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An Irish Nightmare: Exploring the Real Folklore Behind ‘Hokum’
Folk Horror stories need to develop naturally in order to feel authentic. Over time, generational beliefs bleed into popular culture until a storyteller is inspired to bring these narrative traditions to the big screen. This process also means that there’s sometimes a grain of truth to these tall tales of witches and pagan deities, and that’s precisely the case with Damian McCarthy’s recently released Irish nightmare Hokum.
In honor of the film finally hitting home video this week, I’ve decided to explore some of the real inspirations behind the fictional terrors of Hokum in order to find out how deep this Folk Horror rabbit hole goes. Be warned, however, as there are minor spoilers ahead, and McCarthy’s movie is the kind of supernatural mystery that works better the less you know about it going in.
As Hokum’s trailers have already established, the film follows Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a troubled writer struggling with the downbeat ending to his latest project as well as a considerable amount of unresolved childhood trauma. Ohm then decides to take a trip to Ireland in order to scatter his deceased parents’ ashes near the hotel where they originally spent their honeymoon. Naturally, the Bilberry Woods Hotel also happens to house a legend about an evil witch – referred to locally as ‘the Cailleach’ – who was sealed in the building’s Honeymoon Suite and is said to reside there to this very day.
Now, what the film’s marketing doesn’t reveal is that the Bilberry Woods Hotel is meant to be more than McCarthy’s Irish answer to The Shining’s Overlook. i.e., Kneverday from Folklore in Film actually makes a very compelling argument, suggesting that the real-life Ballygally Castle Hotel likely inspired McCarthy’s latest horror outing, with this ancient building having its own sordid history involving family-motivated murder and ghostly visitors.
According to legend, the castle’s original owner, a Scottish Lord from the 1600s, decided to punish his wife for the crime of failing to bear him a son by imprisoning her at the top of the castle. The Lady eventually fell to her death, and to this day, there are rumors of a ghostly figure wandering around the hotel grounds. Not only that, but the castle also used to have its own wild woman of the woods who lived in the area and often scared guests during the late 1800s due to her bizarre demeanor and unkempt appearance.
Although there’s no record of her drinking milk laced with magic mushrooms…
McCarthy hasn’t spoken out about these possible inspirations, but given how all three of his feature films so far are connected by the idea of women being harmed by men they trust, it would make sense for the story of the Scottish Lady and the ensuing mythology surrounding the tragedy to inform his latest project (especially where Florence Ordesh’s bartender character is concerned).
Beyond the history of the Hotel itself, Hokum also exhibits many similarities with existing tales of Irish folklore despite being a completely original yarn made up by McCarthy. For instance, the recurring idea that these supernatural entities are chaotic wildcards beyond good and evil rather than traditionally malevolent antagonists is a classic theme in Gaelic mythology. In fact, this is something else that all of McCarthy’s features have in common, as the paranormal elements in these stories are used to punish our antagonists by the end of the picture.
The film’s version of the Cailleach is only loosely inspired by the Gaelic tradition of associating wild crones with the oncoming threats of winter, seaborne storms and -obviously- old age. However, there exists an Old Irish poem called The Lament of the Old Woman of Beara that some scholars interpret as a story explaining how The Cailleach came to be so old while also fostering fifty children in the Beara Peninsula. This association with children may very well be the root of the witch’s penchant for kidnapping kids (and the occasional naughty adult) in Hokum.
That being said, the film’s use of “Cailleach” actually refers to a generic hag figure rather than any specific witch or nature goddess that chains her victims up and drags them screaming into the underworld. The idea of using chalk to protect yourself against these entities was also made up by McCarthy as a visually-striking plot device (likely inspired by the protective circles of apotropaic magic). Of course, these creative liberties are thematically in line with the folkloric history that the filmmakers are trying to evoke here, and the director has stated that much of what we see from the protagonist’s point of view is, in fact, hokum due to that mind-bending reveal from the end of the flick.
While these mythological inspirations are certainly fascinating, the most compelling part of Hokum is the fact that, in classic McCarthy fashion, the antagonists here are all too human. This grounded detail makes the director’s films much more impactful than your average supernatural scare-fest that fades from memory the second that you remember that ghosts and goblins can’t hurt you in real life.
Of course, while I may be a skeptic, you couldn’t pay me to take a trip down that rickety dumbwaiter and check in on the Cailleach for myself – and that’s exactly why I’d recommend that you check out Hokum at home if you somehow missed it in theaters!
Hokum is available now on digital platforms everywhere, with a physical release planned for August.
