EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Damian McCarthy knows what scares you. After three feature films, it’s clear that the Irish filmmaker is one of the most tapped-in genre directors when it comes to producing old-school, truly terrifying horror. His second film, Oddity, was even named Dread Central’s favorite horror movie of 2024 for being out-of-this-world scary. And now we’ve got word on what his fourth movie will look like, and it already has me freaked out.
I recently had the chance to sit down with the visionary filmmaker to discuss his new film, Hokum, in theaters May 1, which was so panic-inducing that I called it “gratuitously frightening hotel horrors” in my 4-star review out of its SXSW World Premiere just last month.
During the interview, McCarthy opened the doors slightly about his next project. All three of his previous films have easily proven that he’s a filmmaker with a penchant for producing classical, gothic scares, so when he described his next movie as the “ultimate haunted house horror movie,” I nearly blew a gasket. Here’s what he had to say:
“After making three feature horror films and ten horror shorts, I feel now like something has clicked for me, in terms of how to craft a scare,” he tells me.
“I really feel like if I was to make another horror film, I think I’d really nail it,” he continues. “I have ideas of how I could build on everything I’ve learned over the last few years. For my next film, I definitely want to make the ultimate haunted house movie. I have the script … and I think that next I definitely want to make one more out-and-out horror movie and just apply everything I’ve learned to the ultimate haunted house horror movie! That would be the plan.”
Trust me, if there’s anyone primed to craft the ultimate haunted house horror movie, it’s without question Damian McCarthy. He’s to spooky horror what Damien Leone (Terrifier) is to gore horror: if Leone treats his films as a form of experimental cinema designed to push the grotesque to its most extreme and fulfilled potential, then McCarthy is pushing the boundaries of spooky cinema to similar extremes.
McCarthy’s new film Hokum stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a prickly author on a personal odyssey to rural Ireland, where he stays at the remote heritage hotel his parents honeymooned at forty years earlier. Now both dead, he has returned with their ashes to the last place they were truly happy. But while the Baumans had some dark secrets, the hotel has secrets of its own locked safely inside the restricted Honeymoon Suite, a room long banned and cordoned off to both guests and staff. Why? Because the hotel’s elderly owner is convinced the room contains, and is haunted by, an evil witch.
Hokum arrives in theaters only on May 1st.
