Hellbender (2021)

Disclaimer: Hellbender (2021) review originally posted February 24, 2022 and updated July 24, 2025.

Available to watch now on Shudder by clicking here, Hellbender is a 2021 horror movie that bends tropes while creating a broad supernatural world. A protective mother and her adolescent daughter live in rural woods near mountains and bodies of water that they utilize. Living off of foraged plant life Izzy, portrayed by Zelda Adams, and her mother, portrayed by Toby Poser, play in a 2 person metal band together when Izzy isn’t being homeschooled or wandering the woods. Believing she has an autoimmune disorder that requires her to stay away from other people the only exposure Izzy has to the outside world is through her mother who travels to town every so often to run errands.

Spoilers for Hellbender (2021) past this point

Purchasing art supplies and art like the sick black crown featured on the movie’s theatrical release poster Izzy’s mom tries to keep her contained while also utilizing magic to spy on her from the sky. On a random day Izzy encounters a man hiking while she’s drawing by a creek who is lost and requests directions to the nearby highway. She keeps her distance but this friendly man, portrayed by John Adams, is just excited to find locals and wants to connect with them. During their conversation Izzy’s mom appears on the cliff above them, asking why this man is trespassing and what he wants. With inhuman speed she teleports from above them to right behind the hiker by the time he turns around, revealing early on that they are definitely not run of the mill witches or hippies living in the forest.

Offering to guide him back while Izzy returns home her mother leads him into the forest and asks him questions about himself like if he’s married or has children. Just before this he reveals he has a niece around the same age as Izzy who lives on the nearby mountain, offering to introduce them so Izzy has someone around her age to connect with. After he reveals he doesn’t have family or a partner she lifts him off the ground using telekinesis and cuts his arm, causing blood to pool in his hand. She dabs one drop and seems overtaken by it when she consumes it before she turns him to ash that falls to the ground. Unfortunately for her mother Izzy meets the hiker’s niece, Amber, portrayed by Lulu Adams, anyways when Izzy sees her at the pool of a house she’s watching from the forest.

Amber calls Izzy over and the pair have fun swimming in the pool together, Amber impressed that Izzy’s in a metal band called Hellbender. She invites Izzy to come play at the pool the following day, saying she has some friends coming over that she can introduce Izzy to. Izzy floats the idea to her mom at dinner but her mom isn’t interested in any ideas that will bring Izzy into contact with other people. At the party Izzy puts on a borrowed bikini and has a good time with Amber and her 2 friends, AJ portrayed by Rinzin Thonden and Ingrid played by Khenzom. She plays the drums and they all think she’s really rad, offering her a shot with a worm in it. Things go haywire then, Izzy letting out a face reddening, blood curdling scream once the worm settles in her stomach, having warned them that she’d always been strictly vegan.

As this happens the real owners of the house return home and the teens go running into the woods and off of the property. In the woods Izzy is in a trance, her vision bending and melting like she’s on a drug trip. In this state she goes to choke Amber which Amber perceives as her hitting on her rather than attacking her which results in Amber screaming at her to never come near her again as she runs away from Izzy. Izzy goes back to get her shoes and clothes but then is confronted by the house’s owner, the scene ending on Izzy chuckling in response to him without showing how the interaction concluded. Back at their house Izzy’s mother is worried and concerned when she learns of the situation and that Izzy has consumed a worm.

Now that Izzy has consumed meat per-say her mother starts to teach her their ways and what is happening in Izzy. Mother explains that she can help Izzy control her powers that Mother and her own mom had as well, stating her own mother wasn’t good at the mothering portion of raising her. Izzy wants to leave the mountain now that she knows she’s not sick and her mother shows her how to activate their powers by consuming living creatures, using a caterpillar to show her how. A montage shows the pair adapting to their new normal as Izzy continues exploring and expanding her powers, even without her mother present. Her mother encourages Izzy to stay isolated and without humans, arguing they don’t need them and aren’t like humans.

