Adam Scott’s Hokum has been on quite the roll, joining the growing collection of recnt horror flicks. After his debut feature Caveat became a word-of-mouth sensation in 2020 and Oddity cemented his reputation as a genuine genre force in 2024, McCarthy has returned with his most ambitious project yet.
Now in a candid interview with FILMHOUNDS, McCarthy pulled back the curtain on exactly how this chilling new chapter came together and what inspired him to write this story.
The seed of Hokum was planted with a deceptively simple desire. McCarthy told FILMHOUNDS that from the start, he wanted to craft a haunted hotel story, a setting that allowed him to place an outsider within a world where everyone else already knows the rules. The dynamic of a sceptical, difficult guest gradually being confronted by everything he has dismissed was central to the vision from the outset.
Speaking to the outlet he states,
I think right from the start, I just wanted to make a haunted hotel movie. I love haunted houses, haunted objects, and stuff like this, but I wanted a guest, an outsider kind of fish out of water…I wanted to tell a simple story but with a complicated character. I also knew that I wanted to make a witch horror.
What separates McCarthy’s horror from much of the genre, however, is his insistence on layering human evil alongside the supernatural. He has spoken openly about feeling that purely supernatural threats, on their own, lack dramatic weight. Without a human dimension, the question of how characters can fight back and whether justice is achievable becomes less satisfying. In Hokum, as with Caveat and Oddity before it, the human villain is deliberately unglamorous. There is no moment of cool, composed menace when the antagonist is revealed.
More details about Hokum
Hokum has received strongly positive reviews from critics with it’s classic haunted house atmosphere enriched by folklore and perfectly-timed shocks, further cementing McCarthy as a modern master of horror. Adam Scott’s acting is another striking point, as the Severance actor surprised fans with a horror role.
The film’s story follows Ohm Bauman, a celebrated but creatively blocked author who travels to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland to scatter the ashes of his late parents, the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon. The Irish hotel is populated by quirky personalities and he refuses to believe in the horror that lies beneath it.
Hokum is now in theatres.
Edited by Nibir Konwar