An Interview with Damian McCarthy, Director of ODDITY (2024) and HOKUM (2026)

In time for the theatrical release of Hokum, which, buoyed by Neon’s robust campaign, is receiving words-of-mouth praise from the theatergoers as well as good to excellent reviews from critics, I am appending the interview I had conducted with Damian McCarthy, director and screenwriter of Caveat and Oddity.  The occasion was the 2024 Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival.  The interview was conducted in July 10, 2024.  The text has been edited for clarity and brevity from a longer recording.  The copyright of the interview contents belong to Kyu Hyun Kim and Damian McCarthy: any direct citation of the text requires an explicit permission of the interviewer and interviewee herein.  My great thanks to Director McCarthy, Mr. Siegmund Mark of the BiFan publicity team and other staff members of BiFan.   

Kyu Hyun Kim (Q): Thank you for agreeing to this interview!  I greatly enjoyed Oddity. I have also watched your debut film Caveat. Did you come from a theatre background?

Damian McCarthy (M): No, I grew up in a small city called Cork [the location of Oddity’s Cabinet of Curiosities shop] in Ireland. My parents owned a video store and that was my very first exposure to motion pictures. I just watched a lot of VHS as a kid, sometimes the same movies again and again, and fell in love with the cinema that way.

Q: How did you get into movie business?  

M : I began making short films, quite a bit of them, three minutes, eight minutes long. Some were good, others were bad. Eventually I honed my craft and got better at making them.  I had done this for about ten years, and of course I did not make a living out of it.  When I finally went to a film school for three years, one of the best things about it was exposure to cinema history and all kinds of great films, including non-Anglophone ones, that I would not have been aware of otherwise, in addition to learning the craft and working with those who shared my passion. 

Q: When I watched Caveat, my expectations were overthrown several times in the course of the film, in good ways.  Could you talk about its characters, especially the character of Olga?  She seems to be on the cusp of being a supernatural threat, but by the end of the movie, we end up sympathizing with her. Was she expanded from an earlier version, say, in a short film?  Did you continue to modify her character while directing the feature? 

M: The basic idea about Caveat was that all three main characters were unreliable narrators to varying extents.  Olga is sort of a villain in the film, but never intentionally so: she had suffered through many years of gaslighting and psychological manipulation, so I wanted that point to be underscored. 

Q: The rabbit drum is a great device! 

M: It is open to interpretation whether the drumming bunny is in actuality an alarm system designed to detect ghostly appearance.  I deliberately kept alive the impression that the bunny might simply be a broken toy that randomly acts up, in order to keep the viewers on edge regarding what is going on.  Caveat was a super low-budget affair: all my family members and friends chipped in. People said that characters in this film made the stupidest decisions imaginable, all the things you need to avoid in a horror film [Laughter]. 

Q: That does not apply to some of the characters in Oddity, most importantly Yana [the new girlfriend of Oddity’s doctor protagonist], whose response is, very sensibly, “I am not going back into the house!” 

M: Exactly!  

Q: Can I ask you about spatial designs of Oddity?  Where does your inspiration come from?

M: There was a very old, historically preserved house in Bantree, with a renovated stable in the back. This was a space used for historical exhibition in ‘90s and had since fallen into disuse. I originally wanted to build a set for my next film there.  However, when I got the permission to do that, I realized that the old house itself was such an interesting and unique environment that I decided to film most of my movie inside that house.  I don’t think I would have made Oddity if I had not had access to that house.  

Q: Were you influenced by classic horror cinema, such as Hammer films? 

M: Not specifically British horror: I would consider my influences greatly eclectic.  For instance, I had that idea of a haunted desk bell [featured at the end of Oddity] and this could have easily come from an EC Comics story.  I fully intended, from the beginning, to mash up different subgenres of horror: a thriller with a murderous stalker, cursed objects, supernatural revenge, and so on. 

Q: The design aspect of this movie is fascinating, including some unnerving details.  For instance, the glass eye worn by Ollie, who initially appears quite threatening: that looked literally hand-painted by him. 

M. The actor who played Ollie, Tadhg Murphy, is blind in one eye in real life. 

Q: Really?!

M: Yes, and he worked with the design of the glass eye with the prosthetics team.  We came up with the idea that under the circumstances Ollie would have had to crudely hand-design the glass eye.  And then we filmed his white, nearly pupil-less glass eye under the warm, golden lighting, which makes it pop out in a subtly uneasy way.  Of course, Murphy is a wonderful actor and he made it all the more unsettling through his acting.      

Q: And that wooden figure, a man-sized voodoo doll if you will, when I look at it, it does not look carved or constructed.  It looks like sort of… a person fossilized in the moment of absolute, horrifying agony.

