Hokum (Damian McCarthy, 2026).
My favorite ghost story is just one paragraph long. A man meets an old friend after many years apart. The two walk awhile, and talk awhile, and then they shake hands, and part. The next day our man mentions this unexpected reunion to an acquaintance, and is shocked to learn that this old friend whose hand he has only just clasped is in fact a dead man, and has been dead for the last six months. He had walked beside a spirit, and not even known it.
This spooky tale arrives at the beginning of a longer story of skeletal revenge by the Victorian writer Jerome K. Jerome, yet it expresses in miniature everything worth loving in a good ghost story. Jerome’s narrator tries to rationalize away his encounter: perhaps, he reasons, he merely confused one man for another. But the reality—that, for an afternoon, he could not tell the difference between the living and the dead—is far more unnerving. What if the border between past and present is not as sturdy as we like to think? We might wander every day among spirits and not even notice.
The Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy has made his career in that troubled borderland. Across three features and a number of online shorts, McCarthy has crafted a cinematic pocket universe, a world haunted by remnants of the past. He tells ghost stories, intricate little narratives that collide modern disbelief into much older systems of seeing and being. Making use of both Irish folklore and the director’s own collection of freaky found objects, he presents both viewers and characters with a supernaturally-capacious vision of reality, a place where the living are forever encountering the dead, whether they’d like to accept it or not.
His latest, Hokum (2026), is one such story of encounter. Adam Scott stars as a popular American pulp writer named Ohm Bauman, a hard-drinking misanthrope quite literally haunted by a childhood tragedy. Ohm has come to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in Ireland’s wild southwest hoping to spread the ashes of his parents in the place where they once honeymooned, and perhaps to finish the final chapter of his acclaimed Conquistador trilogy. Needless to say, Ohm’s trip won’t quite be so simple. This spooky inn is haunted by a variety of oddballs—a kooky bellboy, a magic mushroom-chugging drifter—and several specters, chief of all the old witch (cailleach in Irish) that the owner claims to have locked upstairs in the Honeymoon Suite.
Shadowed hallways, looming spirits, a locked room with only a single key: this is the stuff of pure pulp, and Hokum exploits it all to the hilt. Of course Ohm will ascend to the Honeymoon Suite; of course he will come face-to-face with the witch; the only question, really, is when McCarthy will spring it on you. You can see this economy of fright in the short films the director began uploading to YouTube in the late-aughts, an early-participant in the viral video culture that has since become a breeding pen for modern horror filmmaking. These early films are essentially miniature fright gags that operate on basic principles of tension and release, and though budgets were tiny and their premises simple—a nightwatchman following a strange noise, a boy peering through a damaged shutter, a hand reaching out for a light switch—their payoffs will, more often than not, make you slam shut your computer laptop screen.
Caveat (Damian McCarthy, 2020).
McCarthy’s first two films, Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024), deployed these same basic principles to tell gothic stories of murder and revenge. He became especially good at showing you a freaky object—a wooden golem, a smiling corpse—and showing it to you over and over again, prodding at your belief that something, anything, must happen. And then, just when you have stopped believing that this weirdness must mean something, he springs shut the trap around you. This style requires patience, and the resultant films are heavy on shadowy atmosphere. But like the best ghost stories, these films trouble our sense of the possible, sparking horror less from jump cuts or looming murderers than from the pervasive sense that the reality in which we live might be quite other than the one we comprehend. Reason might give you strength, but it won’t save you.
