Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Hokum
2026 · Damian McCarthy · Hokum on Sightlines
A black rectangle where a door stands open, behind a man sitting in a chair. He isn't looking at it. You are.
That composition is Damian McCarthy's method and has been since Caveat. Wide frame, deep focus, one side of it given over to a corridor, an open doorway, the gap beside a bed. Then he declines to cut. The dead space isn't filler, it's the assignment. He has handed you the entire room and made you responsible for policing it, which means anything you miss is your own fault.
Hokum takes that method to an inn. A novelist, Ohm Bauman, arrives with his parents' ashes, hears the local talk about a witch attached to the honeymoon suite, and starts seeing things. Someone disappears. The title states the terms up front: hokum is vaudeville slang for a rigged effect, sensational or sentimental, engineered to work a crowd. McCarthy is announcing that there's a machine, and inviting you to watch the gears while you flinch anyway.
Deleuze starts from something obvious enough to skip past: the frame is a closed set, a finite quantity of information you could in principle count. What makes it cinema is that the closed set always implies more. Usually the more is simply next door. The rest of the corridor, the room a noise came from, a space the camera could reach by panning. Deleuze calls that the relative out-of-field. McCarthy works it constantly, since offscreen sound is how he populates the darkness he just handed you. A knock. A drag. A breath in a room the frame isn't showing.
There's a second kind. Something can press on an image without sitting anywhere a camera could go. Deleuze calls that the absolute out-of-field. It isn't a location; it registers as a change in the whole, felt from inside the visible.
The witch belongs there. She isn't offscreen the way a prowler in a hallway is offscreen. She arrives as talk, attached to one numbered room, in a story told by someone who got it from someone else. Which hands Hokum the sharpest craft problem in McCarthy's work so far: how do you cut between a mouth describing a witch and an image of one? Show her and she becomes furniture, a thing the film owns. Withhold and she stays pressure. Given how he uses sound, the likely answer is the teller's voice running over images, so you can't separate what the inn contains from what you've been told it contains. Deleuze's name for voice and image pulling in different directions is audiovisual disjunction. He has a finer one for what the telling itself does: crystalline description, where words assemble an object so completely that they start to substitute for it. The bar-room story builds the witch. Then the corridor has to answer for her.
A held McCarthy wide asks to be read rather than followed. Deleuze calls such an image a lectosign: it has lost the self-evidence of look here, now here, and has to be deciphered instead. That puts McCarthy inside an argument older than he is. Bazin defended deep focus and the long take on ethical grounds, because montage carves the world into a conclusion and hands it over finished, while an unbroken deep-focus shot keeps the ambiguity and makes the viewer choose what matters. Bazin was defending realism. McCarthy borrowed the apparatus and aimed it at a ghost, using Bazin's own logic: a cut can hide the seam where a trick was assembled, a held shot cannot. Low-light digital capture completes the contract. Dark enough that the eye hunts, clean enough that you can't let yourself off by blaming the camera.
Horror is cinema's last stronghold of what Deleuze calls the movement-image: perceive a threat, act on it, resolve the situation. Run, fight, burn the house down. McCarthy takes that option away from the character and from us. His actors underplay and stay reasonable far longer than horror protagonists are permitted to, and a grieving novelist alone in a strange inn is a part built out of doing almost nothing for a long time. Deleuze's figure for him is the voyant, the seer: someone who has stopped being an agent and become a watcher. What he's stuck inside is a pure optical and sound situation, an opsign, an image with no action attached to it. Stretches of it go nowhere by design; Deleuze calls that temps mort, dead time, and in McCarthy's expository passages it can read as slackness right up until it doesn't. The lens earns its keep because the dread is made of exactly this unavailability. The fear isn't that something will happen. It's that you're holding still in front of an open door with nothing to do about what you can see.
Which brings the title back. The camera's old promise is that it can't invent, only record what stood in front of it. McCarthy keeps that promise in the most literal way available: his monsters are carpentry. A wind-up rabbit with a drum in Caveat, a life-size wooden man in Oddity. Objects that sit in the room with the actor, catching the same light, bending in the same lens. By 2026, with generated imagery flooding the bottom of the market, a real thing in a real room had become an argument rather than a default. So the materials are scrupulously honest and the premise is a fairy tale, and Deleuze's powers of the false is what keeps those from cancelling out. The false, for him, isn't lying. It's the made thing that produces real effects, the fabrication that does work truth can't do. A film called Hokum, about a professional storyteller consumed by a story, runs that engine with the cover off.
