Neon has debuted a new official trailer for Hokum, the upcoming supernatural horror film from Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy, with “Severance” star Adam Scott taking the lead. The project follows McCarthy’s breakout success with Oddity, which premiered at SXSW and captured the festival’s Midnighter Audience Award, helping establish him as one of the more distinctive voices currently working in genre cinema.
In Hokum, Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a reclusive novelist who journeys to a remote seaside inn in Ireland with the intention of scattering his parents’ ashes. The trip, meant to provide closure, gradually spirals into something far more ominous. Staff at the inn recount a long-standing local legend about a witch believed to haunt the building’s honeymoon suite — a story that begins to take hold of Ohm as his grief and unresolved memories resurface.
As the folklore surrounding the inn starts bleeding into reality, Ohm finds himself plagued by unsettling visions and fragments of the past he thought he had buried. When a mysterious disappearance follows, the boundary between psychological torment and supernatural threat becomes increasingly uncertain, pushing him toward a confrontation with the darkest corners of his own history.
The film continues the collaboration between Image Nation and Spooky Pictures, two production outfits that have steadily carved out a presence in the modern horror landscape. Their previous projects include Chloe Okuno’s Watcher, Charlie Polinger’s Cannes-premiering The Plague, and last year’s surprise hit Late Night With the Devil. Hokum also sits within a growing slate that features Bryan Edward Hill’s Archangel and Randall Okita’s Menace, the latter picked up by IFC and Shudder out of Cannes.
Hokum is set to arrive in theaters on May 1, 2026.
