A new horror film reckons with the country’s buried sins—and the women erased by them.
Foreign Policy
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A reclusive U.S. novelist, Ohm Bauman, comes to a remote Irish hotel to scatter his parents’ ashes at the site of their honeymoon, believing that it was a fleeting moment of happiness in an otherwise tragic family history. Some of the staff, however, insist that the honeymoon suite is haunted. When Fiona, the hotel’s bartender, disappears, Ohm (Adam Scott) sets out to find her, probing deeper into the hotel’s hidden depths and sordid past.
This is the premise of Irish director Damian McCarthy’s Hokum, a folk-horror film in U.S. theaters May 1 that builds on his reputation as one of the genre’s most compelling voices. McCarthy here blends Ireland’s rich folklore tradition with its own shameful history to ask what it means to truly reckon with guilt and whether a conscience can ever be fully absolved. For Ohm, that requires a harrowing visit to the hotel’s basement. For Ireland, that requires an unflinching pursuit of truth and accountability—something that McCarthy’s aggrieved ghosts argue has yet to happen.
McCarthy’s previous films, Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024), explore similar themes, and Hokum is replete with callbacks. There are witches, bellhops, crossbows, and creepy-eyed rabbits; there are expansive views of the Irish countryside set against claustrophobic interiors. McCarthy has a particular fascination with light and shadow. Each of his films features an extended sequence of near-total darkness in which characters navigate corridors in search of escape—from their past sins and the terrifying creatures pursuing them.
Most of all, women occupy a central and troubling role in McCarthy’s films: frequently murdered, disappeared, or otherwise silenced. They are depicted as spiritually or psychologically compromised, which is used by their tormentors to justify their gruesome fates. These women pursue revenge—or, perhaps more accurately, justice—through elements of folklore. Ghosts, spells, and haunted objects serve as supernatural forces for liberation where man-made moral structures fall short.
A miniature sculpture of a girl who has her hands tied and appears in distress.
A figurine of a child screaming in terror, from Hokum.NEON
Violence against women is hardly unique to horror. In U.S. horror, the final girl—the last living member of a group who confronts the killer—often reflects the anxieties of her time, embodying a generation’s concerns about morality, sexuality, and the future. She is typically set apart: virginal, vice-averse, and quicker to recognize the signs of a killer than her peers. Whether the final girl ultimately rescues herself or is rescued, she is resourceful, morally disciplined, and perceptive. For that, she deserves to live.
Irish horror is more concerned with the past. Since the genre’s rise around a decade ago, it has often explored historical wounds, in particular the legacy of the Magdalene Laundries. For more than two centuries, these Catholic-run institutions confined so-called fallen women, including prostitutes, unmarried mothers, orphans, the abused, and the mentally disabled. From Irish independence in 1922 until the last laundry’s closure in 1996, roughly 10,000 women and girls passed through these institutions. (This official number, however, is likely a severe underestimate.)
The Magdalene Laundries funded religious orders through women’s unpaid, often coerced, labor. Abuse was common: Survivor testimony in A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland recalls physical punishment with “the belt of the keys on the top of the head,” while others recount nuns withholding food as a form of discipline. As the text notes, “[T]heir release was neither assured nor systematically applied. … [S]ome remained there for their lifetime.”
Many laundry inmates’ fates were opaque due to these organizations’ secrecy, despite public and private record requests. Only in recent decades has the full scale of the horrorscommitted started to come to light. Although the Irish government apologized for its role in the Magdalene system in 2013 and set up a compensation mechanism for survivors, this came only after a bombshell report revealed significant state collusion in placing women in the laundries. The religious orders that ran the laundries, meanwhile, have not meaningfully contributed to survivor redress.
Unsurprisingly, this legacy looms over much of Ireland’s recent horror offerings. Alongside books, documentaries, and other fictionalaccounts, these films contend with the deluge of information that flowed from the 2013 report and build on earlier attempts to reckon with the magnitude of the tragedy. The Devil’s Doorway (2018), from McCarthy contemporary Aislinn Clarke, addresses the topic explicitly, and the real monsters are the nuns who exploit and brutalize the children born from unwed mothers in their care. Clarke’s Frewaka (2024) covers similar ground, with one of its protagonists scarred by time spent “in an asylum or a Magdalene Laundry.”
A dilapidated interior corridor of a building that includes a statue of the Virgin Mary.
The interior of the now-derelict Sisters of Our Lady of Charity Magdalene Laundry in Dublin, pictured on May 2, 2013.Julien Behal/PA Images via Getty Images
In Hokum, an unspecified number of women’s ghosts in the honeymoon suite raises uncomfortable questions about who they were and who confined them. The audience isn’t given many answers. There is the tale of the young bride who supposedly locked herself away years ago, and the hotel’s owner, Mr. Cob, enjoys scaring children with stories about the witch who lives in the forest. But Cob vigilantly guards against access to the suite, and as the film unfolds, he and the hotel manager come to feel more like prison wardens keeping a dark secret than hospitality professionals.
