ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, legendary exploitation-film historian, rapscallion, and frequent contributor to this site, attended the 2026 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He gives us the inside scoop on some upcoming films.

FINAL EXAMINATION—Horror Filmmaking 101

Create a horror feature film using as many types of jump scares as possible. Additional points given for homages to classic horror films with jump scares. Use your imagination and be creative. (Counts for 100% of your grade for the semester)

March 16, 2026

Professor,

As my submission for the final exam, attached is a digital file of my film Hokum, with Adam Scott trapped in an Irish haunted hotel. I hope you like it.

Respectfully submitted,

Damian McCarthy

A mysterious teaser trailer was attached to Oz Perkins’s horror film Keeper last fall. While Keeper was another misfire for the prolific Perkins, the coming attraction was for one of the most anticipated horror films at SXSW 2026, Hokum, writer-director Damian McCarthy’s follow-up to his hit Oddity (2024). While quite a few folks loved Hokum at the SXSW screenings (the young woman sitting next to me watched most of the movie through her hands), it was one of the most infuriating horror movies I’ve seen in years. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hokum begins with a perplexing scene of a man in armor and a young boy in a desert. They have a treasure map that they can’t get out of a bottle. The scene ends with a cliffhanger, and we soon learn that it’s the beginning of the epilogue of what will be the last book in author Ohm Bauman’s best-selling conquistador trilogy. Yours truly, ever the avid credits reader, sighed and noted that in the opening credits, an Abu Dhabi production company was credited, so this is McCarthy’s sucking up to his foreign investors. We’re not off to a good start.

Adam Scott as Bauman sits in the dark in his sterile, concrete residence with his laptop, drinking whiskey and laboring over how to end his book. He has writer’s block. He also has a small box that contains a revolver and some faded old photographs. Hold the phone. There was a sudden movement of something in the dark, our first jump scare. 

The next thing we know, Scott’s in Ireland to write that damn epilogue and put the ashes of his parents under a big tree where they got engaged. In rather rapid succession, he sees a local with a dead goat in the parking lot of the quaint old hotel. He insults the local. He checks into the hotel. He insults the desk clerk. He insults an old guy in a wheelchair, who is telling a folk story about a witch to some children. The old guy owns the hotel, but Scott doesn’t care. He insults the bellhop who’s a wannabe writer. He then pounds down whiskey, finds out about the honeymoon suite that’s haunted by a witch, so it must remain locked, and only mildly insults the cute young Irish woman tending bar.

This sets up two huge problems with the film: First, Scott’s an insufferable douchebag. He’s so awful that he can’t really be a surrogate or a hero for the viewer, You can’t picture yourself in his shoes, and you don’t really care what happens to him. Then there’s an unexpected shock behind his hotel room door, and McCarthy begins the mystery part of the narrative to set up the supernatural part, the movie’s second big problem. The young woman mysteriously disappears, Scott feels compelled to help find her, and the supernatural stuff sets in, which means the film will soon become a jump-scare-o-matic. Oh, I forgot to mention that when he buried those ashes, he met an old coot living out of his van in the woods who drinks milk laced with the local magic mushrooms that the goats have been eating. If you’re getting the idea that this film is overstuffed with random tropes and things that will probably end up going nowhere, ding, ding, ding, you are correct.

This mystery of the missing barmaid really cripples the film because McCarthy must interrupt the supernatural stuff to get back to Scott’s playing detective with the old coot from the woods. At this point, I thought to myself, why in the hell did we need all that set up? Just get Scott locked in the haunted honeymoon suite already. 

In the supernatural part of the movie, Scott eventually does get locked in that suite, and we have jump scares galore. I didn’t count them, but, like clockwork, there’s at least one about every 10 minutes. And McCarthy, like he’s fulfilling the requirements of the imaginary film school final exam that began this review, does almost every possible permutation of a jump scare. He gives you the motionless apparition at the end of the hallway, the out-of-focus image suddenly coming into focus outside a window, a spirit suddenly moving across the screen in the background, and a character shifting position to reveal a ghost. That fulfills the homage part of the exam by cribbing from The Shining, Suspiria, The Exorcist III, and Insidious.

But wait, there’s more! A scary thing comes out of the TV as in Poltergeist and The Ring. And The Ring was so cool, hey, let’s pay more homage to it by turning its well into the hotel’s dumbwaiter shaft. I think McCarthy plays all variations on his theme except the cat jump scare and the old chestnut with closing the medicine-cabinet mirror.

At about midpoint, I started to grade the film like an academic exercise because that’s how it felt to me: a semester-long project to see how many times you   can go “Boo!” To its credit, the production is beautiful looking, the visual effects are good, Scott gives it everything he has, and it’s never boring. About half of the attempted jump scares work well, and a couple are almost in the pantheon of the ne plus ultra, the jump scare at the end of Brian DePalma’s Carrie. But the other half don’t work due to poor timing or misdirection or a musical stinger that comes a fraction of a second too soon. 

Even as time is running out in the last act, McCarthy’s not quite finished. Look at this! It’s Inferno! Now I’m going to crib from Fulci without the gore! It’s The Fog! If you’ve been following me, it should be obvious now why the film infuriated me so much. McCarthy’s a talented horror director, for sure, but he’s just punching in all these mechanical shocks, tropes, and references that mostly go nowhere. And speaking of nowhere, we’re going back to that imaginary desert in Adam Scott’s mind for a bookend scene with the conquistador and the boy. But not before McCarthy has a last line of dialogue that pulls the rug out from under the viewer. No, it’s not “it was all a dream,” but it’s pretty damn close. 

When Hokum comes out in wide release from Neon on May 1, a lot of folks are going to rave and say that it’s effing great and scary AF. But the SXSW crowd at my screening didn’t applaud when it was over. It was the only time that happened at a screening while I was in Austin. That’s dire. Maybe other audience members felt, as I did, that McCarthy had just repeatedly punched them in the face and laughed for over an hour and a half, and that didn’t deserve applause. To paraphrase Monty Python, “I came for a horror film, not abuse.” 

Mr. McCarthy, you passed the final, but just barely. You are a smart and talented guy. Next semester, you’d better show improvement, or you’ll have to do remedial work by directing episodes of Goosebumps.