M: Yes! That is exactly what we had intended.  I had it in the script that the doll should have this gaping, open mouth and is screaming silently all the time. Even when it is completely unmoving and just sits there, it creates an anxiety in the viewer that at any moment you might hear this being scream in an inhuman voice. And then later in the film, we were able to put in a lot of ambient sounds, mostly variations of different human voices, in connection with the doll. I felt that one film that I have seen which did this type of music and sound design truly well is Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. In that film, the sounds and music do not become rousing or bombastic as it reaches the climax, they keep sustaining those ambiently uneasy qualities throughout the entire movie.      

Q: Oh, so this is a perfect transition to my next question, which is about sound design and music. I think this is possibly one area that Oddity benefited from the previous film due to increased budget. 

M: Yes indeed, I was actually able to afford a sound designer with Oddity [Laughter], although many staff members were carried over from Caveat.

Q: Where did you acquire that song which played a pretty significant role in the film?          

M: It’s “Now You Know,” by Little Willie John, an early ‘60s American singer.  I found about his music from [Jeremy Saulnier’s] Blue Ruins (2013), which had used his “No Regrets.” I found the former song to be not only a good addition of humor and a bit of levity to the heavy proceedings, but also a perfect commentary on the behaviors of Dr. Timmis [Gwylim Lee], whose ego prevents him from ever accepting that there are genuine supernatural things taking place around him.

Q: Carolyn Bracken does a wonderful job in a tough dual role. Have you worked with her before?

M: No, I saw her for the first time in another Irish horror film, You Are Not My Mother (2021), and thought she had a great physical presence.  In that movie she went through a transformation that showed that she could play identical-looking but radically different characters in my film.

Q: How do you feel about the horror genre as a whole?

M: I feel that I could have presented Caveat and Oddity with all their supernatural elements eliminated, and they would still stand up as mysteries or dramas. For me, horror and comedy remain the best forms of escapism, those that can provide emotional releases for the viewers. 

Q: I myself grew up in a Catholic milieu, and I recognize the Catholic educational and cultural experiences underlying your works   Could you comment on these aspects of your films?

M: Yes, I was raised as a Catholic in ‘80s and ‘90s, and it was indeed an extremely strict environment.  Since then, the church lost some of its grip on the people’s psyche, but its presence is still felt. The episode in Oddity about someone turning around the cross left on the schoolground, and another person always “correcting” it time and again, probably resonates with those who had grown up in those environments.

Q: What is your new film project? 

M: It is at the planning stage [in 2024] but it is about an Irish writer who decided to visit the country’s most notorious haunted hotel [which eventually became Hokum]. 

Q: For inspiration?!  Sounds like a monumentally bad idea [Laughter]. 

M: Couldn’t agree more! 

Q: Would you be interested in taking a Hollywood project or remain for a while in Ireland?  

M: I think there is some concern on my part, at this point, about jumping into a large production with a big budget.  I still want to maintain some level of control over how the film turns out, not necessarily dictated by what the commercial prospects are.

Q: We have then come to the final question at BiFan, what is your favorite Korean film, and what is your view of Korean genre films?

M: [Emphatically] My absolutely favorite Korean film is Memories of Murder (2003). Bong Joon-ho’s blocking and mis-en-scene are simply amazing.  Oldboy (2003) is another favorite film: sound design, editing, Choi Min-sik’s performance with only music playing in the background— I come back to watch this movie every once in a while, every few months, just to get me worked up [Laughter].

Q: Thank you so much for a fun and enlightening interview! Good luck with your next project and [then upcoming] release of Oddity in the US theaters.

M: Thank you! 

"The Most Haunted Hotel in Ireland"-- HOKUM (2026) Review

HOKUM. 2026. A Team Thrives/Image Nation Abu Dhabi FZ/Cweature Features/Spooky Pictures/Tailored Films/Fis Eireann-Screen Ireland Co-Production, distributed by Neon International. Ireland-United Arab Emirate . 1 hour 47 minutes, Aspect Ratio 2.39:1. Director & Screenplay: Damian McCarthy. Cinematography: Colm Hogan. Production Designer: Til Frohlich. Costume Designer: Lara Campbell. Music: Joseph Bishara. Sound Designer: Steve Fanagan. Makeup Designer: Niam O’Loan. 

CAST: Adam Scott (Ohm Bauman), Florence Ordesh (Fiona), David Wilmot (Jerry), Peter Coonan (Mal, the Desk Clerk), Michael Patric (Fergal, the Groundskeeper), Will O’Connell (Alby the Belloboy/Jack the Jackass), Austin Amelio (Conquistador), Ezra Carlisle (Conquistador’s Boy Companion), Brendan Conroy (Cob, the Old Man), Mallory Adams (Ohm’s Mother), Sioux Carroll (The Witch).

