I’ve been following a few auteurs these days, and I discovered  Damian McCarthy somewhat accidentally.  Wanting to watch a movie and relying on the two streaming services I can choose from, I watched and enjoyed Oddity.  A bit of Celtic folk horror, its story is disturbing rather than the kind of thing that destroys you psychologically.  A friend then told me that he’d directed only one other movie, Caveat, which I also watched.  Hokum is the third and most recent of the folk horror trilogy and is a movie I’m glad to have seen.  It follows an acerbic American writer, Ohm Bauman, who goes to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes at a place they enjoyed.  He arrives at Halloween and finds the hotel owner frightening two young boys with stories of the Cailleach, a witch associated with the coming of winter.

Bauman treats everyone poorly except Fiona, the one woman on the staff.  He hangs himself after disposing of the ashes but is rescued by Fiona and the single bellhop.  After he’s released from the hospital, Bauman finds the hotel closing for the season and Fiona missing.  He suspects she’s in the forbidden honeymoon suite and Mal, the front desk clerk, reluctantly allows him to explore it.  Bauman finds Fiona’s body and learns that Mal murdered her because he got her pregnant.  I’m leaving out a lot, but the movie’s worth watching.  The witch, in the film’s scariest scene, circles Bauman as he hides in the curtained four-poster bed while trapped in the honeymoon suite.  Mal realizes that his only option is to kill Bauman and the two end up in the hotel basement where Mal is caught by the witch.  Bauman, we learn, was playing with a gun as a boy and accidentally shot and killed his mother, thus his guilt and depression.

A little research after watching Hokum revealed some of the subtlety of the film.  The Cailleach, who drags away the murderous Mal, is associated with winter.  In Celtic timekeeping, Halloween is the onset of winter and the murder that leads to Mal’s demise took place on Halloween.  It’s even shown with a carved turnip jack-o-lantern.  Holiday horror, anyone?  Another aspect that comes out is that the witch’s minions strip off body parts as the unwary are dragged away.  The owner frightens the boys at the start by implying the witch will take their private parts.  Mal is guilty of murdering Fiona because he impregnated her.  Subtle, but effective.  There’s more to the film than I can summarize in the brief space here, but it is another example of sophisticated folk horror from Damian McCarthy.  He is an auteur worth following.