Neon has dropped the first trailer for Hokum, the forthcoming supernatural shocker from writer-director Damian McCarthy, with Adam Scott leading the cast. The film marks McCarthy’s next step after Oddity, which premiered at SXSW and went on to win the Midnighter Audience Award, further cementing his growing reputation within contemporary genre cinema.
Hokum centers on Ohm Bauman (Scott), a withdrawn novelist who travels to an isolated inn on Ireland’s rugged coastline to lay his parents’ ashes to rest. What begins as an act of mourning soon curdles into something more unsettling when the inn’s employees recount stories of a centuries-old witch said to roam the building’s honeymoon suite. As the folklore seeps into Ohm’s already fragile mental state, the line between memory, guilt, and the supernatural begins to erode. A series of disturbing visions — followed by an unexplained disappearance — forces him into a reckoning with long-buried aspects of his past.
The film continues an ongoing partnership between Image Nation and Spooky Pictures, whose recent collaborations have made a notable imprint on genre filmmaking. Their shared track record includes Chloe Okuno’s Watcher, Charlie Polinger’s Cannes-debuted The Plague, and last year’s breakout success Late Night With the Devil. Hokum also forms part of a broader slate that includes Bryan Edward Hill’s Archangel and Randall Okita’s Menace, the latter acquired by IFC and Shudder at Cannes.
Neon will release Hokum theatrically on May 1, 2026.
