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!