Damian McCarthy makes small, frightening Irish horror films in which an object in an empty house does most of the work. The first two held their nerve. Hokum, his biggest, reaches for more and drops some of it; we still want the next one.
Fi1m perspective
A Damian McCarthy film puts an object in a room and lets us look at it. A toy rabbit. A wooden man. A bell. He does not tell us what it is for, and he is in no hurry to; the house is empty, the light is low, and Steve Fanagan's sound design, on all three of his features, strips the house back to its own creaks so that we listen for the thing before we see it. By the time someone touches it we have done most of the frightening ourselves. That is his method, and when it works it works on the back of the neck.
He came to it slowly. There were short horror films from the late 2000s, He Dies at the End (2010) among them, made while he worked as an electrician, with a childhood in his parents' video shop behind that. Caveat (2020) was the feature debut, self-financed, and he wrote, directed and edited it himself. Oddity (2024) had a fuller crew and Joseph Bishara's score, and it is the film that found him an audience. Hokum (2026) is the first with a studio behind it and a star, Adam Scott, in front of the camera. The settings hardly change: a house on an island, a manor, a hotel, always Irish, always cut off, with folklore in the walls and some human wrongdoing underneath the haunting.
We rate him, and the reservation is a recent one. Hokum frightened us properly for an hour, and it was the old trick doing it: a hotel, a suite nobody wants to enter, and Scott playing a novelist too sour to be scared until the sourness cracks. Then McCarthy kept adding. A mother, the locals, the witch, a grief story under the hotel story, and by the last twenty minutes we were confused rather than frightened, which is not a thing we ever expected to say about him. His two earlier films were smaller and tighter, and their limits were part of their strength. Lisa Zagone, who designed the objects on two of them, is a collaborator he should hold on to; the wooden man in Oddity is the image his films are known by.
He told an interviewer that it has never interested him to over-explain, that "you just hint at it, and the audience has brilliant imaginations anyway." Hokum does not over-explain; it over-supplies, which is a different failing and an easier one to fix. He has also said he would like another crack at Caveat. We would rather he took the next film, gave it one room and one thing in it, and trusted us again to do the rest.
Biography
Damian McCarthy is an Irish filmmaker and screenwriter. Born on 16 January 1981 in County Cork, he studied Film & TV Production at St John's College in Cork, graduating in 2003. He began his career with short horror films before making his feature debut with Caveat (2020), which he wrote, directed and edited.
McCarthy is known for his horror films set in Ireland and drawing on folk elements. He wrote and directed Oddity (2024) and Hokum (2026), the latter starring Adam Scott and filmed in West Cork. His work has screened at festivals including SXSW, where Oddity won an audience award.
