Damian McCarthy’s Irish folk horror masterpiece opens May 1 — and it just became 2026’s most essential horror film
Opening May 1 in cinemas nationwide via Neon, Hokum arrives not as a horror film that needs defending, but as one that demands to be reckoned with. Written and directed by Damian McCarthy, it premiered at SXSW on March 14 this year and walked out with a near-perfect critical reception — 98% on Rotten Tomatoes from 43 critics, the consensus declaring McCarthy a modern master of the genre. That isn’t hyperbole. After Caveat and Oddity announced him as a filmmaker worth watching, Hokum is the moment Damian McCarthy stops being a promising name and becomes an indispensable one. Irish horror has produced some of the most distinctive genre cinema of the past decade. This is its new peak.
Adam Scott — best known to millions as Mark Scout in Severance — plays Ohm Bauman, a celebrated novelist who travels to a remote Irish inn to scatter his late parents’ ashes. The honeymoon suite has been locked for years. The inn’s owner, Cob, believes he trapped a witch inside. Ohm, being the kind of man who hates happy endings and trusts nobody in the room, is not inclined to believe him. He is wrong. Catastrophically, irreversibly wrong. And the film takes enormous pleasure in making him pay for his scepticism one unbearable scene at a time. The setup is deceptively simple. What McCarthy builds from it is anything but.
Ohm is not a likable man. He humiliates a bellman who aspires to write. He is abrasive at best, cruel when provoked. Scott sells it without softening the edges — conveying rising fear, deep regret, and an annoyingly self-destructive personality without worrying about whether the audience is rooting for him. It is arguably the finest work of his career. Stripped of the charm that made him a television favourite, he becomes something far more interesting — a man too brittle for the world he inhabits, stumbling into one that is far older and far less forgiving.
What makes the performance land is that Ohm’s ugliness is never played for laughs and never softened into redemption arc convenience. He has wit — but he uses it as a weapon rather than a bridge. When the supernatural begins pressing in around him, Scott plays the terror not as sudden conversion but as slow, unwilling capitulation. He doesn’t want to believe. He fights it. The witch does not care what he wants, and the film is all the more frightening for that refusal to offer its protagonist — or its audience — any comfortable exit.
McCarthy has been building to this for years. Caveat and Oddity signalled a filmmaker with a fierce original voice — Hokum is the fulfilment of that promise. The film operates within a small number of sets, so its construction becomes essential — a perfectly designed haunted dollhouse, knowing exactly when to pull the audience into Ohm’s perspective and when to loosen the tension. The editing, the silence, the specific dread of a corridor at 3am with something shifting at the far end — McCarthy controls every element with the precision of a man who has thought about nothing else for years. This is craft at the service of genuine terror.
Parts of the film recall Resident Evil in the best possible way — Ohm solving puzzles inside the honeymoon suite, creepy miniature statues that open passages, an unsettling animatronic delivering backstory in a sequence that will not leave you quickly. A creepy children’s television programme taunts Ohm about his childhood trauma in one of the film’s more surreal passages. These elements should not cohere. They absolutely do. McCarthy holds them in a grip that never loosens, and the cumulative effect is a film that keeps wrong-footing you even when you think you’ve found solid ground.
The title itself is a provocation. Hokum — folk tales, nonsense, stories told around an Irish fire to keep children quiet and credulous. The film never winks at the audience. It takes its character’s plight seriously, even as the impossible happens. The Irish folklore threading through this story is not decoration or local colour. It is the architecture the entire film is built upon. McCarthy treats these traditions with genuine respect — suggesting that folk tales carry something true inside them, however uncomfortable that truth might be. Dismiss the stories at your peril. The film will remind you, at length and in the dark, exactly why they were told in the first place.
Principal photography took place in West Cork in February and March 2025 — and the landscape earns its place in the film’s DNA. There is something in that particular Irish coastal grey, that specific cold Atlantic light, that no studio backlot can convincingly replicate. The hotel feels like it grew from the rock beneath it. Old in the way certain buildings are old — not age as charm, but age as accumulation. The slow deposit of everything that ever happened within those walls and never properly left.
Critics have noted how the film draws from classics like The Shining and The Innocents while establishing its own terrifying identity. That is exactly the right frame. This is a film in confident conversation with the tradition — not intimidated by it, not hiding behind it, but standing inside it and doing something genuinely new. The haunted hotel has been done a thousand times. It has never quite been done like this — with this cast, in this landscape, with this particular strain of ancient Irish dread stitched through every single frame.
Hokum opens May 1. You will go. You will not sleep comfortably the night after. You probably won’t mind.
Some doors are locked for a reason. Ohm Bauman opened one anyway. Now it’s your turn.