Sometimes the More Unlikable the Character, the Better
When you boil the horror genre down to its most elemental form, we the audience are paying for the privilege of watching very bad things happen to people. Whether our heroes are going to be pummeled by supernatural forces or waylaid by psychos hellbent on their mission to use cutlery in inappropriate ways, we’re here to be entertained by suffering.
This means that horror filmmakers have a delicate needle to thread. Make your main characters too likable, and the audience may not be on board with how much physical and emotional abuse is going to be doled out over the course of a feature length runtime. What should play as rowdy fun might instead take on a sadistic streak beyond the bounds of what’s “movie acceptable”, the unwritten rules that, for example, usually protects dogs and other furry friends from fictional violence.
But you also can’t go too far in the other direction and make your ensemble so repellent that even the promise of brutal reprisals doesn’t make up for spending time with unbearable people. Slasher movies and endless Aliens-inspired creature features frequently make this miscalculation, overloading with obnoxious and aggravating characters who exist solely to die in gruesome fashion. But these characters are often so irritating that the movies become a chore to sit through, with even the promise of grisly comeuppance hardly worth the wait.
The horror hero Heel character may be difficult to get just right, but when it works, the results can be downright magical. It’s truly the best of both worlds to have a protagonist who is multilayered and well-drawn enough that you root for them to survive their ordeal and learn an important lesson, but who also sucks so much that you can take gleeful delight in watching them suffer until that lesson is learned.
It should come as no surprise that Adam Scott excels at playing just such a prick in Hokum.
While Scott has found success in a wide range of roles, he first really made waves playing, respectfully, hateful little shits you really wanted to shove down a flight of stairs. Certainly the first movie I ever clocked him in has a whole scene about just how innately punch-able his face is. With Scott’s savvy with lacerating deadpan putdowns and with his permanently boyish features always a fraction of an inch away from curling into a smug sneer, it’s very easy to denote him as the prick, the high status asshole, the weasel who thinks he’s better than you.
Even as he moved into leading roles that more center his vulnerability and sweetness, Scott never surrendered the caustic, abrasive side of his onscreen range. One of the funniest moments in Severance is when his bifurcated character finds a way to talk with himself and both halves immediately realize that they hate each other. Still, it has been a while since you walked away from an Adam Scott performance going, “Man, what an asshole.”
In Hokum, Adam Scott is an asshole. A prick. A weasel who think he’s better than everyone. To quote that earlier Adam Scott character, you really want to punch him. And it is perfection.
Scott’s character Ohm is a depressive, borderline alcoholic writer of much acclaim and success who arrives at a small hotel in Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes. Ghosts literal and metaphorical already stalk him even before he sets foot in the establishment said to house the spirit of an ancient witch. As the film progresses, Ohm finds himself embroiled in the search for a missing woman, building to a second half in which he is trapped alone in a haunted honeymoon suite being set upon by a cavalcade of creeps.
But before we get to the main event, we get to enjoy Adam Scott as a sarcastic, vain, drunk writer oozing disdain for the world with his every withering glare. One early scene sees Ohm post up at the hotel bar where he proceeds to mock and deride the entire staff one by one. He snaps, he mocks, he takes pains to thoroughly crush the dreams of a bellboy who’s just a mite too insistent on trying to get the famous Yank to look at his manuscript.
And through it all, you can’t help but cackle because 1) Scott still has his fastball when it comes to a perfectly-timed and delivered put down, and he turns every line read into a nail-studded bat to the head of whichever guileless interloper has provoked his wrath, and A) You know that soon a whole array of ghosts and ghouls is going to fall on this dude’s head and all his bad behavior is getting repaid tenfold in terror.
Once Hokum hits its second half, writer/director Damian McCarthy never takes his foot off the gas, plunging Ohm into a continuous stream of abuse, discomfort, and debasement. It’s as pleasantly relentless a horror film as any in recent memory, and the key ingredient is the twinned compulsion to see Ohm pull himself out of this experience and become the better man that Hokum’s quieter moments suggest he could be, and to delight in watching a prick suffer every supernatural humiliation imaginable.
Over the course of three feature films, McCarthy has developed such a confident hand that the jumps and jolts would likely sing no matter what sort of protagonist was on the receiving end of the expertly calibrated scare sequences.
But the fact that they’re befalling Adam Scott while he’s in full jackass mode makes the mayhem all the sweeter. We are, after all, here to be entertained by someone suffering, so it may as well be this guy. Whether he’s being dunked in rancid hot tub water or assaulted by a crone a half step removed from full Deadite-esque acrobatic malevolence, you can’t say Ohm hasn’t earned this punishment.
And yet, Scott and McCarthy work to show enough cracks in Ohm’s nasty veneer that you do empathize with the man and the unbearable loss at the root of his misanthropic relationship to the world. You want to revel in bad behavior being karmically paid back, with interest, but Hokum also invests you in the effort of this man to wiggle his way free of the damnation trap that’s inching closer all around him. Ohm may have earned hell, but that doesn’t mean he can’t claw his way clear of the pit. Whether he makes it out or gets dragged down deeper, either way you’re getting your money’s worth.
Hokum is currently in theaters.
