Adam Scott just cannot catch a break right now, can he? The dude’s gone from being a demonic torturer ostensibly stuck in hell in The Good Place, to facing the liminal-space existential horrors of Lumon in dystopian workplace noodle-twister Severance, to taking on the role of the poor sod at the centre of Oddity and Caveat director Damian McCarthy’s latest horror confection, Hokum. For his latest sufferance, Scott is Ohm Bauman, an American horror writer who heads back to his ancestral homeland of Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to find himself holed up in a haunted inn whose honeymoon suite may or may not be haunted by an actual witch. Sound suitably hellish? Well it looks it too — just check out the trailer below;
Holy heck! Just when we thought we’d finally had enough therapy to get over Donnie Darko‘s floppy-eared freak Frank, along comes Hokum with some fresh leporine nightmare fuel… cheers, Damian. Yeah, so turns out the new Neon-produced horror movie actually looks, y’know, pretty damn scary actually — who’d have thunk? From the oddballs stopping at Ohm’s temporary inn home, to the lodgings’ lugubriously lit corridors, to the aforementioned scary rabbit creature and Ohm’s clearly dark secret strewn past, the vibes are decidedly not happy here. And yet, as is often the genre’s way, this has all the bones (probably actual, literal bones) of a gripping, sleepless night inducing horror joint from McCarthy.
The official synopsis for Hokum, whose ensemble line-up includes Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, and Florence Ordesh, reads: “When novelist Ohm Bauman retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, he is consumed by tales of a witch haunting the honeymoon suite. Disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance forces him to confront dark corners of his past.” What did we say? ‘Clearly dark secrets’, indeed…
Neon’s on a bit of a hot streak of popular horror movies just now with the likes of Keeper, Shelby Oaks, Together, The Monkey, and Presence all having hit cinemas in the last year. We’ll see whether Hokum can keep the momentum building — or if it turns out to be a load of, well, hokum actually — when the movie hits cinemas stateside on 1 May, and hopefully here not too long after. And while we wait for a UK release date, consider the campaign to get Adam Scott in a rom-com officially launched here: he’s earned it!
