The director of Hokum has revealed the original ending — and it would have changed everything about this film
Turns out the ending you watched was not the ending Damian McCarthy originally wrote. Not even close.
In a week of interviews that have been doing the rounds since Hokum opened on May 1, the Cork-born director has been remarkably open about the original fate he had planned for Adam Scott’s prickly, tragic, thoroughly difficult protagonist. And it was brutal. In the early drafts of the screenplay, Ohm does not get out of that basement. He does not escape the dumbwaiter. He does not walk out of Bilberry Woods Hotel into the cold Irish air with his life intact and his guilt finally beginning to lift. He dies down there. Captured by the witch. The end.
McCarthy has been direct about why he changed it. The original conclusion, he says, just felt too bleak. He started asking himself whether anyone would want to sit through the film a second time knowing what was waiting at the bottom of it. Whether it would be entertaining at all. Those are not small questions for a horror director to ask — this is a genre that has made an art form of nihilism, of killing the people you least expect, of refusing to give audiences the comfort they came looking for. But McCarthy pulled back. He gave Ohm a way out. Not an easy one, not a clean one, but a real one. And in doing so he changed what kind of film Hokum actually is.
Because here is what makes that decision so interesting. Hokum is a film about a man who has spent decades writing bleak endings. Ohm’s Conquistador trilogy — the books that made him famous, the books he is in Ireland to finish — is defined by its refusal of hope. His protagonist searches for treasure across a vast desert, gets within reach of it, and loses the map inside a bottle at the last moment. Ohm loves that ending. He is proud of it in a way that reads, early in the film, as smug. It is the ending of a man who does not believe things work out, because things did not work out for him.
He accidentally shot his mother when he was a child. His father drank himself into an early grave because of it. Ohm has been carrying that for decades, and the bleak endings in his fiction are not an aesthetic choice. They are a confession.
So when McCarthy decided that Ohm would live — would break free of those chains, with the help of his mother’s ghost of all things, would walk out into whatever comes next — he was not softening the film. He was completing it. The ending Ohm gets is the ending his books never had. It is the ending McCarthy decided his character had earned, even if his character had spent 101 minutes being spectacularly unpleasant about the possibility that earning anything was even possible.
Adam Scott, who has spoken candidly about how much he relished playing someone so genuinely difficult, described Ohm as a man who feels owed an explanation but refuses to look for one. That push and pull — the anger, the guilt, the alcoholism, the contempt for everyone around him including himself — was always the real horror of the film. The witch was just the thing that forced him to reckon with it.
McCarthy also confirmed this week that the witch herself has more to her than the film explicitly shows. In an interview with Collider, he revealed details about what she says to Ohm down in the tunnels that the finished film leaves deliberately ambiguous. The production design team built enlarged versions of certain prop elements specifically so close-up shots could capture details that would otherwise be lost. Every frame of this film, it turns out, has been thought about more carefully than it first appears.
What the director gave Hokum in that final draft was not a happy ending. It would be wrong to call it that. Fiona is dead. Jerry is dead. The hotel burns. Mal — the real human villain at the centre of it all — leaves no trace. Ohm wakes up in a hospital and starts writing again, this time with a different ending in mind for his Conquistador. A bottle thrown away rather than smashed. Two figures choosing to live together instead of chasing a self-destructive fantasy. It lands next to a ram’s skull half-buried in the desert sand — a symbol that has been running quietly through the film from the beginning, tied to the idea that something can survive what should have destroyed it.
That is not happiness. That is just the possibility of it. And for Ohm Bauman, given everything he came into that hotel carrying, that might be the most frightening ending of all.
If you have seen Hokum and thought it was good, go back and watch it again knowing this. The version of the film that exists is the hopeful one. The one where the man who wrote bleak endings decided, at the last possible moment, not to give himself one.
Some doors open from the inside. Ohm Bauman found the one that mattered.
Hokum is already one of the best horror films of 2026. Knowing that McCarthy originally planned to leave Ohm dead in that basement only makes the film richer. This is a director who understands that the scariest thing you can offer an audience is not death but the possibility of something better. Damian McCarthy has three films. All three are essential. Watch them in order.