There’s something almost quaint about wanting a horror movie to just scare you. No hidden agenda, no thesis statement lurking under the surface — just genuine, bone-deep fear. Damian Mc Carthy understands this better than most working in the genre right now. Three features in, the Irish director has built a reputation on something that sounds simple but rarely is: films that actually deliver on the promise of horror. We’ve all grown weary of certain conversations — the endless debates over what “elevated horror” even means (nothing, really), or the reflexive insistence that a film is “secretly about grief” as if horror hasn’t always trafficked in loss and mourning. What’s genuinely exhausting is watching filmmakers trade atmosphere and dread for metaphors so blunt they might as well come with subtitles explaining themselves.

Mc Carthy isn’t interested in that trade-off. Yes, his films carry existential weight. But scratch the surface and you’ll find a director who simply wants to terrify his audience — and HOKUM, his newest effort, proves it. The setup could’ve been lifted from a King paperback: a jaded, grief-stricken writer travels to Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes near the hotel where they spent their honeymoon. Adam Scott plays Ohm with a terrific balance of biting sarcasm and genuine anguish, and there’s a cruel irony to the character — a man who makes his living writing fiction yet can’t bring himself to accept the impossible things happening around him. He calls it all “hokum,” a stubborn refusal that mirrors his inability to process his own history, and that same stubbornness is precisely what pulls him deeper into the hotel’s darkest corners — and his own.

What makes Mc Carthy’s folk horror so unsettling isn’t just what he shows you, but how he shows it. His blocking is meticulous, and he has an uncanny sense of where a frame’s attention should land. A smirking trinket. A rabbit anchoring some unnamable TV broadcast. HOKUM holds on these images a beat too long, angles them just slightly wrong, and lets your imagination do the rest of the damage. Soon enough you’re following Ohm through corridors that stretch too far and elevators that climb somewhere they shouldn’t, into a world where witches and spirits are simply given. Scott anchors all of it beautifully — venomous, guarded, prickly as hell, but with something soft and aching underneath that never fully disappears. Mc Carthy has never hidden his debt to King, and Ohm earns his place among that lineage of writers haunted by more than just their imaginations.

Before HOKUM hits theaters, Mc Carthy talks the lost art of making horror actually scary, Adam Scott’s performance, and where Ireland’s current horror renaissance is headed.