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Severance star Adam Scott is bedeviled by terrifying rabbit creatures, ghastly corpses, and all manner of other creepy imagery in the first full trailer for director Damian McCarthy's upcoming horror movie Hokum, and it looks legitimately terrifying.
Here's the trailer:
Scott stars as a novelist who travels to his ancestral country of Ireland after his parents' death where he encounters some of the creepiest stuff I've seen in a horror movie trailer this year.
Here's the official logline:
"When novelist Ohm Bauman retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, he is consumed by tales of a witch haunting the honeymoon suite. Disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance forces him to confront dark corners of his past."
Hokum's Irish setting and the rabbit centric imagery of the more terrifying bits of the trailer puts me in mind of the Pooka, a creature of Celtic folklore known for its mischievous and sometimes malevolent nature, using its shapeshifting abilities to turn into animals, with rabbits being one of the more common forms.
There's also the witch mentioned in the synopsis. Folkloric witches are also known to become rabbits, as seen prominently in 2015's sublime The Witch. There could be some connection between those two bits of folklore, or I could be barking up the wrong tree thanks to my interest in mythology.
Either way, I'm a sucker for a nice, creepy folk horror, and Hokum looks stylish enough to hook me based on what I've seen here. It doesn't hurt that director McCarthy's previous films Oddity and Caveat have made a hugely positive impression on fans.
Hokum arrives in theaters on May 1, otherwise known as the sinister witch's holiday Walpurgisnacht in German folklore. While we wait, you can check out our picks for the best horror movies of all time.
