McCarthy’s latest film, Hokum, is a delicious thriller chock-full of surprises, jump scares, and psychological terrors. It’s satisfying all the way to the very last drop of screentime. A curmudgeonly American writer, Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) arrives at an unassuming old inn where his parents shared their honeymoon just before Halloween. He connects with the hotel’s bartender, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), only to learn she disappeared not long after. With help from a local drifter in the woods, Ohm returns to the inn just as they’re closing for the season to search for her, discovering that the story he heard about a witch locked away in the honeymoon suite might be true after all. In Hokum, Ohm’s isolation is both self-imposed—he’s an entitled American, rude to just about everyone he meets on his trip—and chosen when he’s drawn to the part of the hotel supposed to be off-limits to guests, assuming that whatever’s happened to Fiona, she might be there.
McCarthy’s work is part of a new wave of Irish horror movies, perhaps best defined by how he mixes the supernatural and the mundane. From the outside, the gorgeous Irish countryside looks inviting and peaceful, but through McCarthy’s lens, darkness traps each of his protagonists in a spooky indoor world formed by superstitions and ghost stories. In both Oddity and Hokum, McCarthy plants the seeds that there are more magical explanations than meets the eye. In Oddity, Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), the grieving sister, brings a wooden statue of a man under the guise of “a gift” for her sister’s widowed husband who’s already moved on to dating someone else. When Ohm and Fiona talk about his book at the inn’s bar, she gives him a copy of a book of folktales and tells him to mind the story of the witch trapped in the honeymoon suite, which is so real to the owner of the place, he locked the area off himself. They set up the possibility for something extraordinary, adding extra tension in awaiting what might happen next.
McCarthy also has an eye for conjuring creepy, atmospheric settings to wait in. Whether they’re in a maximalist old hotel or a sparse modern home like the one in Oddity, the characters always feel unsettled. The faraway, semi-abandoned house in Caveat and the walls of the hotel in Hokum look appropriately aged and have seen so much history in their years. In its less well-manicured areas, like the sizable honeymoon suite, the hotel’s practically rotting from the inside, with cobwebs, peeling wallpaper, and a putrid swamp where there was once a bathtub. McCarthy embraces shadows to make a good old-fashioned ghost story, and while each film looks slightly darker from the last, they never lose their vibrant colors, a far cry from the desaturated palettes of movies like Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.
In addition to tapping into isolated locations and the atmospheric Irish scenery, McCarthy has incorporated the image of rabbits in his films since the beginning. In Caveat, an angry-looking toy rabbit features quite prominently as a harbinger of danger. The rabbit toy appears briefly in his follow-up film Oddity in an antique store, once again drumming at the sight of danger, not far from a painting of a white rabbit, a reference to the rabbit that leads Alice down to Wonderland. A collector in his spare time, McCarthy has made great use of his props throughout his films. He’s also used his background as an electrician to wire things for maximum tension, like in Hokum, using a delicately timed clock to trigger a button push that calls a dumbwaiter elevator back up to the forbidden honeymoon suite.
In Hokum, there are two people in rabbit costumes, one who is good and guides Ohm from beyond the grave through a taped diary. The second is a nightmarish apparition of a kid’s show host that would terrify many grown adults, let alone children. It demonically appears in Ohm’s vision like flashes of Pazuzu in the original The Exorcist, haunting him alongside his past childhood trauma. The two rabbits could be representations of good and evil, each shaping him through his ordeal not unlike earlier invisible rabbits in Harvey or Donnie Darko. McCarthy’s fascination with rabbits extends beyond Alice In Wonderland into Irish folklore, where an impish shapeshifting fairy known as Púca will sometimes choose the form of a rabbit. Melding the different ingredients of Irish folk horror, isolated settings, cursed tchotchkes, and repeated rabbit motifs gives McCarthy his own signature style, a recognizable blend of spookiness that is only getting scarier.
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