Hokum: Damian McCarthy’s horror finds a human story amid all the creepy grotesquerie
A haunted Irish hotel becomes a site of personal reckoning for a haunted man played by Adam Scott in Damian McCarthy’s surreal horror-comedy.
“Hokum” is how Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), protagonist of Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy’s latest feature, describes the paranormal. After all, resistance – in this case to nonsense and credulousness – is encoded in his very forename. A successful American author, whose downbeat series of conquistador adventures reflects his darkest emotions, Ohm has come to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes near where they had their honeymoon, and to work through the guilt and trauma he has carried since childhood.
He is a haunted man, and now staying in a hotel also said to be haunted, with guests permanently excluded from the cursed honeymoon suite. After the maid Fiona (Florence Ordesh) goes missing, local magic mushroom enthusiast Jerry (David Wilmot) persuades Ohm to break into the suite and go looking for her. There, Ohm will face a murderous member of staff, a legendary witch and his own ghosts, even as he seems doomed to a ‘bleak ending’ like the ones he keeps writing into his books.
Like Paul Morrissey’s Trash (1970), Bert Deling’s Pure Shit (1975), Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987), Wes Craven’s Shocker (1989) and Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), and also like McCarthy’s previous features Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024), Hokum comes with a title that is also an ironic, archly self-deprecating critique. In theatrical contexts, ‘hokum’ means hackneyed material designed to elicit a particular response. Here, it describes McCarthy’s general approach: recombining well-worn horror tropes in absurdist ways that leave viewers unsure whether to laugh or scream.
To appreciate McCarthy’s surreal take on genre, the viewer, like Ohm, must learn to embrace the ridiculous and irrational side of life and death. Part of the uncanny pleasure of Hokum is its elegant overdetermination. What unfolds here might be a writer’s attempts to work imaginatively through the (personal) issues that block him, a hanging man’s death dream (in the manner of Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’), hallucinations caused by a spiked drink, a fanciful cover story for an act or acts of murder – or a real encounter with an infernal creature of folklore.
On any reading, though, Ohm starts off a cynical and unfriendly soul, loathing others as much as himself, but whatever happens to him down in the shadows lets him emerge a warmer, more generous person, having found the power of self-forgiveness and a belief in hopeful denouements. Amid all the creepy grotesquerie and black comedy, McCarthy tells a human story that is more than mere hokum.
► Hokum is in UK cinemas1 May.