Hokum

Gothic horror has always understood something that secular literary culture keeps forgetting: the past does not stay buried.

Hokum opens on Ohm Bauman, a novelist in the middle of a career crisis. His Conquistador trilogy was successful. Now he can't finish the epilogue. He glimpses his dead mother's ghost at home and decides, in the way that people do when grief stops being manageable, to do something about it. His parents honeymooned at the Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland. He'll go there. Scatter their ashes. Deal with whatever this is.

That premise is straightforward. What Damian McCarthy does with it is not.

Ohm arrives at the hotel and is immediately insufferable. He is dismissive of the staff, impatient with the local rhythms, contemptuous of the kind of people who spend their lives in small hotels in rural Ireland. He is the secular urban intellectual in the wrong story. He doesn't know he's in the wrong story yet. The audience does.

The hotel is run by Cob, played by David Wilmot with the ease of a man who has been telling stories his whole life. On the night Ohm arrives, Cob is telling two children about the local witch. She kidnaps children. She leads them in chains through the underworld. The souls there claw at them. Cob delivers this as bedtime material, which is not as strange as it sounds. This is how oral tradition works. The community knows something is real in those woods. The knowledge is passed down. Ohm overhears and decides Cob is superstitious.

This is his mistake.

Joseph Bishara's score begins doing what it does best, building a texture of unease that makes every scene feel like the moment before something goes wrong. Colm Hogan's cinematography uses the green-grey of the Irish countryside not as a postcard but as a pressure: beautiful, yes, but also ancient and indifferent. McCarthy has clearly studied the British and Irish folk horror tradition. The Wicker Man hangs over Hokum the way it hangs over every serious film in the genre.

Adam Scott is the reason the film works. His natural comedic register makes Ohm's condescension funny for a while before it becomes genuinely off-putting. When the supernatural starts encroaching, Scott doesn't play it for disbelief. He plays it for terror. You can see exactly when Ohm realizes that the thing Cob was describing to those children is real. It's one of the best scenes Scott has delivered on screen.

The film does not over-explain. It does not resolve every question. What the witch wants, why she targets the honeymooners, what exactly happens to the people who disappear, some of this gets answered and some of it doesn't. McCarthy trusts the audience to live in ambiguity the way folk horror has always asked us to. Ancient evil doesn't necessarily have reasons we can understand.

From a values perspective, Hokum is doing something that is getting increasingly rare in American horror: it takes the supernatural seriously. The witch is not a metaphor for generational trauma or childhood anxiety or the terror of intimacy. She is an entity that exists in those woods and has always existed there and will continue to exist there after Ohm Bauman finishes scattering his parents' ashes and tries to leave.

There is a profound conservatism in this premise. A world where ancient evil is real is a world where human arrogance about the completeness of scientific knowledge is dangerous. The film punishes Ohm's dismissiveness. It rewards Cob's respect for tradition. It takes the oral wisdom of a community more seriously than the published work of a successful novelist.

The budget was $5 million. McCarthy uses every cent where it matters. The scares work. The atmosphere is real. The 107-minute runtime doesn't drag. This is what lean, disciplined horror filmmaking looks like when the director has a clear vision and the tools to execute it.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Damaged isolated male protagonist with emotional unavailability	2	Moderate	Low	1
Secular intellectual as initial protagonist perspective	1	Low	Low	0.7
TOTAL WOKE				1.7

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Supernatural evil affirms genuine moral reality beyond materialism	4	High	High	5.04
Family duty and respect for the dead	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Rural community with oral tradition and inherited wisdom	2	High	Moderate	1.4
Hubris punished	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Masculine courage confronting genuine evil	2	Moderate	High	3.6
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				14.2

Score Margin: +13 TRAD