There’s a line in The Killers’ song The Getting By that goes “maybe it’s the getting by that gets right underneath you.” There’s no better or more succinct way to sum up what it is about Damian McCarthy’s work that makes him such a great horror storyteller than that line.
Damian McCarthy’s work has a texture to it that can best be described as velcro. You get stuck in it. All three of his feature films have “twists” but astute viewers can figure them out pretty easily. That is where the magic lies.
It’s not the twist that makes the movies so memorable. It is the slow march towards a cliff. It builds and foreshadows. It hooks you. While you’re paying attention and trying to figure out what’s going on, it is taking its pound of flesh.
It’s the getting by that gets right underneath you. Here are four things that set McCarthy apart.
1. A“lived-in” vibe
His films feel so lived-in that by the time you get to the twist it almost feels like a foregone conclusion. In the wrong hands, this might make a film feel anticlimactic. With McCarthy it just feels right.
By the time you get to the payoff you realize you haven’t taken a deep breath in forty minutes and your hands are cramping. You don’t experience the shock of a movie reliant on a twist. You breathe a sigh of relief.
One movie might’ve been lucky, two might’ve been a fluke but since McCarthy’s three for three it bears an examination. There are several things McCarthy does extremely well that allow him to pull this off.
Hokum Film Still
Photo Credit: Filmmaker MagazineD2. Deeply human stories hidden amidst the terror
He buries a deeply human story inside a traditional horror film. The bones of the story are pretty cut and dried. There’s no real debate about what happened. The people who died are dead. The people who killed them are guilty. However, there is so much about the journey you go on.
These horror films take place in gorgeous settings that feel like they existed only to host his movies. They also feature terrifying visuals, some of which are explained while others are not. He exercises incredible restraint in his scripts. This is true of all three films but it is nowhere more effective than in 2026’s Hokum. McCarthy gives you just enough to understand the journey our protagonist is going on, and no more.
Writers can be so self indulgent. They’re often willing to show you how smart they are, as if they’re saying “Look at all this stuff I know” or “look at how in depth this lore I made up is!” Sometimes it works, as long as you go “big world, small story.” The Lord of the Rings is one of the most thoroughly developed worlds. It could have gotten convoluted.
Resisting the modern obsession with world building and over explaining allows the viewers to engage with the story from start to finish. They are the polar opposite of two screen movies stuffed with exposition and monologues, which means if you’re not paying attention you might miss stuff. His movies are rife with metaphors that you may miss on your first watch even if you are paying attention.
3. No hand-holding!
That leads to the third thing about McCarthy’s movies that makes them so effective. They don’t hold your hand. If you miss things you miss them and the movie doesn’t care because the movie still works. It leaves meat on the bone for a rewatch.
There are movies where the rewatches are nostalgic from the second viewing onward. McCarthy’s films take three watches to pick them clean and don’t start feeling nostalgic until after you’ve done so, especially Hokum which packs so much into the Ohm character that it feels like therapy.
When you pull a single thread you uncover so much more to appreciate about the character and therefore the movie itself.
4. A story for everyone
Finally, what makes McCarthy’s movies so perfect is that they work for everyone. If you enjoy analyzing details about a movie, the clothing choices, the dialogue, the locations, the symbolism, and everything else, there’s so much there for you to dig into. If you just like to sit back and get scared the movie also works well. In fact, you could do both.
Sit back and enjoy a tense, beautifully shot and acted horror with suspense and jump scares on your first viewing. Then go back and uncover the Easter eggs, references, hidden meaning, and depth.
There are plenty of horror directors who have honed their styles to the letter. If someone sees ninety seconds of a John Carpenter horror film it’s obvious who made it. The same is true of Sam Raimi and Wes Craven. It’s even true of more modern horror masters like James Wan. It’s exciting and encouraging to see a young writer/director who has established this in just three films.
At forty-five years old McCarthy could have fifteen to twenty more years of horror excellence ahead of him, or more if he’s anything like Clint Eastwood or Ridley Scott.
