Stillness is the Move: The Immobile Horror of Damian Mc Carthy

SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses details about the films Caveat and Oddity that will ruin some of the surprise. Read at your own risk.

Horror is all about broken expectations. A storyteller establishes a pattern that we can anticipate and when they introduce variation—like a brick wall when you expect a window or a corpse when you expect a living protagonist—we are sent into a stomach-flipping state of existential freefall. The best spooky bards find a perfect balance between expectation and variation, conjuring a pervasive aura of doubt and fear. But of course, after enough slasher films, ghost stories, and survival horror video games, the veteran horror buff becomes desensitized to the effect. I’m as guilty as any other horror viewer when it comes to wishing a piece of media “went harder,” which is code for violently breaking my jaded expectations. And that’s why I feel so upsettingly refreshed when watching the work of Irish filmmaker, Damian Mc Carthy.

Mc Carthy’s movies play with the absurd, wasting no time sending us into that sweet horror freefall. His 2020 debut feature Caveat throws logic out the window immediately and leashes us to its nightmare premise: an amnesiac named Isaac is hired to babysit Olga the orphan, and as a term of his employment, he is chained to the basement of her clearly haunted house. The 2024 follow-up, Oddity, is a similarly high-concept story with paranormal detective vibes, following a blind medium named Darcy who seeks the truth behind the murder of her sister through the application of occult methods involving an imposing wooden golem. Both films clip along at a steady pace of tension-building creepouts, broken very rarely by the occasional jumpscare.

I’ve heard of being chained to the desk, but this is ridiculous.

In both films, Mc Carthy demonstrates a sense of gruesome playfulness, sometimes literally showing us how he is going to scare us, and then doing so in the next beat. When Darcy’s sister Dani is looking through digital photos inside a tent during the first act of Oddity, she sees an image of a masked figure standing outside her tent. And that’s exactly what we see when she unzips the tent’s flap moments later. The knowledge of what’s going to happen enhances the fright with an intimate, almost conversational element—as if you can hear Mc Carthy laughing after pulling off the perfect prank. This effect is at its best when he adds a secondary twist to his nightmares: playing against modern tradition and removing the motion from the terror.

As seen on camera!

In film, fright is usually a state achieved through visible action: the swing of a chainsaw, the stab of a knife, the floating of a child vampire, or the persistent crawling of a killer from the Black Lodge. It’s kinetic. So much so that we use the language of locomotion to describe the most heartpounding horror movies, which are “rollercoasters” or “thrillrides,” surprising us through twists and turns and trapdoors. So when we sit down in front of a modern horror movie, our expectation is that the scares will move. Mc Carthy subverts this vocabulary of dynamic heebie-jeebies by using stillness for the most bone-chilling scenes in his movies.

In both Caveat and Oddity, Mc Carthy sets up scare expectations in a similar manner to the aforementioned tent camera by introducing human-shaped objects that are clearly meant to move. Early in Caveat, Isaac finds the body of Olga’s dead mother hidden in a basement wall, and in Oddity Darcy’s golem sits at a table for most of his screen time. Tension is built through that knowledge—the expectation of impossible motion. The mother corpse, for example, is just an actor in makeup, and you can tell her eyes are alive from the moment you see her. Every shot of her face is wound tight with the anticipation her irises will shift, or her pupils will narrow, or her mouth will curl into a smile. So when, in the film’s rising action, Isaac finds himself trapped on the other side of the wall, intimately cramped next to the corpse, you expect motion. And it happens. But not in front of you.

Jeepers creepers, where’d you get those eyes?

The mother’s motion is hidden in shadow. Every time Isaac’s flashlight passes over her, we see her in a slightly different position. And to let us know he’s having fun, Mc Carthy even put in a gag involving a hat that, for all its humour, only supercharges the agony of the moment. A series of still images, the result of unseen motion that should be impossible.

People often ask me what the trick is to watching horror, and my go to answer is that it’s always worse in your head. Fear lives in your imagination, so actually viewing the gore and ghosts is the best way to dispel it. Look at the effects and the acting and you will understand it’s just something on your TV or projected on a cinema screen. And that works most of the time. But not with the movies of Damian Mc Carthy. By telling you what he’s going to do and then removing the fundamental material of horror—motion—you have no choice but to fill in the blanks between static. His stillness implies impossible motion and it infects our minds with fright.

Crime Watch Daily: Do You See?

In the advent of ground-breaking true crime shows like The Jinx and Making a Murderer it seems utterly bizarre that a show like Crime Watch Daily exists. 

For starters, each episode opens like Inside Edition, the TV show equivalent of those annoying click bait Buzzfeed headlines that clog your Facebook feed with crap like “You won’t believe what happened when this man ate a cheese sandwich!” The barrage of “if it bleeds, it leads” style headlines on Crime Watch Daily provide viewers with very little useful information about actual crime, relying instead on grabbing ears and eyeballs with whatever salacious copy they can conjure. At least you can click on clickbait headlines; you have to sit through an entire episode of Crime Watch Daily to get to the “good” stuff.

It’s bad enough that the Internet is crammed with this kind of junk; do we really need it on our TV screens as well? It’s a relevant question since the Crime Watch Daily set virtually indistinguishable from the ones used by shows like Entertainment Tonight: all glass, chrome, sparkling lights, and giant flat TV screens. The set also looks like a super close up photo of microchips, which ironically only serves to further highlight the distinction that this is Not The Internet.

