You know it’s been a good year for horror movies when a genuine hit still slips through the cracks. We spent the summer on discourse over Obsession, The Backrooms, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, and The End of Oak Street, all of which pulled in nine-digit takes at the box office. Before that, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was a critical if not a commercial success. Usually horror fans have to sort through indies for their genre fix, but this year has been a movable feast.
What’s interesting about the spread in 2026 is that there’s room for every type of horror in the current wave. Only a couple of these movies qualify for the old “elevated horror” (read: the real monster is trauma) designation. The rest are good old-fashioned guts-and-gore flicks.
One 2026 hit that is elevated (occasionally literally) is the Irish ghost story Hokum, which debuted in May to rave reviews and solid ticket sales. It made money but wasn’t a blockbuster.
Looking at the year in horror, Hokum managed to thread a very particular sort of needle; it came out two weeks before Obsession and Backrooms went head-to-head at the box office, so it made its money and got out before the real competition started. If you overlooked Hokum in the middle of all that, it’s now streaming on Hulu, and it deserves a place in your cinematic rotation in the run-up to Halloween.
Things to do in Derry when you’re dead
Hokum has such a Stephen King-friendly premise that it’s a shock to learn he wasn’t involved. Instead, Hokum was written and directed by Damian McCarthy, who previously made 2024’s Oddity and 2020’s Caveat.
Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott, Severance) is an American novelist who’s struggling to write the conclusion to his popular trilogy. Left at a loose end, he chooses to visit the hotel in rural Ireland where his late parents spent their honeymoon. Initially, Ohm’s only goal is to leave his parents’ ashes in the nearby woods, but then he accidentally stumbles into what might be a murder mystery, a ghost story, and/or a vivid hallucination.
Hokum can be described as a sort of backwoods Irish Gothic, trading castles and towers for an old hotel with a gruesome history. It’s a careful, deliberate film that gets a lot of mileage out of ominous silences and portraits of stillness. Several critics have described Hokum as a haunted house movie, but that doesn’t strike me as fully accurate. Something is haunted, absolutely, but there are multiple candidates for what, who, and why.
It’s worth knowing before you start that Hokum begins at a slow boil, centered on Scott as one of the great unpleasant tourists in cinematic history. It’s not a movie that’s in any great hurry to get where it’s going, and for a while, feels like a procession of establishing shots. The first half-hour in particular is occasionally mistakable for a product of the tourism industry. Visit beautiful, rural Ireland. You only might get murdered by hotel ghosts.
Once Hokum disengages its parking brake, it becomes an evocative thriller, much of which Scott has to carry across the finish line. He spends a lot of the film solo and silent, so the movie’s story gets told through body language, camera angles, and point-of-view shots. It’s unusually willing to trust its audience, but it’d all be for nothing if Scott wasn’t up to the challenge.
There don’t appear to be too many pieces that specifically praise Scott’s performance, but Hokum is on a short list of horror films that would absolutely fall apart on the runway with a less skilled actor on center stage (see also Happy Death Day, which piles a similar amount on Jessica Rothe’s shoulders), and Scott pulls it off. It’s easy (at least for me) to think of him as a Parks and Recreation guy, but between Hokum and Severance, Scott has been really piling up career-defining performances in the last few years.
In a less stacked year, Hokum would be on the short list for one of 2026’s best horror films. Even so, it easily makes the top 10. Now that it’s available on demand, it’s worth queuing it up as part of your Halloween celebrations.
Hokum is now streaming on Hulu.