Polished frights with a funhouse sensibility, rooted in Irish folklore.
Damian Mc Carthy’s Hokum expertly blends Irish folklore and vintage horror craft, delivering a polished haunted inn story that feels both comfortingly familiar and deeply unsettling, anchored by Adam Scott’s delightfully brittle lead performance.
Damian Mc Carthy’s films don’t announce themselves; they seep in. The Irish filmmaker built his reputation on original stories told with deliberate visual precision and a deep love for classic jump scares. His 2020 debut Caveat delivered quietly claustrophobic terror inside a rotting house, while 2024’s Oddity melded clever plotting with a current of melancholy. Now, with Hokum, Mc Carthy continues to mine Ireland’s rich tradition of supernatural storytelling, blending macabre whimsy and folkloric dread.
Hokum’s setup feels almost knowingly familiar: an American writer, played with sharp-edged unpleasantness by Adam Scott, checks into a remote Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes. Writer’s block plagues him. The hotel, of course, is haunted. What could have been a retread of tired haunted-house beats becomes something cannier. Mc Carthy leans into the audience’s expectations, using that recognition to lower defenses before springing moments of genuine shock. Production designer Til Frolich dresses the inn like a place where time stopped decades ago; it’s quaint in tourist-brochure lighting, deeply unsettling in the director’s hands.
Hokum (2026): How Damian Mc Carthy Refines Old-School Haunted Hotel Horror
A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
Damian Mc Carthy is doing something right. The Irish filmmaker writes original stories, invests time and attention to visual storytelling, and produces eerie, memorable horror. There’s an elegance to his movies, but his tales are not meant simply to provoke thought or to elevate the genre. Caveat, Oddity, and now Hokum draw from a long tradition of Irish horror storytelling and love a jump scare as much as anybody.
Mc Carthy’s latest sees an absolute prick of an American writer (Adam Scott) checking into an Irish inn to spread his parents’ ashes. Is he having a problem with writer’s block? He is! Is the hotel haunted? It is!
Hokum does feel less original than either of the filmmaker’s previous features, but somehow that works in its favor. Mc Carthy knows you think you’ve seen this before, and he leans into its familiarity to lull you.
Scott’s prickly, unpleasant performance at the center of the film is a gift. His unlikability gives the film a nice edge. Scott’s lowkey, brittle performance anchors the macabre whimsy so gorgeously brought to life by Til Frolich’s production design. The inn looks like a place where time stood still, quaint to the eyes of a tourist, spooky in the hands of a talented filmmaker.
Damian Mc Carthy’s Hokum expertly blends Irish folklore and vintage horror craft, delivering a polished haunted inn story that feels both comfortingly familiar and deeply unsettling, anchored by Adam Scott’s delightfully brittle lead performance.
Though Mc Carthy’s script feels less original than expected, he knows how to light, pace, and frame scenes to heighten dread. The sound design is also an eerie delight. And Mc Carthy reminds you that jump scares are not just for kiddie horror.
It would be easy for Hokum to feel overstuffed. The protagonist’s own ghost story, a very flesh-bound horror, and don’t forget the witch—that’s a lot to fit into a honeymoon suite. Scott’s grounded performance provides a clear path through it, and Mc Carthy ‘s skill at crafting intelligent yet primal horror pulls it together.
Scene after scene balances a funhouse vibe with Irish folktale spookiness, and the vintage horror beauty of every frame beguiles you. Caviat offered quietly claustrophobic terror. Oddity delivered clever, melancholy horror. Hokum feels more polished yet more old school. It is perhaps less terrifying than Mc Carthy’s previous features, but it’s a haunting good time.
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