Horror director Damian McCarthy enjoys the dusty, the lived-in, the tactile. He shot his first film, “Caveat,” and his buzzy new second feature, “Oddity” in a spacious converted barn in his native Ireland, and every nook and cranny bounces light like a real-life, if slightly dingy, manor.
“Oddity,” from IFC Films / Shudder, is filled with artifacts from the past, as a woman who is blind named Darcy (Carolyn Bracken) tries to find out who killed her sister using the objects from her store of haunted items —including an imposing wooden man. The result is a mysterious film that dabbles in the occult and has been engaging audiences at festival stops like South by Southwest and Overlook. McCarthy spoke with PvNew about creating a dynamic role for a character who is blind, potential sequel ideas and shooting both of his films in one confined space.
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Even if you took the plot away, Darcy’s haunted objects and the atmosphere in general are spooky. How did you conceptualize all of the strong visuals for “Oddity”?
Growing up with EC Comics, “Creepshow,” all that stuff, it just gets in there, a big mishmash of stuff. Even the old “Twilight Zones,” every episode was so different. I think of myself as a visual director, and it began with that space I had made for my film before this. We built our sets inside in that room, but I spent so much time there, I thought it’d be great if we got rid of the sets, and the room is so interesting. Could somebody live here? Could we turn this into a home that somebody’s renovated?
I had a lot of short film ideas. I was thinking, “A guy is trying to talk his way into a house because he’s telling her that a killer has gone in.” It’s great, but you couldn’t get a feature film out of that. It’d be very boring. Or a haunted hotel desk bell was something that had floated in and out of other scripts that I tried to write. There were just all these ideas with strong visuals: the bell, the wooden man, the character who gets killed and all that’s left is the glass eye. I thought, “I like all of these ideas. If I only got to make one more film, how do I use up a lot of the ideas that I like?” So I started writing that script, weaving in all of these.
Could you see a universe in which you tell other tales from Darcy’s collection of haunted things?
You never say no to any of these things. A lot of her haunted items on the shelves are our stuff from my short films. I’ve made a lot of short films and there are haunted recorders, there’s one called “Hatch” where a guy lays an egg. All that stuff is on the shelf. So there’s little callbacks to those. I just think it’s a fantastic subgenre of horror: the item that’s haunted.
Darcy is such a rich character, and follows a history of horror characters who are blind, going back to Audrey Hepburn, who was brilliant in “Wait Until Dark,” up until recent movies like the “Don’t Breathe” films. How did you conceptualize the line where her blindness deepened the story that you were telling, while not taking advantage of her?
Again, a lot of these ideas come from other short films or other scripts that I could never figure out how to make work properly. She had been another character whose object reading is so much about touch that it’s almost like it heightened this sense. It’s made her so sensitive to touch. If she’s reading these objects that she can tell everything about them just from touch, it seems to naturally lend itself to that.
I always really liked [the 1973 film] “Don’t Look Now.” The psychic is almost set up to be the scariest thing in the film, because she’s so unpredictable and she keeps inserting herself into this couple’s lives, but ultimately, she’s trying to help him, to save him. I always really liked that idea, and was a little bit like Darcy when she first showed up at the house. You kind of wonder, is she a threat? What is she doing here? But as you start to realize what’s happening, it’s following that “Don’t Look Now” style a bit.
The film is primarily shot in one location. What were some of the pros and cons of working in one big space?
I’d shot “Caveat” there and I and I’m good friends with the family that owned the house. You walk out that door, that’s where the makeup department and the hair are. All of the producers were over there, and everybody was inside that one area, so it made it like a real little tribe inside. I think for the actors it was quite good too, because it was no cheating in terms of where everything is in the film and then where it is in real life. The bathroom is downstairs and the bedroom is upstairs, so if you wanted to, you could follow them all the way around.
We did cut the hole in the floor, so that shows how trusting they were of us. We asked, “How did you feel about us cutting a big hole in the floor?” They were like, “Not great,” but we were able to return everything to as good as new, so all good.
Is there anything you can tease about your future work?
I’m starting pre-production now on my next film, which I hope we’re shooting at the end of the year. It’s similar. I think I’ve learned a lot now from my two films. It’s nice to be able to get the chance to make another film and build on that again. Its characters are surrounded by a lot of strange, dangerous characters, and our main character goes on holiday to the wrong place. So hopefully that’ll be next year when we’re talking more about it.
Watch the “Oddity” trailer below.
