Neon and Waypoint Entertainment’s Cweature Features have come on board writer and director Damian McCarthy’s (“Oddity”) film “Hokum,” starring Adam Scott (“Severance”), the companies announced on Thursday.
Neon will release the film theatrically in the U.S. in 2026.
Neon International will represent the foreign sales rights and introduce the film next week at the Toronto International Film Festival. Cweature Features board as co-producers on the project joining Image Nation and Spooky Pictures, as well as Team Thrives, who co-financed the project. The film is currently in post production.
Peter Coonan (“Bad Sisters”) and David Wilmot (“Bodkin”) join Scott along with Florence Ordesh, Will O’Connell and Michael Patric. Siox C, Brendan Conroy, Austin Amelio, and Ezra Carlisle round out the cast.
In “Hokum,” when “reclusive novelist Ohm Bauman (Scott) retreats to a remote Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, the staff’s tales of an ancient witch haunting the honeymoon suite take hold of his mind. Soon, disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance draw him into a nightmarish confrontation with the darkest corners of his past,” according to the film’s logline.
“Hokum” follows McCarthy’s feature debut “Oddity,” which premiered at SXSW and won the Audience Award in the Midnighter Section. The film is produced by Spooky Pictures founders Roy Lee and Steven Schneider, Image Nation’s Derek Dauchy and Tailored Film’s Ruth Treacy, Julianne Forde and Mairtín de Barra.
Executive producers include Cweature Features’ Ken Kao and Josh Rosenbaum, as well as Ben Ross, Dan Kagan, Rami Yasin, Andrew Childs, and Team Thrives’ Bryan Meng and Dr. Terence Chan. The project is also supported by co-production funding from Screen Ireland/ Fís Éireann.
The deal was negotiated by Jason Wald for Neon, Josh Rosenbaum for Cweature Features and Ben Ross for Image Nation.
