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.