Damian McCarthy’s Hokum has been 10 years in the making
Irish horror filmmaker Damian McCarthy is releasing Hokum, his most ambitious project yet after establishing himself as a rising talent in the horror genre over the past five years. Following the success of his microbudget debut Caveat—a psychological thriller about a drifter hired to care for a disturbed woman in an isolated mansion—and 2024’s Oddity, a Shudder exclusive featuring a blind woman using psychic powers to hunt her sister’s murderer, McCarthy has earned recognition for his distinctive approach to horror cinema.
Hokum marks McCarthy’s largest-scale production, starring Adam Scott alongside an all-Irish cast. The film follows Scott’s character, a writer who travels to a remote Irish hotel with a dark secret: it’s allegedly haunted by an evil witch. McCarthy’s characteristic commitment to Irish settings and Irish casts remains central to the project, with Scott as a notable exception to the filmmaker’s typical casting approach.
The trajectory from McCarthy’s early microbudget work to studio-backed productions like Hokum reflects the filmmaker’s growing influence in the horror space. His films have consistently blended psychological elements with supernatural horror while maintaining a distinctly Irish sensibility in their settings and storytelling. The progression from indie productions to a larger-budget feature with established Hollywood talent like Scott suggests McCarthy’s break-through moment after a decade of creative development.