Last year’s horror calendar kept proving there was room for sharper, stranger theatrical swings in the springtime, with Companion and Heart Eyes flopping a bit early in the year before Weapons made 2025’s a summer of horror-adjacent weirdness. Hokum arrives on May Day 2026 with a quainter, folk horror approach with spotlight aspirations: Adam Scott, a remote Irish inn, a haunted honeymoon suite and director Damian McCarthy stretching the dread of his best work, Oddity, onto a bigger stage.
An American writer (Scott) travels to coastal Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes, checks into an old inn, and hears about a honeymoon suite the staff treat like it has rules. He stays anyway. The movie sits in that decision—long walks through tight corridors, conversations that trail off, locals who answer questions with half-answers—until the space itself starts to feel wrong. Doors open when they shouldn’t. Rooms don’t line up. The story stops feeling like something he’s being told and starts feeling like something that’s already waiting for him.
Scott plays Ohm as tense and frayed, carrying grief that shows up in how quickly he pushes past the warnings around him. Damian McCarthy builds the movie around that pressure. The inn feels worn-in and specific—narrow hallways, dim rooms, a layout that never quite settles—and that terrifying honeymoon suite sits at the center of it, a place the film keeps circling as the details stop adding up.
Hokum opens in theaters nationwide Friday, May 1st, with select showings at theaters on Thursday, April 30.
Hokum trailer, preview
What’s meant to be a peaceful, personal trip for Scott’s Ohm starts to shift almost immediately. There’s a disappearance, some hallucinatory flashes, and the sense that the building itself behaves. He hears horror stories, local folklore, and the honeymoon suite becomes the center of a story so real it has walls, so alive it has eyes, rabbit ears.
That approach runs straight through Damian McCarthy’s direction. If Caveat and Oddity were about contained dread—objects, rooms, single locations—Hokum stretches that tension across a full environment. The inn functions as both horror setting and horror mechanism. From the trailer alone, we can see it. Hallways feel longer than they should. Doors open onto spaces that don’t quite make sense. The layout never quite settles. Shot on location in West Cork, the film leans into physical texture—wind, damp interiors, isolation—and keeps the horror grounded in framing, movement, and what’s left just out of view rather than heavy effects.
It lands in a psychological, folk-horror lane with just enough haunted-house structure to keep everything anchored. The imagery—rabbits, shadowed figures, hints of a witch tied to older Irish folklore—points toward something mythic, but the movie keeps returning to Ohm’s perspective as the organizing thread.
I’ve seen folks compare it to an Irish The Shining, not for plot but for how the space behaves: an isolated setting that shifts, a protagonist whose mental state becomes part of the tension, and a building that starts to feel responsive.
Hokum cast
Scott anchors the film, and the performance is the entry point. He plays Ohm as angry, frayed, and quietly unraveling, a man carrying grief he hasn’t processed and doesn’t fully understand. It’s a sharper, more abrasive lane than his usual work, and the movie leans on that instability.
The supporting cast builds the world around him:
- Peter Coonan as Mal
- David Wilmot as Jerry
- Florence Ordesh as Fiona
- Will O’Connell as Alby
- Brendan Conroy as Cob
Hokum FAQ
When does Hokum come out?
Hokum opens in theaters Friday, May 1. This is a theatrical-first release, positioned as a late-spring horror play built for a dark room—more atmosphere and sound design than quick-hit scares.
How long is Hokum?
The film runs just under two hours (1 hour, 47 minutes).
Who’s starring?
The film is led by Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a reclusive novelist pulled into the mystery at the center of the film. The supporting cast includes Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Will O’Connell, and Brendan Conroy, filling out the inn and the surrounding town.
Who made Hokum?
The film is written and directed by Damian McCarthy, whose previous work (Caveat, Oddity) established a style built on controlled dread, tight spaces, and practical, location-driven horror.
What kind of horror movie is it?
Hokum sits in a psychological and folk-horror lane with a haunted-house structure underneath. It leans on atmosphere, spatial unease, and slow-building tension rather than constant jump scares, with the setting itself doing much of the work.
