Severance star Adam Scott faces an Irish witch in the Hokum trailer

If you're looking for a horror movie that will genuinely scare you, Damian McCarthy is your guy. His debut, 2020's Caveat, was a low-budget but deeply unsettling dive into the horrors lurking on a remote island. In 2024, he followed it up with Oddity – a folk horror and supernatural murder mystery that once again made brilliant use of an eerie, isolated setting.

Hokum is McCarthy's biggest film yet, with Severance star Adam Scott heading the cast. The new trailer makes it pretty clear that both the audience and the main character will be doing a lot of screaming.

"When novelist Ohm Bauman retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents' ashes, he is consumed by tales of a witch haunting the honeymoon suite. Disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance force him to confront dark corners of his past."

It's a classic fish-out-of-water setup – an American retracing his late parents' footsteps to a hotel in rural Ireland, where oddballs lurk around every corner and a dark history keeps bleeding into the present. Textbook folk horror territory.

Then comes a missing person – genuinely missing, or Wicker Man missing? – and Scott's lantern-carrying character gets pulled into a sinister mystery that turns out to be far more personal than expected.

The trailer doesn't hold back on atmosphere either: chalk circles, creepy masks, and a disturbing face pushing through TV static all make appearances.

Hokum hits theaters on May 1.