Interviews
‘Oddity’ Writer/Director Discusses Scare-Crafting and That Creepy Mannequin [Interview]
An eerie, threadbare stuffed bunny induced scares for the way it signaled the presence of ghosts in writer/director Damian McCarthy’s feature debut, 2021’s Caveat. The filmmaker ramps up the tension and scares in his follow-up, Oddity, another chill-inducing tale of supernatural revenge with one creepy mannequin at the center.
Oddity, releasing on July 19, stars Carolyn Bracken (You Are Not My Mother) as twin sisters Dani and Darcy. When Dani is brutally murdered at the remote country house that she’s renovating with her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee), the suspect dies soon after. But Darcy, a blind medium and oddity shop owner, arrives at Ted’s home a year later under the conviction that there’s more to Dani’s death than meets the eye; and she’s brought a creepy wooden mannequin with her to find the truth.
While the mannequin is the centerpiece in McCarthy’s unsettling sophomore effort, look for the Caveat bunny on the shelves of Darcy’s shop. It’s not the only loose connection either; Caveat star Jonathan French also appears in Oddity in a different role. Considering the shared themes of supernatural karma and justice, it’s easy to infer a shared universe unfolding. In Oddity‘s case, though, it’s a wry wink from its filmmaker.
In a recent chat with McCarthy, the filmmaker explained why the drumming bunny from Caveat received an upgrade for its brief cameo in Oddity, and why it’s ultimately a tongue-in-cheek in joke.
Leila Sykes and the drumming bunny in ‘Caveat’
McCarthy told Bloody Disgusting, “It is the same designer. It’s Lisa Zagone, who designed the Caveat bunny. I just wanted her to design something, so she designed it. It’s impossible to replicate what she did with that bunny. I mean, the bunny’s gone. I unfortunately don’t have it anymore, but she built what I was saying, ‘Okay, let’s make a hare that has symbols this time and something bigger and meaner.’ That was her brief. She’s got this fantastic way of designing things. So, it’s just a little nod to [Caveat]. More from my own amusement than anything, but yeah, nicely spotted.”
Oddity belongs to Darcy and her terrifying Wooden Man, one whose face is locked in a permanent scream with finger-sized holes in the back of its skull. McCarthy’s explanation behind the mannequin’s design highlights how much he was thinking about crafting effective scares in advance.
“The initial idea was that I always wanted him screaming, because he’ll just look unsettling sitting there with a silent scream,” McCarthy said. “But then just to leave it open for sound design at the end, because when he finally starts doing things, it’s like, great, so if he looks like he’s screaming, it just means that anything then can be put in once we get to the sound design. And as you say, sound design is probably 70%, if not more, of a horror film. We didn’t have much time to design him at all. It was luckily through Paul McDonnell. I had just sent him a few drawings, a few real basic examples of what I wanted. Because we were so tight on time and very lucky to get Paul, it was just sitting down on Zoom with him, just watching him mold it.
“He goes, ‘You’re going to have to be very decisive because whatever we’re doing today is what it’s going to be molded.’ Because it had to go to mold, our stunt man’s body was going to be molded to play the non-prop parts. There were a lot of like, ‘Okay, remove the nose. Okay, bring the nose back.’ Poor Paul, but it worked really well. But he did say, ‘Next time we’re working together, just give me a bit more time.’ It was a bit of a mad dash, but it worked. Maybe that’s why it worked so well because we didn’t have time to overthink it.”
More than just scares, McCarthy wanted to use the Wooden Man to toy with audience anticipation and act as a pressure release where needed, too.
Caroline Menton and Carolyn Bracken in Damian McCarthy’s ODDITY. Courtesy of Colm Hogan. An IFC Films and Shudder Release
“The idea was it was never going to be a big, big tease of even what he looked like. There’s a little bit when Yana [played by Caroline Menton] and Darcy are moving around a little bit, you’re getting a glimpse of him at the table, but finally, he’s just there. He’s just out front and center. That was always the idea that he’s just there, and it might even become comedic because he’s just sitting there and you’d almost wonder whether he is going to lose any kind of a threat because we’re so used to looking at him, by the time he finally does something. There were little things that we shot; that classic trope of his head moving left and right, and he’s looking at different things. We teased it a little bit, but no, in the end, once we really started locking the edit, it was actually funnier and just a little creepier if he just does nothing. He’s just sitting there, and the audience is going, ‘Is anything going to happen?'”
Oddity does have a playful attitude, but it’s not a horror-comedy. While there are occasional laughs to break up the tension, McCarthy’s latest brings the scares. For the filmmaker, it’s as much about making sure his audience is entertained as they are terrified.
On finding that line between horror and comedy, McCarthy shares, “I never try to intentionally be funny, heaven forbid, but it’s just, I think if you try to make a film that’s so serious, if it took itself so seriously, then it just becomes an unintentional comedy because it’s like we have to take this so seriously that there’s that thing of trying not to laugh then. If you allow the audience to laugh and just have the characters a little bit dry, some of the stuff that’s coming out of their mouth is quite droll, and some of their comments are cutting to each other; I think it helps. It’s just a bit more entertaining, as opposed to having all the dialogue be super serious.”
He continues, “I tried to do the same with Caveat. I put stuff in Caveat that I find quite funny, but because Jonathan’s on his own for so much of it. At one stage, that corpse has a bag on her head, and it moves around, and there’s a hole, and it’s great because anybody who laughs at that knows that that’s clearly not supposed to be serious. It’s like the old Sam Raimi rule that your number one goal in making a film should be to entertain. Just try to make it as funny as it can be, and it should just help the horror because it’s such a fine line between horror and comedy anyway.“
Courtesy of Colm Hogan. An IFC Films and Shudder Release
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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