The Director Of One Of 2024's Scariest Films Didn't Realize What A Big Risk He Was Taking [Exclusive]

Writer/director Damian Mc Carthy's "Oddity" is one of the best horror movies of 2024. The small-scale Irish film has an absolutely killer opening scene: A woman named Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is alone in an empty house while her husband works the night shift at a nearby asylum. Dani leaves her front door open for a minute while she searches for something in her car outside, and when she returns to the house, there's a knock at the door. A former occupant of the asylum named Olin (Tadgh Murphy) is there in the dark, claiming that he witnessed someone slip into the house unnoticed while she was in the car. He's asking her to let him inside so he can help her, and Dani is understandably shaken at this suggestion: She doesn't know this man, and she didn't see anyone enter the house. But what if he's right? What should she do?

A majority of the movie takes place a year after this incident occurs, as Dani's twin sister Darcy (also Bracken), a medium who owns a store full of haunted objects, slowly discovers the truth of what happened to Dani that night. But hoo boy, talk about starting thing off with a bang.

I recently had the chance to speak with Mc Carthy about "Oddity," and I asked if he came up with the opening scene first, or reverse-engineered that scene after coming up with other aspects of the story. As it turns out, several aspects of the movie (including the opening scene) existed in his mind as short stories that he decided to stitch together into one big narrative:

"A lot of the characters in this, and a lot of the situations they're in — the settings, Tadgh's character, Olin — they were all scenes that I've had for years. I was like, 'I could just turn this into a short film.' 'I like this idea, but I don't know what to do with it.' 'This scene doesn't really have a home.' And it became this thing of, every time I make a film, I'm worried that I won't get to make another one. So I was like, 'If I could make one more film' — and after 'Caveat,' I felt like I had another chance to do one — 'I'm going to take all of these scenes that I really like, and instead of making a short film, I'm just going to spend a couple of years at it and see if I can weave these stories together and bring these characters together and see if I can use them in this way.'

It could be creatively treacherous to approach constructing a screenplay out of distinct and disparate stories, but Mc Carthy says he didn't realize the weight of his decision until he was in post-production, at which point it would have been too late to do anything about it:

"It was only when I got to the edit that I was like, 'This was actually kind of risky, because are ghosts going to work alongside this murder mystery, alongside these haunted items, alongside this kind of slasher thing that's happening in it?' Luckily, though, I haven't seen any criticism that says, 'This thing is just all over the place!' But they did seem to all blend together nicely."

Armed with the understanding of how the film was conceived, maybe the best thing I can say about "Oddity" is that the final movie does not feel at all like it was put together piecemeal. The storylines all feed into each other organically, resulting in a creepy murder mystery with plenty of unsettling moments (and one scary-as-hell double jump scare).

You can listen to my full interview with Mc Carthy on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which also features a spoiler-filled conversation between myself and /Film's Chris Evangelista about the movie:

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