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The idea that a daily TV show would be able to keep up with crime stories in real time as they develop – a market the Internet and 24-hour news channels have cornered – makes the existence of Crime Watch Daily an anomaly in the first place. If they were reporting on the kinds of things that viewers need to know about crime on a daily basis, perhaps an argument could be made that they provide a vital service, but they don’t.

It’s true that we take risks every time we leave the house (or in the case of a home invasion, while we’re there). Depending upon where we live or what kind of job we have, we could encounter a lot of crime: mugging, shooting, stabbing, kidnapping, or sexual assault. These kinds of risks, however, are already covered by local news programs and crime data maps that are available on, you guessed it, the Internet.

Note that I’m not implying local news stations always do a bang-up job reporting on the kinds of crimes we might encounter, but they are at least more qualified to give us a microcast of what’s going on around us than a national program like Crime Watch Daily. The show does have a segment called “Crime Watch Local,” but it only airs weekly, competing with 30 to 40 other minutes of the show’s airtime; therefore, it would be impossible to cover every “local” corner of the United States.

Crime Watch Daily doesn’t even provide any tips or tricks for how to avoid crime, focusing instead on just telling us about it without giving us any insight into what the crime could mean to the viewer on a personal level or what it means to crime in society as a whole. In fact, the show has two specific segments that seem to have been created purely out of some need to make fun of others. “Bad Seed of the Day” and “CrimeTube” are, respectively “a weekly segment profiling a particular criminal and the crime they committed” and “a daily segment… featuring videos of criminal acts, sting operations, police pursuits, and footage of law enforcement activity culled from public doman security camera, traffic camera, and police dashcam footage." Yeah, we have that second thing already; it’s called YouTube.

Sure it might give us a feeling of schadenfreude to witness criminals being caught in the act, but does that serve any real purpose? No, it seems that Crime Watch Daily is merely interested in WATCHING crime, not examining it, not trying to prevent it, not helping viewers get a more profound understanding of it. It’s a spectator sport that takes real tragedies and repackages them into glossy, bite-sized chunks of sugar, providing a quick fix of empty calories.

There is a certain element of fear-mongering on Crime Watch Daily, which feels carefully scripted to highlight the lurid details and the emotional fallout of the crimes it depicts, but the show doesn’t evoke empathy in the same way that seeing a grieving family member at a press conference or being interviewed at a crime scene might. It’s like a ginned-up version of fear that makes people feel like they know what’s going on even though Crime Watch Daily only provides limited information, the kind of thing that people might use to justify racism, classism, sexism, and the intersection of all three.

Crime Watch Daily is fear mongering without the fear, replaced instead by self-righteousness. That’s truly scary. 

Sanity, Insanity and THE BABADOOK

What is worse: sanity or insanity? The question is at the centre of supernatural horror, and while the answer seems obvious from the experience of a reader (likely sane), things aren't so clean cut in the realm of lucid nightmares. Put yourself in the shaking boots of Amelia, the tortured mother from The Babadook, for instance, and then ask yourself which mental paradigm you would prefer.

Aided by the unreliable narrator device that is typical of horror genre fiction, supernatural elements in stories like The Babadook thrive on the balance between the opposing worldviews of unbridled imagination and a strange reality. Throughout that film, the audience is given numerous hints that Amelia’s experience with the titular evil entity is simply a figment of her imagination born of insomnia, trauma and the stress of having a difficult child who builds weapons as a hobby. Stuck in her point of view, however, we are shown the Babadook as it appears to her: an increasingly real threat to the life of her son.

As viewers of Amelia’s struggle we are given two options on how to explain the film’s conflict. Is Amelia sane or insane, and which is worse? If she is insane - and the film’s ending is certainly open enough to suggest that she is being tortured by her mind - then the struggle exists solely within her home. The stakes are still very high, since an expressionist reading of the film forces you to accept that Amelia is trying to stop herself from a powerful urge to murder her son, but they are isolated. The same can’t be said if we accept a literal reading of the events.

If Amelia is perfectly sane in The Babadook, then she is perhaps worse off. The laws of our universe as we know them do not accommodate spectral, pop-up book enthusiasts who can manipulate reality and possess single mothers. The world proposed by a literal reading of The Babadook is near unthinkable. It is one in which we are wrong about everything and no one is safe. It is a reality that looks exactly like insanity.

In volume three of his Horror of Philosophy series, Tentacles Longer Than Night, Eugene Thacker says that it is the space between the definitive answers of sanity and insanity - a state which he terms fantasy - that horror thrives. Lovecraft and Poe, whose works make up the bulk of Thacker’s analysis, were masters of this balance. The author points to the introduction of Poe’s The Black Cat and Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out Of Time as pinnacle examples of this trope. Each story begins after the subsequently described events take place and the narrators specifically tell their readers that, given the unlikeliness of their recountings,  it is quite possible they are insane.

In stories that evoke the question of a sane narrator, regardless of the medium, the question of reality is integral to the stakes and a key ingredient in the horror. It is the mark of a master, I think, when done properly and left unresolved. Either side – clear minded or off the rocker – provides an anchor from which an audience can navigate the supernatural events of a given tale. When those anchors are taken away, like they are in The Babadook,  we are left to drift in the terrifying moments that make up the present. Here in the sea of uncertainty, where we live daily life, we can access something more terrifying than an unmapped reality or a broken brain: we face the human frailty contained in the thought that an explanation can’t save us from our present circumstances.