Hokum's Editor Reveals How The Movie's Scariest Scene Came Together [exclusive]

Neon

This article contains spoilers for "Hokum."

When making his spooky horror movie "Oddity," writer/director Damian McCarthy didn't quite realize until he got into the edit what a risk he was taking by cobbling together disparate stories into a single narrative. I liked "Oddity" quite a bit, but his newest feature, the Adam Scott-led horror flick "Hokum," is more focused — and I think a better film overall because of it.

As seen in the trailer, Scott plays a writer who heads to an Irish hotel to spread his parents' ashes, but learns that a witch is haunting the area. One of the movie's scariest scenes comes when his character, Ohm, sees the witch down a dark corridor under the hotel, and rides a dumbwaiter up to (theoretical) safety. He pokes his head back into the dumbwaiter shaft to make sure the coast is clear, and then sees the witch crawling up the walls after him, leading to a terrifying, chaotic scramble that ends with Ohm taking refuge in the hotel canopy bed, having drawn a chalk line around it for protection, as the witch creepily circles around the bed's closed curtains. It may not read as being all that scary, but the execution was so good that it gave me chills.

Brian Philip Davis edited both "Oddity" and "Hokum," and I caught up with Davis this morning to ask him about this scene, which is one of his favorites, too. "When I was reading the script, that was when I thought, 'God, this is an action movie. This is not just a horror movie, this is an action movie,'" he told me. "The character that Adam plays is literally being chased around a room by a witch. And I was thinking, 'How are they going to pull this off?'"

Here's how it came together.

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Regarding the scene in question, Brian Philip Davis explained that he and director Damian McCarthy took a page from the playbook of one of the best horror films of all time in terms of how much or how little of the witch to reveal to audiences:

"In my head, I knew that we wouldn't want to see too much of the witch, because I'm always about the 'Alien' approach when it comes to monsters: try and show as little of them as possible. It makes it scarier. But thankfully, that's the way they shot it. So she's kind of obscured by curtains. She's obscured by the darkness of the shaft. You never really get a good look at her except you can see her through the curtain, but it's a little fuzzy. And her performance and the way she moves, yeah, the rushes were just so good for that sequence." 

When I asked if there were any different permutations of this scene as he headed toward the final cut, Davis shared that the second half was pretty locked in from the start, but he did play around with multiple versions of the first half:

"We messed around with the witch coming up the shaft initially. There were definitely some different versions of that. We tried different speeds. There are some speed ramps and things on there to try and get her up. [...] And yeah, just playing with 'how many times do we see her when she's climbing up the shaft?' I think we do end up cutting to her one more time and giving the audience just one more look at her after Adam's slammed the door and run off."

All these deeply considered choices resulted in something truly unnerving, marking a high point for "Hokum," which is in theaters now.