The scares work by a small, precise vandalism. Ordinary horror grammar announces itself: the reverse angle, the insert, the sting. Deleuze would call that a mark, an object made legible by the chain it usually travels in. See the cut, expect the thing. McCarthy strips the announcement and leaves a demark, an anomaly that has broken out of its customary series and forces you to interpret it alone. Ghostwatch found this in 1992 by planting a figure in the background of a live feed with no score and no push-in. The Innocents found it earlier, Freddie Francis parking an apparition at the far edge of a deep-focus frame and letting the audience do the finding.
The rest of the lineage is just as specific. Dead of Night supplies the architecture: guests at a lodging trading tales, the film returning always to one room, the frame-story as container rather than wrapper. Night of the Demon supplies the mechanism twice, a charged object that won't stay where it's put and a credentialed sceptic taken apart by testimony he refuses to credit. Whistle and I'll Come to You supplies the craft outright, Jonathan Miller solving his great scare as blocking and carpentry, a found object and animate bedding staged inside a held frame with the camera declining to move in. That is McCarthy's set piece, move for move. And The Changeling supplies the urn: Medak treated a mourning keepsake as a prop with its own will rather than a symbol to be decoded, which is exactly what ashes carried into a haunted inn are for.
What this film seeds isn't knowable yet, and pretending otherwise would be its own hokum. What can be said is the claim it makes. McCarthy has demonstrated something that shouldn't work, which is that duration can frighten. The long take has belonged to contemplation since the 1960s, to Antonioni's ache and Tarr's exhaustion. Point it at a doorway and the same temporal unit runs on a different nervous system: you scan instead of drift. A filmmaker who keeps shooting in one building after he could afford not to is making an argument about form, and this is it. Horror doesn't need the cut. It needs you certain the camera didn't lie, and then left alone with the frame.
Watch for one decision. Every time someone in that inn tells the story out loud, notice what the film does with the image underneath. Repeated, that choice is the whole thesis. And when you do finally see something in the dark part of the frame, sit with the question the title has been asking since the poster: whether you found it, or put it there.
Concepts in play
- out-of-field-absolute — The witch exists as local talk attached to the honeymoon suite rather than as a located presence; she presses on every held frame without occupying a space the camera could pan to.
- out-of-field-relative — Offscreen sound as McCarthy's principal method for populating the dark space he hands the audience: a knock, a drag, a breath in a room the frame is not showing.
- the closed set (cadre) — The static, wide, deep-focus composition with large areas of dead space, held past comfort and treated as an information system the audience must police themselves.
- pure optical & sound situations — The horror occurs inside a single continuous shot in the space already being stared at, with no editorial permission to look away and no action available to anyone.
- voyant — Ohm Bauman, a grieving novelist written in McCarthy's restrained naturalist register — a role requiring the actor to be interesting while doing almost nothing, alone, for long takes.
- temps mort — The patient rhythm, slack in the expository stretches, holding the everyday geography of the inn before the set pieces turn merciless.
- the readable image — The camera offers everything and points at nothing, converting passive viewing into active scanning; the frame has to be deciphered rather than followed.
- audiovisual-disjunction — The folklore strategy the film invites: the voice of the teller carried over images, so the audience cannot separate what the inn contains from what it has been told the inn contains.
- crystalline-description — A witch composed entirely by a story told aloud in the public room; the film's stated editorial problem is whether to cut from the mouth describing her to any image of one.
- puissances du faux — The title is vaudeville slang for a rigged effect, chosen by a filmmaker whose monsters are handmade physical objects lit in the same room as the actor so the image can be trusted while the premise is a fabrication.
- demark — The Ghostwatch inheritance: a figure planted unremarked and unpunctuated in the frame, no score sting, no push-in, no cut-to-reveal, breaking the customary chain that normally announces a scare.