The Scare Salon

After seeing what he believes is the spirit of a woman we later learn is his mother, he understandably opts to put his writing on hold for a bit, and for reasons that aren’t immediately clear, he decides to fly to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes on the grounds of the rural hotel where they spent their honeymoon, many years ago. It’s later hinted that he’s been putting this errand off for quite a while.

Once he arrives, he proceeds to be a grouchy dickhead to everyone in the immediate vicinity. Actually, “grouchy dickhead” may be drastically underselling it. Ohm is spectacularly committed to being unpleasant, treating almost every employee at the hotel like they’re personally responsible for the fact that he has chosen to visit Ireland.

One of the first things Ohm encounters at the Bilberry Woods Hotel is a dead goat in the parking lot, which seems like exactly the kind of ominous portent that should make the protagonist of a horror movie turn his rental car around and head directly back to the airport. Instead, he learns that the goat had developed the charming habit of climbing onto guests’ cars to admire its reflection in the paint, and had subsequently been put down.

The hotel itself is wonderfully decrepit and weird, sitting practically alone amid acres of damp Irish woodland. Ohm appears to be its only guest, although there are enough employees wandering around that you start wondering exactly how this business model works.

There’s Mal (Peter Coonan), the desk clerk and son-in-law of the hotel’s elderly owner, Cob (Brendan Conroy); Fergal (Michael Patric), the rather intimidating groundskeeper; Fiona (Florence Ordesh), who tends bar and does assorted other jobs around the place; and Alby (Will O’Connell), the young bellhop who recognizes Ohm immediately and makes the catastrophic mistake of admitting that he’s a fan. Even worse, Alby wants to be a writer. Ohm reacts to this information with roughly the warmth and encouragement you might expect if Alby had announced that he planned to spend his life breeding bedbugs.

Adam Scott is very funny in these scenes, largely because Ohm doesn’t behave like a flamboyantly evil asshole. He behaves like the much more recognizable kind of asshole who has decided that everybody else’s feelings are simply an inconvenience. He’s curt, dismissive, self-important and frequently cruel for absolutely no reason beyond the fact that he can be.

The only employee Ohm develops anything resembling a rapport with is Fiona, largely because Fiona seems completely unimpressed by him. She’s funny, sardonic and perceptive enough to recognize that underneath all the celebrity-author attitude is a man who is extremely unhappy. It also helps that she’s able to identify the location in an old photograph Ohm has brought with him: a picture of his mother standing beneath a massive tree during his parents’ honeymoon. That’s where Ohm wants to scatter their ashes. It’s a small gesture on Fiona’s part, but it means something to him.

And we gradually learn that Ohm has brought considerably more baggage to Ireland than the urns. He’s drinking heavily, and he’s clearly depressed. He keeps seeing his dead mother, usually standing silently somewhere she absolutely should not be. And the ending he’s trying to write for his Conquistador trilogy is so relentlessly bleak that even Fiona basically asks him what the hell is wrong with him.

The book-within-the-movie (which we really only see two or three bits of) is actually more important than it initially seems. In Ohm’s proposed ending, the conquistador and the little boy traveling with him have finally reached the location marked on their treasure map, except the map itself is trapped inside a glass bottle whose cork they can’t remove. With nothing available to smash it against, the conquistador realizes that the boy’s skull would probably do the job nicely. And that is apparently the ending Ohm is considering for his enormously successful trilogy. Christ, dude, have a Snickers.

But the story tells us something important about where Ohm’s head is at before the supernatural stuff really kicks into gear. This is a guy whose imagination has become incapable of conceiving of an ending that doesn’t involve somebody being destroyed.

Meanwhile, the Bilberry Woods Hotel has its own stories. Ohm overhears Cob entertaining—or traumatizing, depending on your perspective—a couple of children with the local legend of a witch who once haunted the surrounding woods. According to Cob, she would capture unfortunate travelers, bind them in chains and drag them through the underworld while the dead reached out and clawed at them. Exactly the sort of whimsical bedtime story I assume Irish children hear immediately before Goodnight Moon.

More importantly, Cob claims the witch eventually ended up inside the hotel. Specifically, inside the honeymoon suite. The same honeymoon suite, in fact, where Ohm’s parents stayed. The room has been permanently boarded up, nobody is allowed inside, and an old-fashioned service bell connected to the suite still hangs near the front desk. Every so often, despite the room supposedly being empty, it rings.

This should perhaps concern Ohm, but it does not. Instead he dismisses the whole thing as “hokum,” thus giving us our title drop and demonstrating once again that if you announce loudly enough that you don’t believe in ghosts, the ghosts will eventually interpret this as a challenge.

Ohm heads into the woods to scatter his parents’ ashes at the enormous tree from the photograph, and the scene is one of the first indications that there’s something considerably sadder underneath all his hostility. I particularly liked the way McCarthy handles the ashes themselves; Ohm doesn’t need to give us a five-minute speech explaining his relationship with his parents; his behavior tells us plenty. There’s tenderness there, but also anger, resentment and something that looks suspiciously like guilt.

