Director Damian McCarthy (Caveat, Oddity) has crossed over into the mainstream with new horror movie Hokum starring Adam Scott, which just debuted in theaters with a better-than-expected opening weekend take for distributor NEON. Here in the United States, Hokum scared up $6.4 million across 1,885 theaters in its debut weekend at the box office.
Hokum came in fifth place on the domestic box office charts overall for the weekend, besting the $2.1 million opening of Renny Harlin’s new shark attack movie Deep Water.
Hokum‘s impressive $6.4 million opening weekend also tops the opening weekends for several other horror movies released this year, including They Will Kill You ($4.9 million), Luc Besson’s Dracula ($4.4 million), and Renny Harlin’s The Strangers: Chapter 3 ($3.4 million).
The production budget for Hokum was somewhere in the ballpark of a reported $5 million, so we expect this one will be profitable for McCarthy and NEON in the coming weeks.
What’s next from Damian McCarthy? He’s currently writing a haunted house movie, but recent comments suggest he may be moving into other genres beyond that upcoming project.
Adam Scott (“Severance”) stars in Hokum as reclusive novelist Ohm Bauman. When he retreats to a remote Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, the staff’s tales of an ancient witch haunting the honeymoon suite take hold of his mind. Disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance draw Ohm into a nightmarish confrontation with the darkest corners of his past.
Peter Coonan (“The Alienist: Angel of Darkness”), David Wilmot (“Station Eleven”), Florence Ordesh (“Departure”), Michael Patric (“Frontier”), Will O’Connell (“Game of Thrones”), Brendan Conroy (“Bodkin”), and Austin Amelio (“The Walking Dead”) also star.
Meagan Navarro raves in her review for Bloody Disgusting, “A quaint Irish hotel with a deeply haunted history awaits an American writer in McCarthy’s third outing, continuing his streak for folkloric tales of supernatural karma and spine-tingling terror with a dark sense of humor.”
