The first horror masterpiece of 2026 was 10 years in the making

The Irish filmmaker behind Oddity and Caveat reveals how he cast Adam Scott, why he loves witches, and the secret to a good jump scare At the start of the 2020s, nobody had heard of Damian McCarthy. Then came a string of hits from the Irish horror filmmaker. First was Caveat, a microbudget film about a drifter who takes a job looking after a psychologically disturbed woman in an isolated mansion. McCarthy followed that up with Oddity, a 2024 Shudder exclusive about a blind woman who uses her psychic powers to get revenge on the man she suspects of murdering her sister. Now, he's taking his biggest swing yet with Hokum, starring Adam Scott as a writer who travels to a remote Irish hotel that may or may not be haunted by an evil witch. (Spoiler alert: It is, and she's terrifying.) Like McCarthy’s previous films, Hokum takes place in Ireland and features an all-Irish cast (with the sole exception of Scott's character, Ohm Bauman). Also like his previous films, it relies heavily on a single physical location that shapes the story in multiple ways. (Oddity takes place in an old country house; Hokum upgrades to a grand, creaky hotel.) And like his previous films, Hokum is quite scary. Wh