Hokum Is the Best Horror Movie You Might Be Sleeping On Right Now and That Needs to Change Immediately

I will be real with you: when I first heard "Adam Scott in an Irish folk horror film about a haunted hotel," I thought, that sounds like something that would be charming but mid. I was wrong. I was so wrong. I owe this movie an apology.

Hokum takes place on Halloween at a haunted hotel in the Irish countryside full of unsettling atmosphere and surrounded by goats who attack the guests' cars while they're tripping on mushrooms. That sentence alone should tell you what kind of movie this is. It is deeply strange and it absolutely commits to the bit.

Director Damian McCarthy's previous movie, 2024's Oddity, featured the scariest scene of that year. Hokum will almost certainly be a contender for the same title in 2026. This is the guy's third feature and every single one has been better than the last. He is on a run that the horror community seriously needs to be paying more attention to. Adam Scott stars as Ohm Bauman, a bitter alcoholic novelist who travels to the remote Bilberry Woods Hotel to scatter his parents' ashes and procrastinate on finishing the last book in his popular trilogy. Relatable, honestly.

What makes this film work on a supernatural level ...no pun intended... is the craft underneath the scares. The camera often stays locked in the lead character's POV, forcing you to wonder what exactly is in the dark in front of him just as much as he does. This is not a film that screams at you. It creeps up on you. It gets into your bones and stays there. There are sequences here that are among the scariest you will see all year, and they don't rely on cheap jump scares or loud noises to get the job done.

And then there's Adam Scott, who has absolutely no business being this terrifying and this good. He plays Ohm with a prickly edge but a quiet touch of humanity, balancing the two poles of the character with surprising grace. Ohm is easy to dislike at first, but Scott never lets him slip into caricature or parody. He does a lot of heavy lifting in this film and carries every single scene he's in.

Even when the story falters, the mood never does. It's not horror for the sake of popcorn screams and viral reactions. It's horror that lingers. Horror that quietly follows you home.

Hokum is in theaters now. Go see it before someone spoils it for you.