SXSW 2026 Film Preview: Movies to See in Austin

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. It might be the culmination of Oscars week in Hollywood, but down in Texas a new year of moviegoing is in full boom. The SXSW festival is here and with it comes the greatest intersection between film, […]

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In the 2024 movie Oddity, Irish director Damian McCarthy places a man-sized wooden doll with the most terrifying face you’ve ever seen at a kitchen table and then just lets the story proceed. Throughout the entire film, the various characters will acknowledge that the scariest thing you’ve ever seen in your life is just sitting there, but they don’t let the terrifying wooden doll disrupt their day.

After watching the trailer for his latest film Hokum, one has to wonder if McCarthy plans to repeat the trick. The trailer introduces us to Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, an American author visiting the Irish country town where his parents spent their honeymoon. Once there, he checks into an old-timey hotel so scary that not even Barton Fink would stay the night, and lots of townspeople say cryptic things. But the absolutely terrifying moment occurs right at the end of the trailer, when we’re treated to an image of some ungodly human/bunny hybrid.

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Hokum is McCarthy’s third film, after Oddity and his 2020 debut Caveat. Both films deliver exactly what horror fans want from atmospheric folk horror: memorable characters, a general sense of dread, and excellent use of place. Neither film has a plot that makes much sense, but what it lacks in precision it more than compensates with mood.

For some horror fans, that balance of mood and plot is a feature, not a bug, and those are exactly the audience members that Hokum targets with its trailer. Hokum is not only McCarthy’s first Hollywood movie, but it’s his first with Neon, the distributor that has joined A24 in being the go-to source for what some call elevated horror. In recent years, Neon has released the Oz Perkins films Longlegs and Keeper, YouTuber Chris Stuckmann’s debut Shelby Oaks, and Steven Soderbergh’s ghost story Presence.

But if that terrifying rabbit is any indication, Hokum‘s clearest forerunner is Frank, the other-dimensional nightmare rabbit who advises Jake Gyllenhaal in 2001’s Donnie Darko. One would not think that a creature best known for reproducing a lot and absolutely freezing when it gets scared would be capable of creating dread in moviegoers, but rabbits have often been the subject of cinematic scares. Sometimes, they’re ineffective (Night of the Lepus), sometimes they’re comical (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), and sometimes they’re utterly heartbreaking (Watership Down). But Frank and Donnie Darko captured a primal sense of unease the little critters cause better than any movie before or since.

If Neon and McCarthy can follow suit, then the scary bunny of Hokum could join Frank as not just one of cinema’s best bunnies, but one of the most iconic monsters in movie history.

Hokum hits theaters on May 1, 2026.

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