Damian McCarthy says his new horror film Hokum could not be further from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, even though it follows a horror novelist to an isolated inn and carries the kind of haunted setting that invites comparison. The film, led by Adam Scott as a writer named Ohm, is due out on May 1.
McCarthy said he actively tried to avoid being inspired by The Shining, even if it was tempting to borrow certain scenes and scares. “It was almost like, ‘We really can’t do anything that was done in that because it’s been done. It’s got its own voice.’ It was one we were trying to avoid,” he said.
That matters because Hokum arrives after McCarthy’s Caveat and Oddity, which in 2024 debuted to a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score and helped establish him as a filmmaker with a knack for stripped-down genre pieces. Hokum centers on Ohm, a horror novelist who travels to rural Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes and ends up staying in an inn supposedly haunted by an ancient witch, with Peter Coonan, Will O’Connell, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh and Austin Amelio in the supporting cast.
The tension inside McCarthy’s pitch is that Hokum is meant to be frightening without becoming grim. He said he tries to keep his films entertaining as well as scary, adding that he hopes audiences get “a good scare along with a few laughs” and something worth revisiting. He also said he has no appetite for the kind of heavy horror he admires from a distance, calling many great horror films too weighty to revisit in a hurry.
That is the film’s real promise: not a replay of a familiar classic, but a haunted-house story with a lighter touch under its dark surface. If McCarthy has his way, Adam Scott’s arrival in rural Ireland will leave viewers unsettled, amused and looking for the next scare when Hokum opens on May 1.
