Damian Mc Carthy terrified audiences with his 2020 feature film debut Caveat, featuring a strange rabbit and one of the most unsettling jumpscares of recent memory. This year, Mc Carthy is back with his new vision of terror, Oddity, a ghostly murder mystery about a blind medium searching for the truth about her twin’s death.
In Oddity, “A blind medium uncovers the truth behind her sister’s death with the help of a frightening wooden mannequin.”
We spoke with Mc Carthy and Oddity stars Carolyn Bracken and Gwilym Lee about making the scariest movie of 2024, that terrifying wooden man, and more.
Gwilym Lee: There were a few wet seats, I think probably.
Damian Mc Carthy: We were really excited, I think leading up to it, not having seen Oddity with an audience and they responded in all the right places and in some places that we didn’t expect as well. They kind of recognized some humor that maybe we weren’t aware was necessarily there. It was a good night. It was really fun.
DM: Yeah, I think it’s just taking a lifelong love of horror films and then all the subgenres in that horror film. Your slasher and your ghost story and your psychological thriller and just trying to mix it all together and see if you can get away with it. And luckily it did work because you never know. But I will say it was definitely written with love because I do love all those subgenres, so it was never like, “Okay, I’m just trying to tick boxes and make sure I’m getting everything in there.” It’s only now that it’s all finished and people have seen it that you start to see it [all come together]. It’s even a little bit of a monster movie at the end.
DM: I guess maybe the golem would probably be the closest thing, but no, nothing in particular. I don’t have anything in Irish folklore about murderers roaming the countryside. No, it’s just that idea of an object coming, all your classics like Talking Tina in The Twilight Zone and Chucky.
DM: I like to draw myself. I’m not very good at it, but I storyboard and stuff. Even the way he was described in the script was just that he was screaming. The only reason for that was to cover myself in sound design. Once you get to sound design, if he’s doing something, it allows you to just leave yourself open for those ideas afterward. But really it was sitting down with the designer, Paul McDonald, and watching him come up with these ideas. Paul has so much experience. He’s built huge structures before and they’re basically creatures made of timber, ivy, and twisted bark. So he was able to take that idea and put a horror spin on it with this thing.
Carolyn Bracken: Yeah, I suppose the character of Darcy is so connected to Woody McWood Face that I felt kind of a warmth that was always happy to see him there. You know what I mean? A lot of the time, from my memory, he was propped at the end of the table in that pose. And when you think about if there’s dozens of crew on set, everybody’s just getting on with it and [working] around him. He became part of the furniture by the end. But initially, it was very unsettling, particularly that eternal scream. He feels different than what you think he’s going to feel like.
GL: He was omnipresent. He was just always there and kind of a witness to daily lives, really watching silently observing.
CB: Yeah, I think initially Darcy and Danni were there in the script, you know what I mean? And Darcy was clearly very different from Danni. I’ve said it a few times now in terms of prepping for Darcy in particular, there was a part of me that was a little bit concerned [about playing both characters]. I think her heart, but also her ethical ambiguity, it was about trying to balance all of those things together.
But I found that, to be honest with you, the costume design, the hair, the makeup, the script, working with Damian each day, throughout each scene quite thoroughly. I’ve said a few times that it made my job very easy to find her once I found her, once that costume was on, once the hair and the makeup were done. Yeah, she just kind of found me, I think, which sounds a little bit, can I say wanky? But yeah, I think throughout that process then she actually kind of found me a bit.
CB: I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned. I wanted to make sure to just get it right. Just Darcy’s backstory as well. She wasn’t always blind, do you know what I mean? So she leading the world with that perspective as well. It was just about doing the homework and trying to understand that a bit more. I did have contacts which helped, but it was just taken day by day. And then there are differences in terms of how she moves in her antique shop. She’s very comfortable in there. She knows the geography and she’s kind of guided by the wooden man as well in a lot of the scenes in the house. So yeah, it was just about taking it scene by scene in terms of navigating and just trying to do it carefully, sensitively, and as best I could.
DM: Yeah, it did work. I think it was that trying to have that timeless feel to the film. I was saying before that I tried my best to write cell phones out of the script. It’s really the only piece of technology in there because even in Darcy’s apartment, she’s using an old answering machine and things like that. Our brilliant production designer, Lauren, I think Lauren was only 22 or something. We said, “Lauren, we need to get an answering machine.” She was like, “What’s an answering machine?” I was like, “How young are you?” But she’s brilliant. For somebody so young, she created this world that does feel quite antique.
DM: It’s funny. I have thought about it because there’s not much we really touch on with her.
DM: Some of that stuff right is from short films I’ve made. I mean the characters are still there and Darcy] is such an interesting character anyway. She’s got stories. So yeah, it’s interesting.
DM: Unfortunately, it’s not the same rabbit. I guess it’s that same kind of feel to it. I just like weathered old props, but I think it is just an aesthetic. A lot of that, even the rabbit in Caveat, a lot of that was inspired by the old Jim Henson film Dream Child from the 1980s. There’s the Mad Hatter party and I mean, the rabbit in that is terrifying. It’s a movie. So yeah, I think I always felt that if I could design props, any prop I think I’ll ever design, that’ll always be somewhere in the references, even if it’s not a rabbit.