Izzy begins to resent her mother’s way of life, in particular feeling that since her mother interacts with outsiders that only she is truly alone. She begins sneaking into the upstairs attic, only accessible when one of them places their palm on a sigil on the door that releases a key through their hand. Inside she places her hand over the book with the same sigil and has visions like her mother’s but her own are triumphant rather than warnings like her mother’s visions. Both of their visions show her mother flying through the sky in flames, screaming while still tied to a post. Photos in the attic show different generations of their lineage at different time periods and Izzy uses a similar spell to her mom’s in order to follow Amber around the woods.

On a forest hike Izzy and her mother happen upon the ripped clean skeleton of a deer that Izzy calls beautiful but vicious. Her mother argues it’s neither or and that rather the thing that did it is just acting in it’s nature. Later on by a waterfall she asks her mother what their nature is to which she replies that it is dark. Her mother warns that their ancestors became “drunk on the fear” that their power generates and bent towards hell rather than the heavens, explaining the name Hellbender. She asks Izzy if she wants a legacy of being feared and unloved but Izzy states she doesn’t and the subject changes to a pop quiz of ingredient combos. This reveals they have an almost unlimited range of capabilities if they combine their knowledge with their raw power.

Mother reveals that they are self reproducing like ferns, which they agree is awesome, and she shows her how to activate a power they no longer use. By crushing a fern and mushroom into their palm after pricking their palms they can smell warm blooded creatures nearby just as a ranger appears on top of the ridge. He asks if he can talk to them briefly and compliments Izzy’s shirt before asking if they have seen carcasses around the area. He thinks the hiker uncle was killed by a rabid mountain lion but they claim to have no idea of any carcasses. Suddenly after her mother says they have no idea about hikers in the area Izzy tells the ranger that it could’ve been a Hellbender. She proceeds to say it’s a witch, demon, and apex predator cross and that they live off of fear pumping through human blood. She says they’ve been around since the dawn of time but are evolving now and he laughs, recommending she become a writer if not a designer.

He tells them to take care of themselves and walks off, leaving them in the woods. Cut to winter and snow has piled on the ground and Mother is out by the water listening and observing, finding more animal carcasses. Using their seeing eye sigil she isn’t able to see through or activate it, causing her to become confused. Later on she gives Izzy a small worm but she says it’s baby food and suggests they eat something larger instead or get burgers even, troubling her mother. She passes her own worm over to Izzy and the conversation is settled. To reconnect her mother shows her what she calls “her special stash” which is live maggots, she states are powerful due to being actual death eaters.

She tells Izzy she collected them from a deer carcass that looked like it had a terrifying end which she says enhances the experience. Outside Izzy tackles her mother and tells her she can keep her useless maggots since they won’t allow them to fly, proceeding to vomit up a blood like substance into her mother’s face. Rather than being upset her mother laughs maniacally and throws Izzy off only to repeat the same blood vomit in her face. Both laugh with the bloody maggots in their faces and create images in the sky. Her mother creates a flower that Izzy destroys then a heart she throws an arrow through, and her mother calls her a bitch.

Her mother asks if she’s been in her dreams and Izzy says they would make a great pair, her mother suddenly feeling sick and wanting to shower. She tells Izzy that what they did was bad and they couldn’t do it again but Izzy wants to hear about her own mother. She tells Izzy that her mother was a monster who ate an entire village but felt guilty so sewed her own mouth shut. She didn’t starve though but was hung, the rope not having an impact on her. She tells Izzy that her mother died the same way all hellbenders die, “Spring eats winter, winter eats fall. Fall eats summer,” and Izzy asks her age which she says is 147 she believes. When Izzy asks her how old she’ll be she tells Izzy to tell her.

Cut to a deserted town street and Izzy comes out to confront Amber as she’s leaving work, offering her swimsuit back with an apology for being weird. Amber says the guy who chased them got attacked by a wild animal and she says she hoped nothing happened to Izzy. When Izzy offers Amber her hair barrettes back and admits to stealing them she tells Izzy to stay away from her and walks away down the deserted street. The next morning Izzy isn’t in the house and her mother is unable to release the attic door’s key, finding it already unlocked and the book missing. She finds the book in Izzy’s room and by placing her hand over the book it reveals Izzy killing the man last summer and swimming until the blood was gone. It also shows that Izzy saw her mother’s witch nanny cam in the sky and used her own powers to disable it and stop her mother from finding out what she’d done.

