You know it's been a good year for horror movies when a genuine hit still slips through the cracks. We spent the summer on discourse over Obsession, The Backrooms, Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, and The End of Oak Street, all of which pulled in nine-digit takes at the box office. Before that, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was a critical if not a commercial success.
Usually horror fans have to sort through indies for their genre fix, but this year has been a movable feast. What's interesting about the spread in 2026 is that there's room for every type of horror in the current wave. Only a couple of these movies qualify for the old "elevated horror" (read: the real monster is trauma) designation.
The rest are good old-fashioned guts-and-gore flicks. One 2026 hit that is elevated (occasionally literally) is the Irish ghost story Hokum, which debuted in May to rave reviews and solid ticket sales. It made money but wasn’t a blockbuster.
Looking at the year in horror, Hokum managed to thread a very particular sort of needle; it came out two weeks before Obsession and Backrooms went head-to-head at the box office, so it made its money and got out before the real competition started. If you overlooked Hokum in the middle of all that, it's now streaming on Hulu, and it deserves a place in your cinematic rotation in the run-up to Halloween. Hokum has such a Stephen King-friendly premise that it's a shock to learn he wasn't involved.
Instead, Hokum was written and directed by Damian McCarthy, who previously made 2024's Oddity and 2020's Caveat. Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott, Severance) is an American novelist who's struggling to write the conclusion to his popular trilogy. Left at a loose end, he chooses to visit the hotel in rural Ireland where his late parents spent their honeymoon.
Initially, Ohm's only goal is to leave his parents' ashes in the nearby woods, but then he accidentally stumbles into what might be a murder mystery, a ghost story, and/or a vivid hallucination. Hokum can be described as a sort of backwoods Irish Gothic, trading castles and towers for an old hotel with a gruesome history. It's a careful, deliberate film that gets a lot of mileage out of ominous silences and portraits of stillness.
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