Hokum Is The Spiritual Remake Of A Terrifying Twilight Zone Episode

Spoilers for "Hokum" follow.

Director Damian McCarthy's new horror film "Hokum" stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a depressed and mean-spirited author visiting a small Irish inn to scatter his long dead parents' ashes. At the inn, he comes across evil at work, both mundane and supernatural.

"Hokum," which /Film praised as a truly scary horror movie, melds a lot of horror influences. Considering it centers on a writer in a haunted hotel, the movie has an inarguable debt to "The Shining." Ohm's backstory, and how his memories of a creepy TV screen factor into it, will also remind you of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) in "Get Out." We can't forget McCarthy's previous film, "Oddity," either; like "Oddity," "Hokum" is a murder mystery set around a haunted Irish country house.

In "Hokum," the haunting is confined to a specific room: the inn's honeymoon suite. The local legend is that the hotel's owner, Cob (Brendan Conroy), managed to trap a witch in that suite, and so now the suite stays locked to keep the witch in there. Ohm dismisses the story as (what else?) "hokum," but when he's locked in suite himself, some terrifying events make him reconsider. 

In broad strokes (an American traveling Europe comes to an old countryside building, which has a supernatural evil locked inside in one room inside), "Hokum" reminded me of "The Twilight Zone" episode "The Howling Man." Self-adapted by Charles Beaumont from his short prose story, "The Howling Man" sees traveler David Ellington (H.M. Wynant) happen upon a monastery during a dark and stormy night. In this old hermitage is a howling prisoner (Robin Hughes), whom the monks claim is the Devil himself in a human guise.

I'll argue that "The Howling Man" is the scariest "Twilight Zone" episode, and "Hokum" certainly honors that part of its legacy.

To get 66-year-old spoilers out of the way, in "The Howling Man," it really is Satan locked up. Ellington lets the prisoner free, and he morphs into the horned Prince of Darkness — his tattered rags becoming regal robes — before disappearing in a plume of smoke right before Ellington's eyes. "The Howling Man" may be ancient history in TV terms, but Satan's appearance can still leave you as chilled as the witch or rabbit-faced ghoul in "Hokum" do.

In "Hokum," Bauman's skepticism gets frightened out of him just like it was out of Ellington, because there is really a witch locked in the hotel ... probably. It turns out at the end that the entire time Ohm had been trapped in the honeymoon suite, he'd been drugged with psychedelic mushrooms. The night before, he'd been quite cruel to a bellhop (Will O'Connell), who spiked Ohm's drink as a revenge prank. But Ohm still has marks from the witch's shackles on his body, and the murderous Mal's (Peter Coonan) body can't be found after Ohm witnessed the Witch and some ravenous damned souls dragging Mal into Hell. 

Earlier in the film, vagabond Jerry (David Wilmot) tells Ohm that the mushrooms let him tune into the ghostly plane of existence (and talk to his late wife's ghost). That suggests Ohm's mind wasn't playing tricks on him, but rather the mushrooms primed his mind to perceive real horror. 

"Hokum" lacks the exact moral choice imposed on its hero that "The Howling Man" does, since the witch never puts on an innocent face to convince Ohm to unlock the door trapping her. Ohm, like Ellington, refuses to listen to the locals who tell him not to enter the inn's honeymoon suite, but it's because he thinks the room has clues to the disappearance of a friendly clerk, Fiona (Florence Ordesh). While "The Howling Man" concludes with futile despair, and the horror of Satan let loose, "Hokum" concludes with the witch — and Ohm's worst troubles — seemingly vanquished.

The movie puts us in Ohm's shoes as an outsider to this local myth, because there's very little exposition on who or what the witch is, besides that she likes to drag souls off to Hell. (Ohm, who accidentally shot his mother as a child, believes he is a condemned man walking. Him escaping Hell represents self-forgiveness.) 

She's barely even glimpsed for most of the movie. The scariest scene in "Hokum" sees Ohm hiding behind curtains of the suite's bed as the unseen (but heard) witch seemingly stalks around him. She's kept out by a chalk circle Ohm drew, pulling from a long-standing belief that circles hold magical powers to contain evil. Capturing the supernatural with mundane means is of course the main premise of both "Hokum" and "The Howling Man."

"I was always drawn to the idea of making a horror film about a witch and putting my own Irish slant on it," said Damian McCarthy to The Irish News. "Oddity" took influence from the Jewish myth of the Golem, while "Hokum" sees McCarthy pulling from local ghost stories ... with a touch of "The Howling Man" for good measure.

"Hokum" is playing in theaters.