Unquiet Dead: The Lively Ghosts of Director Damian McCarthy’s Horror Films

Damian McCarthy‘s films are obsessed with ghosts. 

They lurk everywhere in his first three features – Caveat, Oddity, and the just-released Hokum – driving the plot, enhancing the tone, and delivering some of the best jump scares we’ve seen in horror cinema over the last half-decade. McCarthy’s not alone in these obsessions, as any fan of Mike Flanagan or James Wan will tell you, but over the course of these three films, he has found a way to make them his own. 

One way McCarthy puts his own stamp on the subgenre of ghost horror is the remarkable connectivity of his films to date. Every horror auteur worth their salt has shared themes, visual motifs, and character concerns arcing through their filmography, but McCarthy’s works are always in delicate, near-constant conversation with one another. The ragged little dowsing rabbit from Hokum turns up in Oddity, the bell from Oddity turns up in Hokum, and so on. 

This extends to the way he thinks about ghosts, in that every Damian McCarthy film positions these spectres as psychopomps on the way to the horrible truth of the human world while also positioning them as emotional links to the lost souls, which are his characters. In a Damian McCarthy film, the undead are quite lively indeed, and for extra fun, they never stop being scary along the way.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD for Caveat, Oddity, and Hokum!

Ghosts are, at least in terms of fiction, convenient metaphors for all manner of things, but most recognizably, a ghost is a representative of the past trauma of a place, person, or group of people. They point the way to unfinished business, and in doing so, help the living to reach some manner of conclusion, if not closure. 

In McCarthy’s first three films, it’s easy to see where the ghosts are pointing, at least by the end. In Caveat, the ghost of Olga’s mother, left to wide-eyed decay in a hole in the wall, is pointing the way to a criminal conspiracy that robbed Olga (Leila Sykes) of her agency and Isaac (Johnny French) of his memory and sense of sure footing in the world. In Oddity, the ghost of Dani (Carolyn Bracken), with much help from her psychic sister Darcy (also Bracken), points the way to a similar conspiracy in the hopes that her husband (Gwilym Lee) will suffer for her death and her sister might find solace in the truth. And in Hokum, McCarthy’s most layered ghost story yet, multiple ghosts point the way for writer Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) to not just solve the murder of a hotel employee (Florence Ordesh) but to make peace with the accidental death of his mother when he was a boy.

This makes each of McCarthy’s ghosts a powerful engine for plot, particularly since his films tend to run closer to 90 minutes and therefore must be lean exercises in storytelling. From the opening scene, Ohm’s mother haunts him. In Oddity, even before Dani’s death at the hands of a man hired by her husband, she takes Darcy’s advice and has her camera auto-shoot to scan the place for ghosts. With Caveat, the old, secluded house where the story unfolds feels like something’s very wrong there even before we see the ghost. More than that, it looks like something was always wrong there.

McCarthy’s ghosts, even before we see them, infect the landscape with fear, desperation, and simple, well, wrongness. Even beyond the sense of wrongness we expect because we’ve just sat down to watch a horror movie, something stirs in the corners of rooms and makes you question everything.

We question right along with McCarthy’s protagonists, each of them searchers for some version of the truth, each of them primed to have their convictions shaken by a shade from beyond the realm of the living. But their positioning as a blank slate of character set to go through a straightforward supernatural arc is yet another piece of the ornate, weathered puzzle boxes McCarthy sets up here.

Isaac enters Oddity as a man without a memory, hired essentially to babysit Olga with the caveat that he wear a leather vest secured with a chain to keep him from getting too close to his charge. So, as the film begins, he is the ghost at the core of the house, a shambling, empty shell of a man dragging his chain through dark hallways. When Olga clues him in to his past involvement in the lives and deaths of her family members, Isaac reacts not unlike a ghost who’s forgotten how he died (his memory loss is the result of a fall he took at the end of this initial calamity).

He is the first example of the kind of lively, haunting figure that stalks these films, and when he meets Olga’s mother’s corpse in the wall, it’s almost a relief. Finally, there is something tangible, wide-eyed and sneering at him in her frozen state, to which he can connect all of this strangeness. With a ghost in the house, he feels less alone, and as the web of memories grows more complex, Olga’s mother becomes more animated, more alive, until she’s once again a player in the story that took her life to begin with.

Darcy enters Oddity through an entirely different paradigm, as someone who’s not only blind but blessed with perceptions that grant her sight beyond what everyone around her can perceive. She is quite aware, almost painfully so, that there is life after death, and she plans to use that to her advantage as she attempts to unmake her brother-in-law’s life.

Like Isaac, Darcy haunts the house where her sister died, arguably even more than Dani, accompanied by her wooden golem with its head full of talismans. Each of McCarthy’s films deals with justice in some form, with the dead helping the living to correct some wrong, but Darcy’s position within Oddity makes his most pointed, vicious version of this story. We know this not just because of the frightening golem who becomes the film’s mascot, but because Darcy, with all her extrasensory power, seems to understand from the beginning that this is a mission from which she will not return.

She seems like a ghost in the house, with her shock of white hair and her cryptic way of speaking, because she already is one, and her love for her sister animates her with purpose even beyond her death. Then, of course, there’s the bellboy ghost, a passive player in Darcy’s game, whether he realizes it or not, to give us one last jolt of life from the great beyond. 

The bellboy is a perfect entry into Hokum, where his presence is essentially repeated in the form of a living bellboy in a near-identical costume. The bellboy’s not the center of the story, but he does add to the connective tissue of McCarthy’s films, and the feeling that these films present a spiritual (pun intended) trilogy.

Hokum is not the story of a writer who discovers ghosts are real when he visits a haunted hotel, because Ohm is haunted even before he sets foot in Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes. He’s been haunted his entire adult life because in a moment of childhood curiosity gone horribly wrong, he shot and killed his mother, and her last act as a living person was to embrace him instead of damn him. He hides in the fiction he writes and drinks himself into oblivion because it’s easier than confronting the spectre with the shoulder-length blonde hair who lurks on the staircase, who creeps up behind him at his desk. She is Ohm’s burden, psychologically and physically, which explains why he hopes that scattering her ashes will be the end of that particular journey. 

It’s not. Instead, Ohm finds more ghosts waiting at this strange country hotel, ghosts amplified by the legends of a local witch and the macabre dioramas waiting in the lobby. When Fiona, the bartender, goes missing, Ohm feels an unexpected pull to help her, to solve the mystery of her disappearance. It’s something for his mind to chew on, but it’s also perhaps a sign that he can sense the growing supernatural energy in the hotel, whether he knows it or not. He’s lived with ghosts so long he can anticipate them, so when he finds Fiona’s corpse, like Darcy and Isaac before him, he’s weirdly at home with it.

Trapped in a locked honeymoon suite, he faces memories of his mother, but he also faces the nagging feeling that anyone who gets close to him becomes a ghost, a lost soul for which he is the only anchor. In confronting the web of secrets that led to Fiona’s murder, Ohm finally looks these persistent ghosts in the face after decades of sidelong glances; that is his salvation. 

Lots of filmmakers are able to wield ghosts as metaphors and tonal enhancements. Lots of filmmakers are able to wield ghosts as engines of plot and jump scares. It’s rare to find a filmmaker who can do both not just in the same film, but in the same frame, and do it as well as Damian McCarthy. He is one of our finest ghost story craftsmen, and with Hokum, he’s completed an essential 2020s horror trilogy.