In the accompanying Damian McCarthy interview, he describes Hokum as a movie about Ireland’s “most haunted hotel,” with a particularly terrifying honeymoon suite. It is a very accurate description, but of course his third feature film is much more than that. Not that Hokum deviates much from classic horror film formulae: it is a conscious riff on Stephen King in his ‘70s mode of updating Universal-style old horror cinema motifs— a psychologically conflicted writer visiting a haunted/cursed location that might have a personal connection— with dollops of Irish folk horror. 

Ohm Bauman, an Irish American writer, played by Adam Scott with the requisite air of mundane callousness and just-visible-below-the-skin internal turmoil, currently working on the final installment of his Conquistador Trilogy of historical novels, visits a secluded hotel called Bilberry Woods to scatter the ashes of his parents. It appears that they had stayed in the hotel’s honeymoon suite following their marriage. The hotel comes with a creepy folk-horror mythology about Callieach (or the Hag of Beara), a witch supposed to, according to this film, cuff and chain children, dragging them into the underworld. Bauman is cynical and abrasive and has a nicely rendered encounter with the hotel’s Bellboy (Will O’Connell) who pushes all the wrong buttons in the writer (including the ultimate no-no, “I am an aspiring writer myself and I have a manuscript that I want to show you…”) and gets physically abused as a result.  

It turns out Bauman is seriously depressed and, while creatively productive, has lost faith in humanity. He spells out the intended denouement of his latest novel to Fiona (Florence Ordesh), a female staff member who stands up to him and calls his bluff, a pitch-dark, feel-bad ending that she immediately rejects. He also reluctantly befriends Jerry (David Wilmot), an aging counter-culture backwoods type who drinks goat milk spiked by magic mushroom elixir, allegedly enabling him to pick up signals from the underworld.

At this point, something drastic happens to the protagonist, pushing the whole picture slightly askew and makes the viewers question the verity of what they are about to follow. Fortunately, Director McCarthy manages to avoid relying on tiresome editorial tricks that call attention to unreliability of the narrator and keeps the proceedings just conventional and predictable enough to stabilize the viewer’s orientation. This aspect of the film, Bauman’s subjective perspective in contradistinction to the “real” supernatural things happening, is handled particularly well by McCarthy. He provides a satisfactory resolution that shows the protagonist having been positively transformed from his experience, without necessarily shutting down multiple possibilities of interpretation regarding the question of “what really happened?”   

There are some cliched plot developments and characterizations, most notably the source of Bauman’s guilt involving his parent’s deaths, but these points are never belabored to the point of distracting the viewer. Scott does an excellent job of keeping the viewers engaged, considering that his Bauman is an unlikable, self-possessed ass, working well with local Irish actors playing characters designed a bit like board game personages but still effective. The standout for me was the interaction between Bauman and Alby the Bellboy, sarcastically humorous but genuinely cringe-inducing in its combination of awkwardness and malice, culminating in a rather nice payoff at the end.   

Interspersed with the reasonably well worked out plot are McCarthy’s signature touches, such as his love for the quirky, the slightly ridiculous and the portentously antique— a cord-pulled servant bell that looks positively ancient and an elaborately crafted, sinister-looking angel-motif alarm clock, for instance, play significant functional roles throughout the film. He pulls out all the stops in the middle part when Bauman must deal with the Honeymoon Suite itself, seemingly connected to the underworld through a dumb waiter, the figurative (and literal) key to unlocking his confinement tantalizingly out of reach for him. 

The interesting spatial arrangements of his previous films, always subtly off-kilter and artificial like an old fin-de-siecle mechanical toy, are also present here, substantially enhanced by Colm Hogan’s widescreen cinematography and the subdued but effective production designs supervised by Til Frohlich. It is to McCarthy’s credit that the film, although largely confined to several rooms of the hotel in terms of settings, never feels claustrophobic except when such feelings are explicitly called for. The visual scheme of Hokum is otherwise almost rigorously classical, the events and visuals presented on the precise scale of a ‘70s-style regional horror film: no elaborate CGI demons, no overtly absurdist imagery that references other, more famous horror films. The only exception is Bauman’s hallucination (which is given a sort of rational explanation at the end, natch) of a children’s show character, Jack the Jackass, indeed a nightmare fuel and far scarier than the witch, supposedly the film’s main supernatural bogey. 

Oddity has its committed supporters and is a rollicking fun of its own, but in my view Hokum has a more precise take on the psychological and moral conflicts of the protagonist and presents an overall more thoughtful, positive understanding of human weaknesses and foibles than its predecessor. It is also one darn spooky ride, that earns its stripes fair and square: I heartily endorse the star Scott’s call to “watch Hokum in the theater, with a fellow group of paying audience.”