Hokum is a considerably larger production than anything McCarthy has worked on before, and he wisely puts his budget into a series of lavishly dilapidated sets. The gleefully gothic Honeymoon Suite is a marvel of production design, crammed full of objets d’art both creepy and tawdry. Yet the ever-economical director wastes none of it, utilizing every bit of domestic topography—locked doors, shrouded bedframes, even a dumbwaiter down the building’s bricked-in basement—in a series of microcosmic set-pieces. An especially good sequence involving a jerry-rigged elevator relies (and plays) on literal clockwork timing; each time I saw it, the payoff made me jump, and then cackle. There is even a haunted television, and a tape recorder that seems to operate as a conduit to the dead—and whose autonomous operation seems a good metaphor for Hokum itself, sparking on whenever it likes, and forcing viewers to catch up to the action. By the end, the Honeymoon Suite, the Bilberry Woods Hotel, and perhaps even Ireland itself have all been unmasked as zones of occult confusion, where the living are at the mercy of the dead, and those who would deny ghosts and witches and infernal retribution do so at their own peril.
The Outcasts (Robert Wynne-Simmons, 1982).
Restless spirits and nascent film industries both demand your attention; no wonder they’re always trying to scare you. When filmmakers want to put together a little money, after all, they make a horror movie, and this is as true in Ireland as anywhere else. When the Englishman Robert Wynne-Simmons directed his folk-horror landmark The Outcasts (1982), it was the first feature-length Irish film made in nearly fifty years. Set in a 19th century, pre-Famine Ireland of dire poverty and overpowering superstition, The Outcasts stages a clash between the Catholic peasantry, clinging with their fingernails to the edge of the world, and the older, irrepressible power of the landscape itself. In this occult fable, a put-upon young woman named Maura (Mary Ryan) is transformed by her encounter with Scarf Michael (Mick Lally), a musical trickster magician. Maura’s community might still pay lip service to the faint remnants of druidic folk culture, but they know well enough to be frightened of the real article. Maura is condemned as a witch, and nearly drowned at sea. She is saved by Scarf Michael’s magic, but in the process made invisible to the people she loves—a kind of wandering phantom, a portent of all those famished masses soon to be driven from their homes by the blight.
Wynne-Simmons’s film aired on the UK’s Channel Four, and was barely released in Ireland. But it anticipated in certain ways the future of the Irish film industry. Taking advantage of the country’s picturesque landscapes (as well as decent support from its national film board), independent directors have been turning to horror movies to tell their own stories of repression and reunion. In films as varied as Ivan Kavanagh’s The Canal (2014), Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name (2016), and Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever (2019), the constraining structures of contemporary life (and modern rationality) are seriously shaken by their confrontation with the inexplicable, from generational hauntings to the consciousness of the land itself. Distributed abroad on Shudder and similar horror-focused streaming, these films sell a particular vision of the country: verdant, strange, and near-pungent with magic potential. Lee Cronin (of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy [2026] fame) first made waves internationally with The Hole in the Ground (2019), a dour, desaturated story about fairies and missing children and the struggles of single motherhood. Yet by packaging his story in then-vogue elevated-horror stylings, Cronin irons the particularities right out of his movie; swap the accents and the color-grading and this film could be set anywhere, at any time, a pat tale of grief and survival fattened up for international consumption.
Nearly all these films, in fact, are cast in molds set by existing films, from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) to Scott Derrickson’s Sinister (2012)—a reasonable calculation, likely made to avoid confronting foreign audiences with unfamiliar references. In recent years, however, a number of young filmmakers, McCarthy included, have been pushing back against these blueprints, manipulating both folkloric traditions and the all-too-real horrors of Ireland’s history in service of their own distinct strain of horror. In Aislinn Clarke’s Fréwaka (2024), a home health aide finds herself working in the house of a combative old woman named Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), who is convinced that the spirits who kidnapped her as a young woman (the malevolent aos sí) have returned to finish the job. Peig’s house is protected by all manner of peculiar superstitions: she makes sure to place seven nails before the sill of every door- and window-sill, and she has surrounded the basement door with horseshoes. But the story she tells of her life, pregnant, kidnapped by sinister forces, and forced to give up her child, is more akin to that of the many unwed mothers imprisoned in church-run Magdalene Laundries across the better part of the 20th century. When asked to describe the realm of the aos sí, Peig likens it to a run of catastrophes from throughout Irish history: plague roads, coffin ships, Black & Tans, and, of course, the Magdalene Laundries.
