After watching the superb Gothic horror film Hokum, I walked into the blood-red-drenched men's room at the McHurley Film Center and more fully appreciated the décor’s direct reference to The Shining. That was a good sign, an indication that Damian McCarthy’s latest film registers on an impact level vaguely in the neighborhood of Kubrick's masterpiece.
That’s not to say that Hokum rises quite to Kubrick’s apex, but the new film is a fine entry in the subgenre of horror films set in an old hotel, where things go seriously bump — and worse — in the night and day.
Our hapless protagonist in the unsettling tale is a frustrated writer, Ohm Bauman (like the unraveling Jack “here’s Johnny!” Nicholson character in The Shining: I’m telling you, writer’s block is a bitch!). As some consolation, there is light at the end of the creative tunnel, in the form of an epilogue, for both the film and its characters’ agonized-over book finale.