Amid so much secrecy, the tragedy of Fiona, a warm and charming woman whose primary flaw is trusting the wrong man, gestures toward answers. Her disappearance was not inevitable, nor even magical, but carried out to preserve an image of principled order. Fiona is not a perfect person, but she is powerless—stashed away because she can be. The audience is left to wonder if the honeymoon suite’s other spirits suffered the same.
This all mirrors a broader historical erasure. In the early years of independence, Ireland cultivated an identity rooted in Catholic moral authority. Newspapers criticized the prevalence of single mothers and framed them as a moral stain on the young nation, with one 1929 article arguing that women’s “contempt of moral decencies” was at least in part due to “the downfall of parental responsibility and the disregard of religious teaching.” The removal of these women from public life, whether through laundries or other institutions, was widely accepted.
As for married women and mothers, the Irish Constitution still asserts that the state shall “endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” Contraception was only made widely available in 1985; divorce was illegal until 1996 and abortion until 2018.
Within such a rigid, omnipresent moral order, folklore offers an alternative source of power. Hokum and its contemporaries are set in isolated locations, where mystical and primeval spirits still lurk among the craggy hills and deep-rooted forests. Forces believed to predate British rule, the Catholic Church, and even Christianity itself become a means of reclaiming identity from centuries of colonial and religious control.
The goat, an important character in Irish folk traditions associated with wildness and fertility, appears across these films as a conduit to a pre-Christian identity. Frewaka features goats in a wedding and a cultish festival, and the protagonist’s final embrace of her fate transports her to an untamed landscape where a horned figure looks on, suggesting a surrender to a more primitive, magical authority. In The Outcasts (1982)—which some people credit with restarting the Irish film industry—a man transforms into a goat mid-sexual encounter, reinforcing the animal’s ties to fertility and passion within a story about a girl’s struggles with her own identity.
In Hokum, goats are almost transcendent. A refreshing source of levity, the goats feed on hallucinogenic mushrooms; while intoxicated, they climb onto cars because they are drawn to the headlights. Jerry, a psychedelic shaman figure who Ohm meets while spreading his parents’ ashes, also eats these mushrooms—and claims that they allow him to see beyond the terrestrial plain into supernatural realms, helping him heal from past traumas.
The hotel groundskeeper, Fergal, takes a less generous view. When Ohm first arrives, he sees Fergal standing near a dead goat, crossbow in hand. They are “stubborn” and “pests,” Fergal says—not unlike how many of these tragic women are described, it’s worth noting.
Witches, meanwhile, traditionally represent unusual and socially transgressive women. In Hokum, the Cailleach—“hag” in modern Irish and “veiled one” in Old Irish—haunts the woods and the hotel’s depths. In films such as Oddity, The Outcasts, and All You Need Is Death (2024), nonconforming women are frequently associated with witchcraft. Unlike their more uniformly malevolent counterparts in the English tradition, such as the potion-brewing witches of Macbeth, Irish folklore treats witches with more ambivalence than outright fear.
In Henry Glassie’s Irish Folk Tales, the story of Biddy Early depicts a healer who is respected within her community even as her practices are frowned upon by local priests. Petticoat Loose, another well-known figure in Irish folklore, is a cursed spirit condemned to purgatory for her earthly sins. She serves as a warning to women who fail to meet the state and church’s lofty moral standards. Even here, the reach of the Catholic Church is inescapable: A priest banishes these spirits, reinforcing the tension between the male ecclesiastical authority and folk traditions.
Troublesome women who won’t retreat to their proper place in society continuously plague the men of Irish horror cinema, Ohm included. Yet the eccentricities that make these women troublesome also allow them to see beyond the blinkered binaries of religious society and reclaim something originally Irish, rooted in the land itself. They turn to witchcraft and the occult as a last resort, only when traditional paths to justice fail.
Hokum’s witch is the only woman in McCarthy’s filmography imbued with such extensive primeval powers. Cob’s story of the Cailleach provides greater clarity about her role here: Historically, she represents the divine feminine, functioning as a goddess of winter, a shaper of landscapes, and a sorceress. The justice she serves up in Hokum is more like holy wrath than mortal revenge. Against whom this justice is directed I won’t reveal, but one can see in its execution the rage of generations of forgotten or fallen women.
Hokum navigates difficult history with humor, grace, and an expert command of atmospherics. Though its characters’ personal and collective traumas might seem better suited for drama, one of the beauties of horror is its ability to unearth those truths we would rather keep buried and imagine paths toward absolution. Ohm carries a yearslong burden to the hotel, only to find peace in an unlikely location.
“All these things do exist,” Jerry tells Ohm, referring to the supernatural, but only “closed minds” fail to see them. The remark resonates with Ireland’s history of sequestering unruly women, and the two are not necessarily unrelated: When women are confined by oppressive systems with little room for legitimate recourse, witchcraft and magic mushrooms may offer more promising paths to liberation.