While wandering around the woods, he also meets Jerry. Jerry, played by David Wilmot, is one of those magnificent horror-movie characters who walks onscreen looking so profoundly sketchy that you immediately assume he’s going to have a freezer filled with human heads, only to become weirdly lovable within about ten minutes. Jerry lives in a van in the woods, drinks milk spiked with magic mushrooms, has a somewhat concerning history involving his dead wife, and seems to know significantly more about the hotel than anyone should be comfortable with. Naturally, he’s delightful.

Meanwhile, the weirdness inside the hotel continues to escalate. Ohm hears things. He sees his mother again. That bell connected to the honeymoon suite keeps ringing.

And then there’s Jack the Jackass, a grotesque children’s television character who looks as if somebody commissioned a mascot for a preschool television show and accidentally summoned a demon instead. McCarthy understands something I have repeatedly argued about horror: children’s entertainment is already approximately three inches away from nightmare fuel. You really don’t have to push it very far. This unsettling shit occasionally appears on TV screens, talking directly to Ohm and filling in details of his back story. And fun fact: Jack is also played by Will O’Connell, who plays Alby, which only makes the whole thing more wonderfully bizarre.

For all of this increasingly obvious paranormal activity, however, the scariest thing happening to Ohm isn’t necessarily supernatural. He is also psychologically falling apart. After another night of drinking, and after being particularly shitty to Alby, Ohm returns to his room and unceremoniously hangs himself.

And this is where the movie suddenly makes all of his earlier behavior land differently. It doesn’t excuse him, of course; Ohm really is an asshole with a capital A. The movie never performs that annoying storytelling trick where we’re informed that someone has suffered and therefore all of their cruelty is retroactively okay, but it does make him comprehensible. This isn’t simply some famous novelist who gets his kicks tormenting hotel employees; he’s a severely depressed alcoholic carrying around an enormous amount of unresolved grief, and he’s apparently reached the point where he no longer expects his own story to end any more happily than the ones he writes.

Fiona, who has gone to his room to return his portable recorder (and because she’s had a bad feeling that something is wrong), finds him hanging there, and saves his life, even though she barely knows him, an act of kindness which will set up all the ensuing action.

Ohm wakes up in the hospital. Again, I really like that McCarthy doesn’t suddenly transform him into a different person afterward. There’s no magical “I almost died, therefore I am now nice” montage. He remains prickly, defensive and emotionally constipated, because that is generally how human beings actually work. But Fiona saving him matters.

While Ohm is recovering, the Bilberry Woods Hotel holds its annual Halloween party. By the time he returns to collect his belongings, the festivities are long over, the hotel is shutting down for the season, and by the way, Fiona has gone missing. She vanished sometime during the Halloween festival and nobody knows where she went. And because she was apparently last seen talking to Jerry, the hapless unhoused man becomes the prime suspect.

What follows gets stranger, scarier and considerably darker, as Ohm’s interest in Fiona’s disappearance inevitably draws him back toward the one place in the hotel everybody has repeatedly warned him not to go: the fucking honeymoon suite with the supposed witch therein.

Much like Oddity, Hokum combines a murder mystery with a pronounced supernatural element that definitely has a folkloric flavor, and spools its story out at an unhurried pace where the eerieness ratchets up little by little until it’s almost overwhelming. Also like Oddity, McCarthy once again proves that he is really fucking good at making you stare at empty space. He’ll give you a wide shot of a hallway or a doorway or a room with some giant black void in the background, and after about five seconds you stop watching the characters and start searching the shadows. Is something there? Was something there before? Once he’s trained you to start doing that, he barely has to do anything at all; you do the number on yourself.

McCarthy also continues to understand the difference between a jump scare and a good jump scare. Yes, there are several here. Yes, a couple freaked me the fuck out. But the important thing is that they’re generally built on suspense rather than substituted for it.

The emotional component of Hokum also worked much better for me than I expected it to. Yes, we’re once again in the realm of Horror Is Actually About Trauma™, a territory modern genre cinema has now explored so extensively that trauma should probably start demanding residuals. But McCarthy doesn’t use grief as a replacement for horror. He uses horror to externalize it. Ohm is quite literally haunted by his mother before he ever reaches the haunted hotel. That’s not subtle, but it doesn’t need to be.

His unfinished book is another piece of the same idea. He can’t imagine a hopeful ending because, at this point in his life, he apparently doesn’t believe in them. Everyone in his fictional world is doomed, and so is he. At least, that’s what he seems to believe.

I still think Oddity is McCarthy’s best film. That movie was so ruthlessly efficient that there were stretches where I felt like I was physically bracing myself against whatever horrible fucking thing he was going to show me next. Hokum is looser, funnier (though still not a comedy) and stranger. It’s also more emotionally ambitious. And even when it wanders—and it definitely wanders at times—I was happy to follow it, because McCarthy has become one of those filmmakers whose particular collection of obsessions happens to line up almost perfectly with mine.

Three feature films into his career, Damian McCarthy has developed such a distinctive horror language that I’m now at the point where his name alone is enough to get me interested, which just pleases the absolute shit out of me. I realize that Hokum has received more or less mixed reviews (though tending toward the positive), and like most movies, it’s not going to be for everyone, but if you love an unnerving, creepy folk horror with an unlikeable but compelling protagonist, some extremely disquieting visuals, and an oppressive atmosphere that has you scanning the dark corners of every frame, then you might love it as much as I did.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.