Fréwaka (Aislinn Clarke, 2024).
The events of history might have slipped into the past, in other words, but they haunt us all the same. It might not even be all that past. Set in the world of Irish folk music, Paul Duane’s All You Need Is Death (2023) concerns two Dublin-based collectors scouring the countryside in search of undocumented songs. They want to discover new music, of course, but also to sell it to well-off foreign collectors who will pay out for their chance to own a piece of Ireland’s cultural history. This search brings them to yet another old woman, a lush at the end of a long line of musical enchantresses, and in possession of a song in a language even older than Irish itself. By secretly recording the music, they wrench it from its ancient context, transporting it first to the city, and then the deforming pressures of the marketplace.
These films are awash in folklore as both residue and life-force. Duane finds it in Ireland’s traditional music scene and all those old folk songs that rehearse and rehash these ancient stories of love and obsession, often in a language sung rather than understood. In these films, and in McCarthy’s work too, the Irish language is a conduit to a pervasive world of otherwise invisible beings, and to be ruptured from this linguistic history is to lose all sense of the deeper forces at work. The same goes for the country’s many rural regions, especially the wild western coast, homes still to many standing stones and fairy forts and other physical reminders of the ancient past. Clarke set Fréwaka in an Irish-speaking Gaeltacht, and Wynne-Simmons got quite a bit of free production value when he filmed The Outcasts in the remains of a west Kerry village abandoned during the Famine.
All this rural folk iconography imbues these films with a regional flavor, setting them leagues apart from their horror contemporaries. But they don’t always reveal much below the surface. Clarke set her debut, The Devil’s Doorway (2018), in an actual Magdalene Laundry, and she seems much more comfortable addressing her nation’s atrocities directly, rather than analogizing them via invocations of the ancient. The truth or delusion of the aos sí are ultimately less important than their symbolic function, a thematically-driven choice that has the unfortunate effect of reducing everything to the level of simple metaphor. Duane gets a bit further when he invokes both the deeply strange history of Irish trad music, and the booming international market for its exploitation. He even moves the action to an overcrowded, overpriced Dublin, staging the rural invasion of an unbelieving urban space. Yet however much he might be playing with the imagery of the ancient Irish past, he does not ultimately channel its potency, reducing the evocative resonances of folk culture to mere imagery, and dead symbolism.
Hokum (Damian McCarthy, 2026).
Belief, after all, is what gives any old story its power. And in order to be scared by an aos sí or a cailleach, we must allow ourselves to believe that they are something more significant than an allegory for modern social ills. McCarthy’s filmography, certainly makes good use of the signs and symbols of ancient times. In Hokum, when Ohm does finally enter the basement, he finds a wall marked with Ogham script, whose hatch-marked writings have been found on standing stones across the country. But unlike in Clarke’s Fréwaka, which ends with its own passage to a basement-underworld, Hokum allows this image to stand in an image-world of other potent symbols without being collapsed into a neat analogy of historical trauma. The film ends on a sensation of expansion, a meeting between the modern world and that other, ancient one, of stories and spirits and very real, very ravenous witches.
This is good for a scare, yes, and a few laughs on your way out the door. But it also speaks to why McCarthy’s films have managed to cross over outside Ireland, when so many of his contemporaries have not. His symbols and images point to an older, deeper world, a system of powers and spiritual personages which we would like to dismiss as so much hokum, but ultimately can’t. There is always more that goes on than we know. All those cursed antiques and folkloric totems are not just set dressing: they constitute the base matter of an enchanted world.. He chooses the ambiguity of legend over the solidity of social metaphor, and his films are much better for it.
The cinema, after all, creates its own zone of uncertainty. Before and after your time in the theater, you probably don’t think much about witches and ghosts and banshees, about the cailleach or the aos sí. But for a few hours, like a portal opened, you are presented with a world inundated and perhaps even structured by these secret forces. And if the illusion is good enough, you might stop being confused, and allow yourself to believe.