Hokum
Gothic horror has always understood something that secular literary culture keeps forgetting: the past does not stay buried.
Full analysis belowHokum does not qualify as a woke trap under VVWS v1.1. A woke trap requires a negative margin with ideological content hidden until more than 50% of runtime. This film carries a +12.54 TRAD margin and a TRADITIONAL verdict. The minimal woke signals present, primarily the damaged-male-protagonist framing and the secular-intellectual as initial skeptic, are standard Gothic horror character architecture rather than ideological insertions. Damian McCarthy's direction is genre-craft, not political messaging. There is no bait-and-switch here. The film announces itself as folk horror about an ancient witch and delivers exactly that. No trap.
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
Director: Damian McCarthy
MIXED LEANING TRADITIONAL. McCarthy is an Irish filmmaker whose 2020 debut Caveat was a stripped-down, claustrophobic horror film with no discernible political agenda. Hokum continues in that tradition. McCarthy is a genre craftsman, not a political filmmaker. His interest is in dread, atmosphere, and the logic of folk horror. There is no evidence of progressive ideological intent in his work. He casts Adam Scott, an actor with progressive associations in Hollywood, but uses him against type: an abrasive, arrogant secular intellectual who is humiliated and terrified by forces he refused to take seriously. If anything, McCarthy's films implicitly endorse the position that the supernatural is real and that the arrogant dismissal of tradition is dangerous. That's a conservative metaphysical stance.Damian McCarthy is an Irish director and writer who made his feature debut with Caveat (2020), a psychological horror film produced for a reported $10,000 that built significant critical buzz on the festival circuit before landing on Shudder. Caveat was notable for its mechanical ingenuity, a character restrained by a harness mechanism that creates an eerie sense of inevitable doom, and for its absolute commitment to atmosphere over exposition. Hokum represents McCarthy's major studio step up, financed in part through Image Nation Abu Dhabi and produced by Roy Lee (The Ring, It, The Departed) and Steven Schneider, who have deep roots in American horror production. The fact that Hokum was shot in Ireland with a primarily Irish supporting cast, using a $5 million budget, and still managed to land Adam Scott as its lead suggests McCarthy is operating with real creative leverage. His horror instincts are traditional: slow build, earned scares, consequences for the protagonist's failings. He is not in the business of subverting the genre. He is in the business of perfecting it.
Adult Viewer Insight
McCarthy's horror is fundamentally traditionalist in its metaphysics. The supernatural is not a symptom or a symbol. It is a fact. The community that lives near it has developed knowledge about it, transmitted that knowledge through story, and treats it with appropriate seriousness. The arrogant outsider who dismisses that knowledge is endangered by his own dismissal. For adult viewers interested in what horror is actually arguing about, Hokum is a film that argues for epistemic humility about the limits of secular rationalism. That is not a fashionable position in contemporary cultural production. It is also not a coincidence that it makes for deeply effective horror. Horror has always been the genre most willing to say that there are things humans do not and cannot control, and that the proper response to those things is something other than confident mastery. Hokum earns its scares by being honest about this. The Irish folk horror tradition, from which McCarthy draws directly, has always understood this.
Parental Guidance
Rated R for horror violence, disturbing images, and language. Hokum is a mature atmospheric horror film that earns its rating through psychological dread and supernatural violence rather than gore. The scares are genuine and effective. Not appropriate for younger viewers or those who find atmospheric horror difficult to watch. Adult horror fans who appreciate craft over shock will find this among the better genre releases of 2026. The themes of grief, family duty, and confronting the irrational fears inherited from our past are mature territory handled with intelligence.
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