, that’s not the same one that was inside the soldier.
Apparently, female Argonauts make these egg cases to store their eggs until a male “deposits” its whole you-know-what inside the case. Yep. It needs to be the whole business and not just the sperm. And if we’re to assume that the creature from the opening scene was the mama who trapped the soldier inside her egg case, that’d mean that some interspecies fertilization of her eggs had to happen for this new creature to grow inside him. So he’s actually the creature’s biological dad and it’s likely the first of its kind, a human-mollusk hybrid. Does that mean this one will go about making babies with its own species? Sure doesn’t look like it. John practically explodes like a blood and flesh-stuffed balloon when his life is threatened by Danko pointing a gun at him. How did this situation come to be? Well, solid guy that John is, he went ahead and tried to dispose of Christian’s body, when he was caught by Filip and Danko. Poor Filip freaked out and pointed his gun at John, and instead of getting the situation under control, Danko grabbed the gun and accidentally shot Filip dead. With two of the guys dead, Danko’s the only one for the creature to get inside. So that’s what it does. And when a suicidal Danko with the creature inside of him is discovered by the group, the slimy thing doesn’t seem to be interested in the women at all. Does that mean this one is not just inhabiting these men’s bodies but is also mating (or waiting to) with them? To Danko’s horror, that sure seems like what’s going on.
Is the creature inside Teddy?
You know what’s nice about a film that realizes that companies don’t always have the typical hierarchy dynamics and the higher-ups aren’t always total narcissists? All you really get are nice little surprises. And Emily’s a pleasant surprise if ever there were any. She isn’t all that righteous like her nephew Teddy. But she isn’t the cold, unloving, not-too-motherly woman that people make her out to be either. She’s a picture of stability and restraint. More a wholesome matriarch, if you will. So when all hell’s broken loose and she’s got to get a handle on her ship, freaking people out by revealing too much is the last thing she wants. The creature’s made a cozy home in Danko. And despite being totally aware that this would most likely end in his death, Danko hasn’t really lost his sense of humor. Maybe that’s his coping mechanism, who knows?
There’s a little problem in Emily’s plan to keep the crew in the dark, though. Luka and Mickey have seen what’s happened to Danko. And while they don’t totally grasp what’s inside him, they know that it’s not a party, and they sure don’t want to catch it. There’s even talk of it being a virus among the crew. Luka and Mickey would rather play safe and kill the host. Bye bye Danko? Not if Emily has anything to say about it. But turns out, she’s not the only one who doesn’t want to kill Danko. Although for a whole different reason, Nikola wants to keep the crew from killing Danko. He’s all one impassioned rant after another about the miracle of nature and evolution they’ve been privileged enough to be a part of. He’d rather Danko be a good little mom and let the one-of-a-kind creature grow inside him.
Oddly enough, it’s likely the moronic scientist’s perspective on things that pushes Emily to change her mind. She knows there’s no way she can actually save Danko, and since he doesn’t really mind being killed by his buddies, she lets Luka and his gang escort him into the woods to kill him. Not that I think it would’ve made any major difference in the outcome, but the group’s smug enough not to heed Danko’s warning because they’re not really convinced that the creature would hop bodies. And Danko being shot kickstarts a chain of deaths, some caused by the creature, some the group needs to take credit for. Ultimately, it’s Luka who comes back to Emily and co. with the creature inside of him. No matter how hard a desperate Nikola tries, there’s no talking him out of killing himself because he’d rather die than risk putting his family in harm’s way by going back home with that thing. When he walks into the water for a peaceful death, you know that the creature will slip out of him. But it’s a total riot watching Nikola eat his words when it picks him as its new host. Didn’t he say that he’d be honored to host it inside him? Sure doesn’t seem like it now that he’s desperate for Sofija to cut off the tentacles wrapped around his stomach. Unlucky for him, a nervous Sofija accidentally disembowels him. Were you worried that the creature doesn’t have a gender preference when it attacked Emily? Not gonna lie, I was worried too. But it’s actually Hell Hole’s rotten sense of humor that confuses the creature about Emily’s gender, likely because of the way she dresses. Hey now, don’t come at me. I didn’t write the script. But wait till I tell you about the next joke Hell Hole’s ending pulls. You’ve seen the creature get dangerously close to Sofija and Teddy. Ah, to run away into the sunset with your new crush while a parasitic creature chases you!
Hell Hole’s ending scene doesn’t really spell it out for you. But when you see a gloomy Teddy sitting in a bathtub and a droopy-faced Sofija comforting him, they’re actually about to become a weird little family. The ominous front-page piece about the oil rig deaths in the newspaper says enough about what Teddy and Sofija should expect. It’s actually a subversion of the personal goals Teddy and Sofija shared with each other when they were flirting. He said he wanted to find someone, settle down, and be a dad. And Sofija said that she wanted to study parasites and their relationship with their hosts. So, the creature entering Teddy and his shacking up with Sofija is kind of a nightmarish wish fulfillment for both of them, really. Before I go though, I’d like to leave you with a little food for thought. Why? Because I can. You remember that creepy Roma woman who handed the “infected” horse over to the soldiers in the opening sequence of Hell Hole? There was this weird smile on her face, almost like she knew exactly what she was doing. So, should we expect a prequel that’d shed light on the origin of the creature and if that woman was a Serbian patriot who wanted to kill off the remainder of Napoleon’s platoon? By all means though, if you have any other theories about that woman, feel free to share them in the comments.
