He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
The recent back-to-back box-office success of Obsession and Backrooms appears to have overshadowed a couple of other horror movies. The more recent of the two, Passenger, didn’t really stand a chance anyway. It had the misfortune of opening in the wake of Curry Baker‘s movie, which had already become a box-office sensation. However, a slightly older horror movie opened to excellent reviews and seemed to be doing just fine commercially when Obsession and Backrooms rewrote the rulebook. The movie in question recently debuted on digital platforms for rent and purchase, and immediately found a spot on the domestic top 10 chart.
The movie premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March, and was released theatrically by Neon on May 1. It went on to gross a solid $23 million worldwide against a reported budget of $5 million. Directed by Damian McCarthy, the movie follows an American author on a trip to a creepy family-run hotel in rural Ireland. Once he arrives at the hotel, the author is explicitly warned not to go near the honeymoon suite, where, he is told, there lives a witch. He brushes the warnings off as “hokum,” but soon discovers that there may be some truth to the superstition after all. Combining the claustrophobic chills of The Shining with the haunted house goofiness of the best Scooby-Doo stories, the movie is now available on the PVOD market.
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
We’re talking, of course, about Hokum. Starring Adam Scott as the American writer, the movie holds a “Certified Fresh” 89% critics’ score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “A classic haunted house story enriched with atmospheric folklore and perfectly-timed shocks, Hokum further solidifies writer-director Damian McCarthy as a modern master of horror.” Collider’s review praised McCarthy’s direction and noted that the movie “doesn’t overcomplicate itself, but rather, it sticks to the classics: strange figures moving in the dark, claustrophobic scenarios, and the old trusty jump scare.”
According to FlixPatrol, Hokum emerged as one of the top five titles on the domestic Apple TV chart following its home video debut this week. It’s worthy of being in the same conversation as Backrooms and Obsession. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
A writer travels to a secluded Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, but his lodgings may be haunted.
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Hokum a lot better than Backrooms, and the guy gets a girl to like him using magic wishes is a trope that’s been done too many times before.
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