Although the uncanny-ness of buildings in general is tapped out through tropes like the haunted house, the evil place, Gothic mansions and all, the horror of interior spaces has been considerably less explored. Until this year. By using inner spaces as a metaphor for the dark corners of the human mind, Backrooms literally opened the doors to fantastic ideas and will probably be and stay the prime example, the epitome of this sub-genre. But the recently released Hokum, although taking on a little more on its plate, plays with that idea too - and the result is glorious!
I want to start explaining my personal connection to interior spaces with a secret of mine - I very often dream about spaces. When I have those dreams I usually have super powerful and intense feelings upon waking up. Let me elaborate with an example of a recurrent dream I have. In my dream, I am in one of the flats I lived in in the past, or in my current place. All of a sudden I discover a little door, maybe hidden, or a window that I didn't know about before, and I open it. When I go through, a much bigger, almost gigantic hidden room or even multiple connected rooms are revealed. And I feel a very great relieve, a happiness like I was trapped in a tiny space before and now I am more free. I have the luxury of many rooms to spread out, and it was hidden before, so no one knows. That's the dream.
I think it's because my family once lived in a bigger house but we were thrown out by my father who had founded a new family, and after that, when we were new in Germany, we had to live under very precarious circumstances for a while. So the loss of that big space is a sorrowful memory for me. Now, I live as I live in a Berlin flat. I'm not rich or even well-off by any means and can only pay a limited amount of rent. With the housing situation in Berlin being what it is, there is always the fear of being evicted by some company or evil landlord, so there's already a tension there. I am obliged to live in small spaces, but somewhere in the back(rooms) of my mind, I have a kind of longing for big rooms with high ceilings and complex houses with nested rooms. It's not something I can ever have and I'm aware of it, so I guess that yearning manifests itself in my dreams. And that's why Backrooms resonated so much with me, I guess. And not only Backrooms, I generally enjoy films that use space in creative ways. (Please let me know if you know any other horror movies hat use interior spaces!)
Another thing I have recurrent dreams, or rather nightmares about, ever since I was a child, is the elevator in the apartment building I grew up in. I was terrified of it because it often got stuck between two levels, and since it was really bad technology, there was no alarm button, and you had to knock on the elevator door and scream until someone heard you and the janitor was called. I don't know how, but he usually had a way of fixing the elevator and it either continued going to your destination, or the door opened halfway between floors and neighbors pulled you out of there. So every ride with the elevator was a hellish trip of me waiting all tensed up to get stuck and each time I got off unscathed the relieve was indescribable. We lived on the sixth floor too, so I couldn't always resort to stairs. One big fear of mine was that the steel ropes holding the elevator would rip and it would fall all the way to the bottom of the building, where there would be a dark and horrible basement (in reality there wasn't) and I used to dream of monsters with lion faces or Freddy Krueger waiting there to attack me in a place that my young brain associated with what hell would look like.
And friends, imagine my surprise when I saw that exact space the elevator would land, and the exact same basement from my nightmare in Hokum!
Let us rewind, though, and look at how author Ohm Bauman (played by Adam Scott) landed in this hell. The depressed author stuck in a writer's block travels to his parents' honeymoon place, an Irish inn in the middle of nowhere, which, on top of it all is said to be haunted by witches, for a very personal endeavor. Pretty quickly does he find himself investigating the disappearance of the only hotel worker he kind of connected with and ends up locked up in the one suite that is off-limits, plus the inn is closing for the winter season. Rumor says the suite is haunted, and it indeed is. What he then goes through is truly terrifying, at least for my measures, and is the beginning of a great movie with amazing horror scenes.
Both films by Damian McCarthy that I have seen, Oddity and now Hokum, strongly use horror generated by props and setting, although Hokum dares a little more and uses some breath taking jump scares and truly terrifying folk horror too. There is an element of classic horror and storytelling rather than relying on innovative techniques and the horror rather develops quietly, in gloomy and Gothic places following a solid, classic, almost vintage script.
The place where something terrible has happened is the basis of this script, and where to better set this place than in the grim Irish countryside? But what is more interesting is the forbidden room in the Irish inn. We should take into consideration that Ohm is a haunted person himself, he has a locked room in his own head that he refuses to explore, so his whole experience in the hotel is a parallel to what happens in his inner world, his inner rooms. He carries the guilt of something that happened in the past which is his Achilles' heel, and the witch knows it.
The witch, on the other hand, has been trapped and imprisoned in the wedding suite by the owner of the hotel who is also the true villain in this story. She plays a rather secondary role, almost like Pinhead in Hellraiser, more like a supernatural weapon. The real villain in Hellraiser is Frank Cotton who opens the box and the gates to hell, thus the person in control of a supernatural evil. We can't really say hotel owner Mal (Peter Coonan) has control over the witch per se, but he keeps her captive nevertheless. The confrontation of Ohm and the witch will turn into an opportunity for him to finally enter and face the backrooms of his mind in which the guilt that has been the root of his lifelong depression is nested, and it will possibly either help him dissolve it or kill him.
Allegorical stories like these are the salt and pepper of good horror and whereas Oddity was solid horror, my personal opinion is that Hokum is fantastic and one of the best films I have seen this year. I hope I will have the chance to see it a second time soon. And you guys and everyone too.
On a final note, the Fantasy Filmfest has announced its winners of 2026, and they're so different than my estimates, haha, I totally missed the mark this year. For those who missed it: Sanguine (Species) won the jury award with Motherwitch receiving a special mention, The Fox won the audience award (I unfortunately missed this film, it was sold out by the time I decided I want to see it), and finally Flock won the short film award (I really didn't like this film, so what the heck is wrong with my taste this year?).
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