How YouTube gave cinema its next great horror director
One of the most bone-chilling images in recent horror cinema is, on the surface, nothing more than a beanie hat with a hole through it.
In the scene, the accessory is pulled down over the wearer’s face so far that one of her eyes is clearly visible through said hole. Like most great horror scares, context is everything, though, and the image becomes a truly terrifying one when you consider two things. The first is that the wearer is dead, and the second is that the person who put said beanie hat on the corpse definitely didn’t put it on like that; he just looked away for a second and to say anything else would spoil it.
The image comes from the 2020 Irish horror film Caveat, directed by Damian McCarthy, one of the best calling card movies to arrive in the horror scene for years. A debut of quite absurd style and panache that throws about five of the most creative, unnerving horror set pieces you’ll ever see at you. The fact that it was made for just £250,000 beggars belief. It is slight, and it doesn’t have much else to offer other than those set pieces (the two lead performances by Johnny French and Leila Sykes are great), but it really doesn’t have to offer much more than that.
It’s a calling card picture after all. It’s less about telling a story than it is about showing what the director is capable of, and by the evidence shown by Caveat, there was little that McCarthy couldn’t do. While it sounds like an overnight success, the truth is that McCarthy’s journey began way back in 2003, after he graduated from his hometown of Cork’s St John’s College with a distinction in scriptwriting and directing.
With no shortcut into Hollywood making itself known, McCarthy turned to a little video-sharing website that had got off the ground around the same time. A site called YouTube.
How did YouTube start the career of Damian McCarthy?
While working as an electrician to pay the bills, McCarthy began writing short films, making them with the help of his friends and throwing them on YouTube to help spread the word about his work – the first one, He Dies at the End, was uploaded 17 years ago, and one can still see the DNA shared between it and Caveat. Few directors have ever captured eerie stillness the way McCarthy does, and that’s clearly something he had right from the jump.
It’s clear he also understands that a scare and a joke are more or less the same thing, a matter of set-up and punchline. Which makes sense, this is a man whose favourite film is Evil Dead 2. Caveat doesn’t indulge in his sense of humour as much, but its follow-up, 2024’s Oddity, absolutely does. Expanding on everything that made his previous work great while retaining the same unmistakable feel that he’s had on his nine films for YouTube as well.
Caveat and Oddity were praised to the moon in horror circles, but 2026 could quite possibly be the year that McCarthy breaks into the mainstream with his upcoming picture, Hokum. With Severance‘s Adam Scott leading the film and Neon, the brains behind Longlegs, Anora and Parasite handling the promotion, this scrappy director could graduate from YouTube to the big leagues. Few directors, even in a genre having as extended a purple patch as horror is right now, would deserve it more.
Just wait for the sun to go down before giving his work a shot, though, if you dare.