The Big Picture

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sits down with the team behind
Oddity
at SXSW 2024.
Writer-director Damian Mc Carthy and stars Gwilym Lee and Carolyn Bracken discuss making their stunning and deeply chilling supernatural horror movie.

Oddity
follows a blind medium who sets out to uncover the truth behind her sister’s murder with the help of a wooden mannequin.

Sure, we’ve seen our fair share of horror movies with haunted objects in them, like in The Conjuring franchise, but filmmaker Damian Mc Carthy is carving out a unique and very special place for himself in that sub-genre via an especially deft hand when crafting them, one that gives his movies an unmatched and highly refreshing texture and elegance.

Mc Carthy’s second feature film as a director is Oddity. It stars Carolyn Bracken as Darcy, a psychic and collector of cursed objects. A year after her twin sister, Dani (Bracken), is brutally murdered, Darcy opts to visit the scene of the crime — a home Dani’s husband (Gwilym Lee) now shares with his new girlfriend, Yana (Caroline Menton). With the help of an eerie wooden mannequin, Darcy sets out to uncover the truth about Dani’s death.

While in Austin for Oddity’s world premiere at the SXSW film festival, Bracken, Lee, and Mc Carthy all visited the Collider Interview studio to discuss their experience bringing the story to screen.

Image via Collider

Before getting to the wealth of haunted objects featured in the film, including the aforementioned Wood Man, Bracken took a moment to touch on pulling double duty while making the movie. While Dani and Darcy are twins, they’re very different people, and Bracken set out to reflect that, but while ensuring the audience always felt the familial connection. She explained:

“In terms of the prep for both of the sisters, I did want to not just search their differences, because that’s probably a very easy direction to go down, that they have to be wildly different. I wanted to explore their similarities. Do you know what I mean? There were certain aspects of their character, with both of them, that I didn’t want to change too much.
What I really loved about Darcy is her glorious independence and her ethical ambiguity and her fierce protectiveness over her sister. I think with Dani, she’s all heart
, you know what I mean? She loves her sister, she loves her husband, and I think that finding the heart in Dani was important because we don’t see her as much as Darcy.”

‘Oddity’ Director Damian Mc Carthy Is One to Watch
Image via Collider

Related ‘Oddity’ Review: This Supernatural Horror Film Will Tear You To Pieces | SXSW 2024 Yeah, you should definitely stick your hand in the mouth of the perpetually screaming wooden man.

While Mc Carthy was eager to sing Bracken and Lee’s praises for taking the words he put on the page and making so much more with them, his stars insisted he take the credit he deserves for the positive working environment and the sky-high quality of the finished product. Lee began:

“It’s so easy to wax lyrical about this man. First of all, as you can tell, he’s just such a down-to-eart
h, lovely, gentle, warm kind of individual and creates a great atmosphere on set to work with. He is also an encyclopedia of horror. Knows the genre inside out, and it’s what makes this film work so well, I think, is because he knows how the mechanics work, how the cogs work, and plays around with those moments as well.
There’s a great scene at the end that I don’t want to spoil, but you know there’s a scare coming and he takes that apart and elongates it over such a long time, and there’s just real joy in that and there’s a thrill for an audience watching that. His knowledge of the genre leads me to trust him absolutely, and that trust makes a great foundation for a creative experience.”

Bracken jumped in to reinforce Lee’s comments, and to emphasize that great value Mc Carthy places in collaboration:

“What Damian said about the process of the second movie being quite smooth, he’s the reason why it was so smooth. [Laughs] Just a very, very collaborative gentleman. It was just this lovely atmosphere on set. And just as Gwilym said, the knowledge that he has — and you were just so efficient, like storyboards, you knew exactly what you wanted, but he was completely open to collaboration. Like as you were saying about just finding the characters, he was just incredibly approachable, and I think you need to be able to have that approachability as a director and that ability to be able to communicate, to collaborate and all that kind of stuff. He’s brilliant. It was really smooth, wasn’t it?”

‘Oddity’s Oddities Are Real Creepy Objects the Director Collects
Image via SXSW

Given Mc Carthy has a habit of collecting oddities and supposedly haunted objects, it should come as no surprise that Oddity is filled with them. And the same is true of his previous work as well. In fact, Mc Carthy is building a haunted object cinematic universe of sorts with these items. He explained:

“In [Darcy’s] room of haunted objects, a lot of that stuff was in my short films just because I had that stuff collected and said, ‘Oh, let’s put it there.’ Because if somebody sees the reel to reel recorder, there was a short film about that, or there’s an old cymbal monkey, there’s a short about that.
My next two scripts are written and they’re, again, full of haunted items
and stuff that’s doing stuff, you know?”

After you meet Oddity’s The Wooden Man, you’re going to be mighty eager to see what else Mc Carthy can cook up in the haunted object department.

Given the film’s SXSW description refers to him as a “wooden mannequin” and many festival attendees whipped up their own names for the item, I opted to ask Mc Carthy for clarity. Does he have an official name, even if it’s just a term used during the production process? Mc Carthy revealed, “It was just always The Wooden Man. We never named it. We never nicknamed it. It was like, where’s The Wooden Man?”

Just because he didn’t have a name, doesn’t mean he didn’t feel real. Bracken added, “We’d address him, you know what I mean? You’d walk in and you’d be like, ‘Hey!’ He just kind of was there and just became part of the furniture, you know? We all got used to him after the initial shock.”

Why Damian Mc Carthy Doesn’t Explain Away ‘Oddity’s Wooden Man
Image via Collider

One of many things Mc Carthy does especially well with this Wooden Man is strike the ideal balance between offering the audience enough without revealing too much about the specifics of how he operates. It’s a balance that sparks engagement and ensures the movie will linger on minds well after the credits roll.

Given I haven’t stopped wondering about where The Wooden Man came from and every single thing he’s capable of myself, I opted to ask Mc Carthy if even he knows these details. Did he ever whip up a Wooden Man bible of sorts?

“You try to keep it kind of loose. I never really committed anything down, or even in the scripts, there was never anything about how she’s controlling this or what she does because I think sometimes with horror films, it’s fun if people use their imagination with it. Because even when Yana’s removing those items from [his] head, it’s a lock of hair and it’s a photograph, but how does this work? But
I think all of that is kind of intentional to never show her doing any of this witchcraft stuff because she’s clearly an unreliable narrator.
We’re not really sure if anything that she’s saying is true. Ted is obviously gaslighting her, saying, ‘Well, you know, you haven’t been very well and are you sure everything’s okay?’ He’s really manipulative. So if you’d ever shown her doing anything really specific, I think it would have given it away.”

We may not know where The Wooden Man came from, but we do know where he went after starring in his first feature film. Mc Carthy laughed and revealed:

“The Wooden Man, I think, for the last year, he’s been stored at my parents’ house, or he’s in my childhood bedroom, so when I go home he’s just alongside the bed when you wake up.”

Looking for even more about The Wooden Man, the Oddity screenplay, and the craftsmanship that went into bringing it to life on the big screen? You can catch my full chat with Mc Carthy, Bracken and Lee in the video at the top of this article.