Hokum ★★★★★

Released: 1 May 2026

Director: Damian McCarthy

Starring: Adam Scott

Damian McCarthy certainly knows a thing or two about sequential discovery. Ever since he first garnered the goodwill of the horror community with Caveat and Oddity, the Irish genre artisan has made a name for himself with an eerily modern spin on vintage folk horror. At a time when so many filmmakers are busy adapting lofty ideas into yet another variation of Prestige Social Issue cinema, McCarthy’s work evokes the memories of spooky folk tales — think Baba Yaga through the prism of personal regret. His latest (and, arguably, greatest) is Hokum: a haunted house creepfest told with remarkable sensitivity and grace rarely found in modern horror. It is also a puzzle box that knows exactly what buttons to push, how to seamlessly merge past with present, and leave a hauntingly beautiful impression.

With shades of hotel-based horrors of yesteryear that shall not be named, Hokum is a terrifying delight: set in rural Ireland, the film centres around Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a troubled American writer trying to come up with the bleakest ending for his well-received trilogy about the Spanish conquistadores. Overwhelmed by painful memories, he ventures out to a remote hotel deep in the woods to spread the ashes of his parents and visit the place of their honeymoon he recognizes only from old pictures. Upon his arrival, Bauman struggles to connect with the locals—mostly due to his inherent arrogance—but takes a liking to the bartender who reminds him of his mother. When she suddenly disappears after a Halloween party, Bauman decides to investigate the matter himself, only to find the doors that should’ve never been opened.

To quote the King of Horror, “[Ghosts] live inside of us, and sometimes, they win”. McCarthy seems to have taken to that statement as his mantra, even more so than Flanagan or Perkins before him. Hokum is a film of—you guessed it—trauma, yet one that smartly avoids contemporary horror trappings in favour of a genuinely frightening and surprisingly compassionate character study. Ohm Bauman isn’t exactly the most pleasant lead: it takes the film less than ten minutes to get the audience rooting for the ghosts and somehow denounce all their love for Adam Scott’s nice guy persona. But just like in Oddity, McCarthy’s writing is a sleight of hand trick, a kind of litmus test for flawed people and their personal demons. Bauman can be a bit of a cynical asshole, one whose rancour is a self-destructive instinct — back in the day, we used to just call that being human.

While this may sound a bit like the hackneyed post-horror motif that genre enthusiasts have been hearing since the emergence of “horror films that don’t actually want to be horror films”, McCarthy’s deft handling of the subject matter only works in favour of his scary side. That is to say, Bauman’s interiority is the key to unlocking the terror in Hokum, a genuine fear of darkness that made some of us horrified at the sheer concept of sleeping at night. Whether it’s the alcoholic father who’s had one too many or a sleep paralysis demon standing beside the bed, the idea of “ghosts” is just as real as a skeptic’s hurried rush towards the night light they’ve had since childhood. Bauman learns it the hard way at the godforsaken Irish hotel, but he also manages to face that fear head-on as it takes a turn to a—literal—purification by fire. Perhaps, all it took was looking inward.

If there’s one defining trait to McCarthy’s style, it is his clever manipulation of the conventional three-act structure. The first third of Hokum is closer to what you’d expect from your typical Blumhouse fare: effectively creepy jump scares, Joseph Bishara’s startling score, and a slew of ominous images that would make even the strongest horror soldiers quietly fidget in terror. All of that is, ultimately, a smart play on the audience, as the film quickly shifts gears and embraces its novelistic storytelling. The dead suddenly turn tragic, the living even more evil, and the hotel becomes a morbidly beautiful site of reunion rather than a place of mourning. The entire thing is helmed so confidently and with such a degree of emotional maturity, you might be surprised to find out it’s the director’s first big studio venture.

In the 2000s, Hokum would’ve probably been an expensive Dark Castle Entertainment production — and I say this with deep love, admiration, and maybe just a tiny bit of disappointment at the current state of affairs. This is a work of remarkable restraint and a deeply satisfying payoff, the kind of film that will make people fall in love with the horror genre all over again because it is so indebted to the darkest stories we read growing up. McCarthy’s filmmaking is unsettling, emotional yet not sentimental, and uniquely subversive without the need to outsmart audiences. There’s a kind of sincerity to the film that somehow renders it scarier — it makes it feel real. Maybe all those dark shadows aren’t the scary ones, after all.