Damian McCarthy’s “Hokum,” a wonderfully well-crafted work of Irish folk horror, is a genre film in an almost classical sense. Much like his petrifying prior features, “Oddity” and “Caveat,” it’s built around a confined, potentially haunted setting, a central mystery that carries deeper personal pain, and a determined yet troubled character trying to piece it all together.
The only difference this time around? McCarthy has turned to an American actor, Adam Scott, to lead his film. Playing a writer, Ohm Bauman, who is living, writing, and drinking existence away in a small rainy town in Washington state, before he finds himself drawn to a remote area a world away in Ireland, in order to scatter the ashes of his late parents, Scott fits right into McCarthy’s horror sensibility even as his character remains continually out of his depth. As Ohm makes his way through a hell both personal and paranormal, he begins seeing a nightmarish children’s television character, Jack, on the TV in the honeymoon suite he finds himself trapped in, just as there is a witch that may be coming for him from the dark depths below the isolated hotel itself.
McCarthy and Scott spoke with RogerEbert.com about finding horror and dark humor in their film, crafting the many haunting visual and auditory nightmares, the central existential challenge about finding a meaningful end to what could otherwise be a bleakly macabre story, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I’m from Washington state, and there is a line in this film where I believe it says that this character is from “Pullman City, Washington.” Damian, was that Washington state?
McCarthy: Yeah, that’s Pullman in Washington. So 20 years ago, I went to a Weezer concert there. I spent the summer in New York. You get a three-month visa or whatever it is, so at two and a half months, I think I had two weeks left. I had some cousins out in Seattle, so my friends and I said, “We can either take what little money we have left and fly home, or else go to Seattle to see Weezer, cause they were playing in Pullman in Washington.” And yeah, it was a little nod to that.
So really, we have Weezer to thank for this film, if you think about it.
McCarthy: Yeah [laughs].
This is your first film of an American character coming to Ireland, a place that’s obviously significant to their family. I’m curious, Damian, how was it that you approached that?
McCarthy: For me, it was just wanting to start to blend movies that I grew up watching. I loved American cinema but still wanted to tell my stories in Ireland. So I felt like this was the start of that, being able to work with American actors that I actually really admired, but being able to shoot at home with my crew in places I’m familiar with, and to marry those two things a little bit. It was also just so they’d feel like that outsider. That kind of “An American Werewolf in London” type thing, you know? They’ve come here, and everybody seems to know the score and know what’s going on, but this guy is not one of the locals. That was the start of it.
Adam, what was it like for you to strike a balance between your character’s attempts to connect and his tendency to hold things at a distance, given the skepticism he brings to it?
Scott: That’s something that came somewhat naturally because I was in West Cork, Ireland, a place I’d never been, and I didn’t know anyone. Everyone was unbelievably friendly, but I didn’t know anyone on the crew, the cast, or anything. Everything was foreign to me, and so being a stranger in a strange land came somewhat naturally. And he, being a skeptic, I’m a skeptic. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything like that, so there were certain things about the character and how he was reacting to some of these ideas and situations that line up, at least somewhat, with how I would react.
I also feel like this character doesn’t believe in the living either.
Scott: Yeah, yeah.
Damien, this character is really struggling. What was your process of finding the withering humor of that, which then goes hand-in-hand with the haunting horror pieces?
McCarthy: Yeah, the first act was almost about setting up this character to be so unlikable that the audience will hopefully engage with him so that they get to see him punished. They go, “Oh, I can’t wait to see this guy get what’s coming to him.” Then, as they get to know him, they get to see that there is a little bit more going on than just him being cruel. Then you hope that they’ll change and stay engaged and go, “Oh, well, now I’m with him because I think he’s suffered enough and I’d like to see him get out of this.”
A lot of the comedy, I never tried to be intentionally funny. It’s just that there is something about the characters talking to each other, a turn of phrase, and the way they dismiss each other. In the dialogue and how the characters react, and just in the fact that the film knows it’s a horror movie and it knows it’s trying to scare you, you get both the laughter in the way the wonderful actors I have perform and feed off each other, and then also that nervous laughter when it’s just Adam alone being tortured over this whole night. Trying to escape and frustratingly failing and then coming back and trying something else and getting even more scared, there’s a lot of dark comedy in that.
Adam, where do you see comedy and horror intersecting? You’re no stranger to both (you got your start in horror), and I feel like those emotional registers are not dissimilar.
Scott: Yeah, I feel like with comedy and with horror, in particular, they do have some crossover. Because, ultimately, what you’re seeking from the audience is an involuntary response. You can fake laugh, we all do that, you can pretend to be scared, but you know when you’re actually laughing, you know when you’re frightened. There’s nothing you can do to control either of those things. It’s about the tension leading up to a joke or to a scare. It’s about the atmosphere and all that stuff you’re trying to maintain. I’ve always found those two to have certain commonalities.