Editorials
‘Behind the Mask II: The Return of Leslie Vernon’ Wraps Up a Wildly Successful Fundraising Campaign
Last month, Bloody Disgusting had the immense pleasure of announcing that Scott Glosserman’s long-gestating sequel to Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon blasted through its $20,000 Kickstarter goal in a mere 10 minutes. In fact, by the end of the campaign this past week, the project ended up earning a whopping $400,000 meant to expand the film’s scope and even pay for a few extra cameos. And though the sequel was already set to be produced regardless of fan contribution, this crowdfunding success story serves as further proof that there is now a massive audience for intelligent deconstructions of our favorite genre stories.
I, for one, had been waiting for this announcement ever since experiencing that Psycho Killer needle-drop during the closing credits of the original film back when I was a teenager, but now that the dust has settled and we eagerly await further news about the follow-up that felt like it would never come, I’d argue that this is the perfect time to think about what a sequel to Behind The Mask actually means. The original movie was a love-letter to the Slasher genre and its complicated position in the mid-2000s media landscape, so it’s fair to assume that Behind the Mask II: The Return of Leslie Vernon will have a lot to say after two decades of cinematic silence.
After all, the 2006 production released during a divisive period in film history where it was generally accepted that the industry had become oversaturated with Americanized J-Horror, so-called “Torture Porn” and excessive remakes. This situation led to many fans becoming nostalgic for the horror titans of yesteryear. While the truth is that the 2000s actually had plenty of original genre filmmaking going on, the lack of easily accessible online distribution meant that genuinely memorable flicks like Laid to Rest and The Hills Run Red would only find their audiences years down the line.
Leslie Vernon was created as both an homage to our favorite Slashers and this new wave of underappreciated killers created by indie filmmakers attempting to carve out their own niche during a period when the best they could hope for was a straight-to-video release. By the end of Behind the Mask, however, Vernon had more or less ascended to legendary status, carrying out his first massacre and earning a spot among his murderous heroes (including Eugene, the mentor figure played by Scott Wilson who is heavily implied to be Billy from the 1974’s Black Christmas).
Back when a sequel was first announced, Glosserman and co-writer David J. Stieve explained that they wanted to continue analyzing recurring trends in 2000s genre productions. The follow-up was initially planned to poke fun at the Found Footage technique itself while also exploring the appeal of Torture Porn among then-modern audiences. Unfortunately, as time went on and the team failed to secure funding for their idea, this script became more and more dated. And with the filmmakers’ first attempt at crowdfunding ultimately turning into a flop (which makes their latest success that much more impressive), they ultimately decided to release this story as a comic-book.
Feeling like a comic adaptation of a movie from an alternate universe, Before the Mask: The Return of Leslie Vernon was conceived as a “Spreemake” – a simultaneous sequel, prequel and remake explaining how Leslie planned his initial massacre while also following up on the aftermath of his crimes when a movie studio attempts to adapt his bloody moment of glory to the big screen.
While this comic is an undeniably fun time and a must-read for fans of the original movie, it’s already been confirmed that the new sequel is completely ignoring this story in favor of a new script more in line with current horror trends. With indie Slashers having a much more prominent role in modern-day Hollywood (just look at the Terrifier franchise or even the absurd Poohniverse films), it would make sense for a sequel to reevaluate Leslie’s position as an icon.
Glosserman and Stieve have already explained that they imagine Behind the Mask II: The Return of Leslie Vernon taking place in a tongue-in-cheek reflection of the real world where Leslie is respected by fans after the orchard killings despite not being quite as feared as more popular criminals like Michael Myers. The idea here wouldn’t be to merely comment on the current state of Slashers, however, (though I imagine we’ll be seeing plenty of references to modern titans like Art the Clown), but also to explore how familiar archetypes have evolved into new forms that say more about how society views who is and isn’t expendable.
It’s easy to imagine the upcoming flick discussing the rise of the hardened Final Girl (like Jamie Lee Curtis in the recent Halloween trilogy) or even the complicated victim selection process now that hard labels like “jock,” “virgin” and “stoner” are no longer as useful as they once were. Of course, what I’m most excited to see is more screen-time by Robert Englund as our vengeful “Ahab,” Doc Hallorann – an underutilized part of the original movie that makes Leslie’s mythos that much more fascinating.
Of course, only time will tell exactly what kind of story the filmmakers have in store for us when The Return of Leslie Vernon finally comes out (hopefully in the next year or so). But, regardless of any meta genre analysis or potential cameos, I think the main takeaway here is that Glosserman and company have managed to create characters so memorable that we’re still dying to see them again two decades later. And if you ask me, that’s what really makes Leslie unkillable.
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