‘Hokum’: Gratuitously Frightening Hotel Horrors [SXSW 2026 Review]

Filmmaker Damian McCarthy is to spooky horror what Damien Leone (Terrifier) is to gorecore. If Leone treats his films as a form of experimental cinema designed to push the grotesque to its most extreme and fulfilled potential, then McCarthy is pushing the boundaries of spooky cinema to similar extremes. Hokum may not be a perfect film, but it is gratuitously frightening, and for horror fans with a penchant for classical, gothic scares, this is groundbreaking stuff.

The film stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a prickly and unkind author on a personal odyssey to rural Ireland, where he stays at the remote heritage hotel his parents honeymooned at forty years earlier. Now both dead, he has returned with their ashes to the last place they were truly happy. But while the Baumans had some dark secrets, the hotel has secrets of its own locked safely inside the restricted Honeymoon Suite, a room long banned and cornered off to both guests and staff. Why? Because the hotel’s elderly owner is convinced the room contains, and is haunted by, an evil witch.

When a hotel worker whom Bauman owes his life goes missing, he’s forced to confront the Honeymoon Suite firsthand. What he discovers inside the hotel’s infamously haunted top floor is something far more sinister than any urban legend or ghost story whispered about among the guests and staff. The room is not simply haunted, but is instead the epicenter of something deeply monstrous…

For those familiar with McCarthy’s previous films Oddity and Caveat, the evolution from those works into Hokum will feel natural and earned. The filmmaker has a distinct style and is unafraid to lean fully into the realms of traditional, gothic horror. In the hands of lesser storytellers, these elements might feel hokey: the antique hotel, the motif of eerie handmade dolls, and traditional folk horror involving ghosts, witches, children, and very, very bad men…