Speaking of tension, Damian, your first feature, “Caveat,” was set in a small, remote, confined place, and your next, “Oddity,” was a little bigger but still confined. Now this is much more expansive, but then it ends up getting even more into those confined spaces. How did you find this specific hotel? Was it actually multiple hotels through movie magic, and then they decided to send Adam up before he descended into hell?
McCarthy: We looked for a real hotel to shoot in around West Cork, but nothing would have been practical to film in. It was too small or too inaccessible, or strange. So this became a mix. There was a private residence we found, just a beautiful location with the carpentry and the stonework and everything, where we added a little bit of production design and art direction for that to be our hotel for certain rooms (the lobby, for example). Then it became building everything else, the honeymoon suite, the elevator, and some of the hallways. That was a big part of it, which we built in the West Cork studio. Then, for the basement, that was a beautiful castle that’s in West Cork. We shot on the ground floor of that, which is quite dark and not the prettiest part of that castle, but it worked great for us because the environment felt real.
You again worked with your cinematographer on “Oddity,” Colm Hogan. How was it that you again captured scenes that are always submerged in this darkness, but still something we can very much viscerally see and feel, too?
McCarthy: It is just about focusing the eye. If we say in “Hokum,” for example, if Adam is there in the shot, I want all eyes on him. I want that whole frame to look lovely, but then it’s all of that darkness around him, that’s where the horror comes in. It’s in all that darkness that the audience uses their imagination to fill in what could be there. Are they seeing things? Because, yeah, I’ve worked with the same cinematographer twice now, and we’ve tried to build on that ghost story type feel to it.
I know you’d seen “Oddity,” Adam. But did you have an idea of what this would be going into it?
Scott: Not really at all. I loved “Oddity” and was already excited to work with Damian when I read the script. Then I found the character super interesting and loved the story. But as far as being involved in pre-production or anything like that, I wasn’t involved until I showed up, probably a week before we started shooting. I just started trying on wardrobe and getting going on.
How did you settle on his wardrobe, and specifically, his glasses?
McCarthy: For me, it was just the idea that he’s a writer. It’s just that look, and it’s something that I thought would look interesting. Then it allowed us to play with reflections in the glasses with what he’s looking at. I’m really glad that we did it because I think even with scenes, for example, when Adam’s character is watching Jack on the TV, it’s such a disturbing image. He’s laying out everything that he’s done, and he’s punishing him. But when you look at the glasses, all that’s just in that little frame is just static. That is then a nice little tipoff to, is this just in his head?
Scott: And the jacket was something that was an idea of our costume designer, Lara [Campbell]. It struck a chord with me because it’s kind of a detective story at the end of the day, and that jacket was really evocative of an old-fashioned detective story or movie. That was a little nod when we chose that, or at least it was for me.
McCarthy: Yeah, when we first talked about it, the mystery and the detective side of it, Adam brought to my attention. I was like, “Oh no, yeah, there is that mystery to it.” That raincoat, that whole “Angel Heart” kind of feel to it, we talked about day one. But sometimes you write these things, and you’re not even aware of it.
Scott: Yeah, that billowing raincoat on the poster for “Angel Heart” as Mickey Rourke is running, it’s really cool.
When you mentioned the reflection of the TV, was there a children’s television show that scared you growing up, or something you were drawing from there? Because it’s a very striking image.
McCarthy: It is. I’m sure when I was writing, I went down some rabbit hole on YouTube. You see these lists, “Top 10 Most Disturbing Kids TV Shows From The 1960s,” or whatever it is, and some of them are really freaky. You go, “Did kids ever really find this entertaining?” Then it made me think of what I would’ve watched when I was small, like claymation or some kind of freaky, strange puppets or whatever it would be. It was just about leaning into that because this character’s whole life was ruined by what happened as a child, and it’s something that’s still haunting him. I just thought it was a nice way to bring it back once he’s up in that honeymoon suite.
Adam, where do you then go to find some of that painful emotional history this character has? Especially when we’re fully confronted, like in the TV scene, with what happened.
Scott: It’s all there in the script. At least for me, when I’m initially going through something and figuring out what this beat is or what this one is, the thing I’m always looking for is the direct line to me and my experiences. So sometimes you know exactly what something is and exactly what a feeling is. Sometimes it’s not something you’ve experienced or have a direct personal reference to, and you have to find it. It’s a matter of just rooting around, and if it turns out you don’t have any reference, you have to either make one up or find someone who has one and talk to them. All of that stuff is part of the fun for me. Before I even get there, I try to get all of that stuff sorted.
