Adam Scott Thriller Hokum Now Streaming on Hulu

You know it’s been a good year for horror when a genuine hit still slips through the cracks. Summer brought endless discussion of Obsession, The Backrooms, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil and The End of Oak Street. All four pulled in nine-digit box office totals. Earlier in the year, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was a critical success if not a commercial one. Horror fans usually have to dig through indies for their fix, but 2026 has been a movable feast.

The current wave has room for every kind of horror. Only a couple of these movies fit the old “elevated horror” label (read: the real monster is trauma). The rest are old-fashioned guts-and-gore pictures.

One 2026 hit that is elevated, occasionally in a literal sense, is the Irish ghost story Hokum. It debuted in May to rave reviews and solid ticket sales. It made money but wasn’t a blockbuster.

Hokum threaded a particular needle. It opened two weeks before Obsession and The Backrooms went head-to-head at the box office, so it earned its money and cleared out before the real competition began. If you missed it in the middle of all that, it’s now streaming on Hulu. It deserves a spot in your rotation as Halloween approaches.

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. The film was written and directed by Damian McCarthy, who previously made Oddity in 2024 and Caveat in 2020.

Adam Scott (Severance) plays Ohm Bauman, an American novelist struggling to write the conclusion to his popular trilogy. With nothing else pulling at him, he visits the hotel in rural Ireland where his late parents spent their honeymoon. His only goal at first is to leave their ashes in the nearby woods. Then he stumbles into what might be a murder mystery, a ghost story, a vivid hallucination, or some mix of the three.

Hokum works as a kind of backwoods Irish Gothic. It swaps castles and towers for an old hotel with a gruesome history. The film is careful and deliberate, and it gets a lot out of ominous silences and still compositions. Several critics have called it 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.

Know going in that Hokum starts at a slow boil, centered on Scott as one of the great unpleasant tourists in cinematic history. The movie is in no hurry, and for a while it plays like a procession of establishing shots. The first half-hour could almost pass for a tourism ad. Visit beautiful, rural Ireland. You only might get murdered by hotel ghosts.

Once Hokum releases its parking brake, it becomes an evocative thriller, and Scott has to carry much of it across the finish line. He spends a lot of the film alone and silent, so the story comes through body language, camera angles and point-of-view shots. The movie trusts its audience more than most do, but all of that would be for nothing if Scott weren’t up to the challenge.

I haven’t found many pieces that single out Scott’s performance. Still, Hokum belongs on a short list of horror films that would fall apart with a less skilled actor at the center. Happy Death Day is another, since it puts a similar load on Jessica Rothe’s shoulders. 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, he has piled up career-defining performances over the last few years.

In a less stacked year, Hokum would be on the short list for the best horror film of 2026. Even in this one, it easily makes the top 10. Now that it’s available on demand, it’s worth queuing up for your Halloween viewing.

Hokum is now streaming on Hulu.

Source: Polygon