The New
Damian McCarthy’s third feature Hokum debuted in theaters last week. The film follows an American writer named Ohm (Adam Scott) who visits the Irish hotel his parents honeymooned to spread their ashes.
This film should have debuted in October. It’s set during Halloween, has a haunted hotel, a possible witch, several ghosts, a guy who lives in the woods drinking magic mushrooms infused into milk shooting goats with a crossbow, etc.
More importantly, although Hokum is light on ecohorror, it’s very much an ecogothic tale.
The Old
An American goes to Ireland; chaos ensues.
John Ford plays this trope for laughs in The Quiet Man (1952), but it’s a tragedy in Jim Sheridan’s 1990 adaptation of John B. Keane’s 1965 play, The Field. A lesser-known horror movie, The Eternal (1998) follows an American family visiting Ireland and getting pulled into local supernatural shenanigans.
Unlike Hokum, the Americans in these films act as if they own the “land of their ancestors.” Ohm goes to Ireland to let go of his past, and he has a particular aversion to the landscape and the people. Scott plays a misanthropic American writer well. He’s not there for pleasure, but to resolve unfinished business.
Ghosts, likewise, have unfinished business, which is one of (perhaps too many) threads that Hokum weaves together.
The Ancient
- Beware of Spoilers -
Hokum features three women: Ohm’s deceased mother, the hotel bartender Fiona, and a witch. Together, these three characters correlate to the maiden, mother, crone imagery that folklorists and literary critics have identified across cultural narratives, from mythology to Shakespeare to the modern horror of US politics.
To be sure, the film makes it clear that the Real Villain ™ is possessive, violent men. Like McCarthy’s previous film Oddity, the central plot is a murder mystery draped in curses and hauntings—in this case, the hotel manager murders Fiona to hide their affair.
But what does it mean for a film to explore male violence so overtly without offering much interiority to the women on screen beyond the way men relate to them?
Still, I recommend seeing Hokum in theaters if you can, especially if you like jumping out of your skin with other people jumping out of their skin. It’s fun to sit in a dark theater and hear other patrons whisper to each other “that ain’t right.”
Elsewhere and Meanwhile
I wrote a guest introduction about folk horror for the Horrorverse newsletter.
Find my book: Frightful Harvest: Food, Agriculture, and Landscape in Folk Horror Films from McFarland Books.
Find my writing at my website and at Crossroads: Folk Horror in the United States