An eerie, threadbare stuffed bunny induced scares for the way it signaled the presence of ghosts in writer/director Damian McCarthy’s feature debut, 2021’s Caveat. The filmmaker ramps up the tension and scares in his follow-up, Oddity, another chill-inducing tale of supernatural revenge with one creepy mannequin at the center.
Oddity, releasing on July 19, stars Carolyn Bracken (You Are Not My Mother) as twin sisters Dani and Darcy. When Dani is brutally murdered at the remote country house that she’s renovating with her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee), the suspect dies soon after. But Darcy, a blind medium and oddity shop owner, arrives at Ted’s home a year later under the conviction that there’s more to Dani’s death than meets the eye; and she’s brought a creepy wooden mannequin with her to find the truth.
While the mannequin is the centerpiece in McCarthy’s unsettling sophomore effort, look for the Caveat bunny on the shelves of Darcy’s shop. It’s not the only loose connection either; Caveat star Jonathan French also appears in Oddity in a different role. Considering the shared themes of supernatural karma and justice, it’s easy to infer a shared universe unfolding. In Oddity‘s case, though, it’s a wry wink from its filmmaker.
In a recent chat with McCarthy, the filmmaker explained why the drumming bunny from Caveat received an upgrade for its brief cameo in Oddity, and why it’s ultimately a tongue-in-cheek in joke.
Leila Sykes and the drumming bunny in ‘Caveat’
McCarthy told Bloody Disgusting, “It is the same designer. It’s Lisa Zagone, who designed the Caveat bunny. I just wanted her to design something, so she designed it. It’s impossible to replicate what she did with that bunny. I mean, the bunny’s gone. I unfortunately don’t have it anymore, but she built what I was saying, ‘Okay, let’s make a hare that has symbols this time and something bigger and meaner.’ That was her brief. She’s got this fantastic way of designing things. So, it’s just a little nod to [Caveat]. More from my own amusement than anything, but yeah, nicely spotted.”
Oddity belongs to Darcy and her terrifying Wooden Man, one whose face is locked in a permanent scream with finger-sized holes in the back of its skull. McCarthy’s explanation behind the mannequin’s design highlights how much he was thinking about crafting effective scares in advance.
“The initial idea was that I always wanted him screaming, because he’ll just look unsettling sitting there with a silent scream,” McCarthy said. “But then just to leave it open for sound design at the end, because when he finally starts doing things, it’s like, great, so if he looks like he’s screaming, it just means that anything then can be put in once we get to the sound design. And as you say, sound design is probably 70%, if not more, of a horror film. We didn’t have much time to design him at all. It was luckily through Paul McDonnell. I had just sent him a few drawings, a few real basic examples of what I wanted. Because we were so tight on time and very lucky to get Paul, it was just sitting down on Zoom with him, just watching him mold it.
“He goes, ‘You’re going to have to be very decisive because whatever we’re doing today is what it’s going to be molded.’ Because it had to go to mold, our stunt man’s body was going to be molded to play the non-prop parts. There were a lot of like, ‘Okay, remove the nose. Okay, bring the nose back.’ Poor Paul, but it worked really well. But he did say, ‘Next time we’re working together, just give me a bit more time.’ It was a bit of a mad dash, but it worked. Maybe that’s why it worked so well because we didn’t have time to overthink it.”
More than just scares, McCarthy wanted to use the Wooden Man to toy with audience anticipation and act as a pressure release where needed, too.
Caroline Menton and Carolyn Bracken in Damian McCarthy’s ODDITY. Courtesy of Colm Hogan. An IFC Films and Shudder Release
“The idea was it was never going to be a big, big tease of even what he looked like. There’s a little bit when Yana [played by Caroline Menton] and Darcy are moving around a little bit, you’re getting a glimpse of him at the table, but finally, he’s just there. He’s just out front and center. That was always the idea that he’s just there, and it might even become comedic because he’s just sitting there and you’d almost wonder whether he is going to lose any kind of a threat because we’re so used to looking at him, by the time he finally does something. There were little things that we shot; that classic trope of his head moving left and right, and he’s looking at different things. We teased it a little bit, but no, in the end, once we really started locking the edit, it was actually funnier and just a little creepier if he just does nothing. He’s just sitting there, and the audience is going, ‘Is anything going to happen?'”
Oddity does have a playful attitude, but it’s not a horror-comedy. While there are occasional laughs to break up the tension, McCarthy’s latest brings the scares. For the filmmaker, it’s as much about making sure his audience is entertained as they are terrified.
On finding that line between horror and comedy, McCarthy shares, “I never try to intentionally be funny, heaven forbid, but it’s just, I think if you try to make a film that’s so serious, if it took itself so seriously, then it just becomes an unintentional comedy because it’s like we have to take this so seriously that there’s that thing of trying not to laugh then. If you allow the audience to laugh and just have the characters a little bit dry, some of the stuff that’s coming out of their mouth is quite droll, and some of their comments are cutting to each other; I think it helps. It’s just a bit more entertaining, as opposed to having all the dialogue be super serious.”
He continues, “I tried to do the same with Caveat. I put stuff in Caveat that I find quite funny, but because Jonathan’s on his own for so much of it. At one stage, that corpse has a bag on her head, and it moves around, and there’s a hole, and it’s great because anybody who laughs at that knows that that’s clearly not supposed to be serious. It’s like the old Sam Raimi rule that your number one goal in making a film should be to entertain. Just try to make it as funny as it can be, and it should just help the horror because it’s such a fine line between horror and comedy anyway.“
Courtesy of Colm Hogan. An IFC Films and Shudder Release
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