In terms of a central throughline, I wanted to ask you about the framing story, the story within this story, Damian. The film becomes about trying to find an ending for yourself, for your own life, after what seems like the unimaginable, of being stranded in a desert with no way out. How was it that you were thinking about that through this journey? Did you always know your own ending within that?
McCarthy: Those bookends with that conquistador, that idea has been floating around in my head for years and years. When I started working on “Hokum,” because he’s a writer, it felt like a nice opportunity. What if we could see a change in this character, that he’s in a more positive mindset, that it’s not so bleak? It just felt like a nice way to use that idea to highlight the change in him. I know myself, in earlier drafts of the script, that those original scripts were a lot less entertaining, or they were certainly heavier. I think there was more violence, and it ended very bleakly, certainly not the way it ends now. There was a lot less hope in it. I think my mood was improving as I wrote it, and it was starting to come through in the script as well.
That was my goal for the script by the time I got to the end. It was just that there was a bit more hope in the story because there is so much heaviness in it, and it is quite scary and frightening, and all these things. A lot of people are going to see the movie, hopefully, and it’s nice to put them through it, like the character, really have it scary, intense, and all that, but have them come out the other side and go, “Yeah, that was worth it.”
Adam, what was your experience of navigating your character’s relationship to hope?
Scott: I don’t think there is anything in Ohm’s life that he feels he deserves. I don’t think he feels he deserves any kind of happiness. I think a key component of that is his bleak outlook and how he feels he’s been wronged. He’s at this place where he’s ready to completely give up, but he’s also not taking responsibility for it. In order to let yourself off the hook, you first have to take responsibility, and he’s not ready to do any of that. He just escapes into these stories that he writes rather than really delving into what’s going on in his own life.
Later in the film, when Ohm reaches a transformative point, the fire alarm echoes through the underground, becoming an almost wailing sound. Damian, what was the process like of working with the sound team on that?
McCarthy: I think it was even in the script. I liked the idea of the bell box, or the battery pack, of the alarm, that it’s melting. That it’s starting to go from just that there is a fire in the building to you having this warning sound turning into something very much more ghostly. It was again trying to lean back into that ghost story sound of it. Our sound designer is Steve Fanagan, and he’s a very talented, really great guy. He was kind of saying, “Well, there’s so much Irish folklore, with the witch, and you’re shooting this in a castle, what if it was like the banshee? Are all these characters about to potentially die? Does it go from this alarm to this wailing sound? That something is coming to get them?” It’s always just trying to make it as creepy as possible, and a lot of that is sound design. It’s like 60 to 70 percent of whether or not the film is gonna be scary.
It can’t just be what you’re seeing; there has to be a second layer to it.
McCarthy: Yeah, that was it. I just thought it was a nice idea, that alarm dying, but then it becomes more ghostly. It’s kind of spooky.
What was the experience like for you, Adam, of shooting that sequence?
Scott: That was fun. It was like the end of the shoot; that was one of the last things we shot. The fire, that was an intense thing to shoot. I’d never really done that before, where you’re shooting in actual fire. I would imagine some of it was augmented, but a lot of that fire was there on the day. Maybe it wasn’t augmented at all; we were surrounded by real flames. It was really intense and really fun. But it was also at the very end. We’d all been on this journey together, and we were all tired, just like the characters are, seeing the end in the distance.
Without giving away the context, I wanted to ask about the line “You can’t stay here,” as I found it had a profound emotional resonance and a deep impact depending on who is saying it and to whom. Damian, when did you arrive at that, and what did it ultimately mean to you?
McCarthy: The film is about a character who is trying to change. He’s quite hard on himself and on everybody else around him. I guess the whole thing comes down to mindset. You can’t stay here; you do have to participate in your own rescue, try to change the way you’re thinking, and get out of this serious, dark place that he’s in. There’s that, that’s all the internal stuff, but then there’s the literal horror sense of it. There are demons and witches, and the building is on fire. You can’t stay here, either.
Given where you’re going next, I imagine you want to stay in Ireland and continue exploring different haunted spaces. Is there anything you’re currently thinking about for that next stage, and would it potentially include Adam?
McCarthy: I definitely want to stay and make horror films. It’s something I love, and the more you make, one hopes, that you’re getting better at it. Even when you hear the audience screaming and laughing, you go, “Okay, they’re all screaming, and they’re gasping, but, if I were to do this again, I know how to make this even worse by adding just this little thing.” And, of course, I had an amazing experience with Adam. I was just so grateful for all his work on this, what he brought to it, and even just how supportive he was of the other cast members. It was a lovely feeling being in the woods, hearing the cast encourage and compliment each other. I thought that was really lovely, really great. Certainly, it would be wonderful to experience it all again.
“Hokum” opens in U.S. theaters May 1, via Neon.