In this moment her mother lets out a scream and is whooshed outside and is standing in front of Izzy who greets her expectantly. She tells her new lyrics she’s written for Hellbender which describe a wolf who tries to be a sheep by “cutting her claws and cracking her teeth” and tried to do the same to her daughter. In the lyrics the daughter grows up and is a wolf still who eats her mother because she’s a sheep. Izzy reveals that her friend Amber is still alive while she consumes her, showing her terrified before her mother leaves the vision state to reveal she’s in Izzy’s room. From down in the basement she hears Amber screaming for help and goes down to investigate.

In the basement inside a wooden box is an underground tunnel that looks like it’s lined with innards and earth. Mother crawls through this tunnel towards Amber’s cries for help and ends up in an open cavern where Amber lays injured and unable to move. She wipes up some of the blood and puts it in her mouth, overcome with the strength of Amber’s fear and gets up to look around the cavern. Izzy is down there and says it’s her happy place, admitting she knows that her mother “dusted” Amber’s dad and states she likes that trick, saying she used it in front of Amber. She tells her mom if humans want to believe in hell so bad she intends to give it to them.

Izzy tells her mother that she knows all of the bad things her mother has done like killing babies and admits she kept Izzy from being like her. Izzy recites the saying of the seasons eating one another and she asks if her mom’s mother sacrificed herself and taunts her to reveal herself. She does and her face becomes terrifying with more teeth rows and hollow black eye sockets before Izzy tells her she intends to show herself too, turning Amber to dust. Her mom pleads she isn’t ready but Izzy says she isn’t going to eat her and that she loves her, stating she isn’t ready to be on her own. She tells her mom she loves her and she’s going to town, asking if she needs anything and she responds bass strings.

Conclusion

I like the twist reveal and confirmation that Izzy has known all along what her mother was teaching her and also had no intention of following her lifestyle. Though hints are left throughout, in particular as Izzy’s exposure to hellbender teachings increases and shares her own opinions with her mother, it is a good a-ha moment as a viewer to see the pieces come together. I also like that Amber is a thread throughout and shows Izzy’s attempts at navigating the “real world” outside of the bubble her mother has created. The twist that they’re heavy metal witches on the overprotective mother is cool and allows for more deep thought into the control rather than stopping at the surface of weird restrictions on clothes, words, or opinions.

Her control is rooted in fear but rather than pure fear of what Izzy is capable of she’s worried that Izzy will turn on her like she turned on her mother. She tells Izzy she only did what she was taught to do when she’s confronted with her own lifestyle that contradicts her teachings to Izzy. Although her mother has guilt and shame about the pain she’s caused I think her actions and precautions are rooted in not wanting to be usurped by her offspring rather than a true motive to live a different lifestyle than her nature.

This tale is about as nature versus nurture as it gets and in the end we see that, as is often true, people are a combination of both. Rather than cruelly kill her mother just because it feels like the natural culmination to events she says she still needs her mother and her mother’s teachings and even offers to get her things from town. This is reminiscent of a teenage girl and her mother fighting in the real world with the stakes raised to a million when compounded with life and death scenarios.

One of my favorite things about horror is the ability to make you think about life in simpler terms because you see the same circumstances play out on a grand and fantastical scale. Often the consequences of real life are unseen but in horror the consequences are shown in blood and agony, impossible to miss or escape. Mother’s decision to hide Izzy’s true nature from herself caused her to be even more fascinated and inclined to accept it once she found out. This following a pattern of rebelling against whatever your parent’s stances are even if they’re the other member in your metal band. Hellbender also feels like a grander way to look at womanhood and how different women approach it for better or worse.

Passing down your trained womanhood or choosing not to having consequences you cannot readily predict without the 20/20 of hindsight or an aerial view of the scenario. My biggest critique is more of a critique about myself: some scenes moved slower to build suspense and often had quiet moments of tension that I got distracted during. I think those scenes are good and essential however and wouldn’t necessarily replace them but am rather conscious of my social media damaged attention span.