Movies & TV Hokum Hokum’s Damian McCarthy Explains the Rabbits of It All Reactor interviewed writer-director McCarthy and actor Adam Scott about the horror film By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on April 30, 2026 Credit: Neon Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Neon Hokum, latest horror movie from writer-director Damian McCarthy, features Adam Scott playing a prickly novelist named Ohm Bauman who heads to an Irish inn to spread his parents’ ashes. Without getting into spoilers, Ohm ultimately becomes trapped inside the inn, which is rumored to be haunted by an ancient evil witch, and faces many horrors, with more than a few of them bunny-shaped in nature. “Those rabbits keep seeming to find their way into the movie,” McCarthy told me in an interview with Scott in the lead up to the film’s release. He shared specific inspirations for the bunny imagery of it all as well as the desire to show a shanachie on screen, while Scott talked about what Ohm sees (and doesn’t see) in the film. Read on for the full discussion. Credit: Neon This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.   Ohm faces internal and external trauma and horror, and sometimes the viewer sees his internal horrors manifested on screen. I wondered for you as an actor, how you approached playing those scenes where things from his past were taking physical form for the viewer? Adam Scott: I think that one of the reasons I was so excited to do the movie—other than Damian’s previous movie Oddity, such a big fan of that— was the character, who’s starting as this prickly, for lack of a better word, a-hole, and then taking this journey where, unbeknownst to him, he’s figuring out how to forgive himself and forgive his father, to let himself off the hook. I think that whether or not everything that happens over the course of the movie is actually happening or not, it is a direct reflection of how he feels about himself and how he sees the world, and that starts to change as he investigates and is finally at a place where he’s able to face up to how he got here. Damian, one of the things that was so striking about the movie was the imagery. We see some of it in the trailer, and I wanted to talk to you about how you came up with that imagery, specifically the rabbit imagery. Damian McCarthy: It was going to be a long time spent with just this one character [Scott’s Ohm] in the one location. He arrives at the hotel, he interacts with the other characters, but by the time he lands in the situation he’s in and trying to escape this night, there’s nobody else there. Your production design—every ornament and painting—everything in the room becomes vital then, and those are the things that are that are watching him. And if you ever want to cut away from the actor to something else in the room… I feel like that that cut away has to be justified, and the way to do that is just with this scary imagery of ornaments and haunting clocks and those carvings of the babies, the cherubs over the fireplace; all of this just continues to tighten those screws and make the film a lot more unsettling. Courtesy of Neon And is there anything special about the rabbit theme? Damian: It seems to keep coming back, those rabbits keep seeming to find their way into the movie. And I know all that comes from, as a child, watching Watership Down, which is very frightening, and then as a film student, things like Danny Darko and Gummo, the kid who has the bunny ears, or Sexy Beast, that demonic hare that’s following Ray Winstone around the desert. Adam: Fatal Attraction. Damian: [laughs] Yeah, it’s all there. So I think all of that—it’s just an image that’s quite strange. And then you get into Alice in Wonderland, that’s what leads her into this other strange world, which I always loved as a child. I think all of that now, just as an adult and making films, seems to keep finding its way back in there. And last question: The actor who played the owner of the hotel—his voice, his delivery, is just fantastic. And I would love to hear how you found him, or if you had him in mind when you wrote that part. Damian: Brendan Conroy, an excellent Irish actor. I wanted somebody that would have that kind of gravitas… we call them in Ireland a shanachie, which would be an old Irish storyteller. And I thought, this part has got to be a shanachie. This has gotta be a guy who’s sitting down and telling everybody in the pubs some old, interesting story. I thought Brendan would be brilliant for that. And he was just lovely to work with. Hokum premieres in theaters on May 1, 2026.[end-mark] The post <i>Hokum</i>’s Damian McCarthy Explains the Rabbits of It All appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations Five Twisty, Reality-Bending SFF Books  Featuring some truly ingenious ways of messing with the fabric of reality… By Lorna Wallace | Published on April 30, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Exploring the nature of reality is a pursuit that’s central to human experience, driving physicists, philosophers, and artists alike to question every facet of our perception and interpretation of existence. In the realm of speculative fiction, authors have come up with countless creative ways to bend reality in their stories—from reality-altering weapons to memory-eating entities. Here are five science fiction, fantasy, and horror books that explore just a few of these reality-bending possibilities. Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (2016) Ninefox Gambit is the kind of SFF story that throws you in at the deep end with its worldbuilding and expects you to learn how to swim on your own. As far as I understand it (and in very simplified terms!), in this world the laws of physics can be manipulated by mathematical formations and collective belief. This means that various weapons exist which can twist reality in some rather unusual and destructive ways. The story follows Captain Cheris, who has been tasked with reclaiming the Fortress of Scattered Needles—a star base that has been taken over by heretics. She’s not in it alone, though; along for the ride is the consciousness of Jedao, a disgraced general who has never lost a battle, but has possibly lost his mind (and has definitely lost his body). Although I found the mechanics of this world to be confusing early on (and, honestly, even by the end I’m still not sure I fully understood), I found the story and characters to be so compelling that I was happy to spend the time coming to grips with the more challenging aspects of the story. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (2019) Arguably all time travel stories bend reality, but This Is How You Lose the Time War takes things to such an extreme that it also bends the reader’s mind. Red and Blue are agents on opposite sides of a war that is being fought via time travel. They’re both incredibly skilled at their jobs, which means the current reality is constantly being changed as they one-up each other to give their empire the victory. Each new timeline is only vaguely described (though in beautifully lyrical language) and feels completely different compared to the last, leaving the reader feeling forever unmoored. But the anchor of the story is the budding relationship between Red and Blue—kicked off in the first chapter by a letter intended to taunt a rival but which develops into an unlikely pen pal correspondence. Although the world is constantly changing around the time-traveling agents, their growing bond endures through it all. There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (2020) The Antimemetics Division—which is part of a larger secretive organization—is tasked with destroying anomalous entities that are feasting on people’s memories. These entities also have the ability to delete themselves from memory, meaning that most people aren’t even aware that their reality is changing around them as things are forgotten and wiped from existence. But Marie Quinn is not most people. She’s the director of the Antimemetics Division and while she doesn’t have access to all of her memories, she at least knows that humanity is fighting this battle. The horrifying sci-fi concept at the heart of There Is No Antimemetics Division pulled me in instantly, and although I was initially concerned that I’d get frustrated with characters forgetting revelations that I could remember, I found that that dynamic actually served to make the story feel all the more tense and emotional. If the plot sounds familiar to you but you’re sure you haven’t read the book, it’s not because an antimemetic entity has eaten your memory. You might have stumbled across it when the story was first published online in serial form between 2015 and 2020. It was then traditionally published as a full novel in 2025. We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer (2024) We Used to Live Here is a little different from the other books on this list. While reality is definitively being altered in those stories, in We Used to Live Here the reader can’t help but question whether reality really is being changed or whether it’s just that the narrator, Eve, is losing her mind (I vote the former!). Eve and her girlfriend Charlie have recently moved into a house with the intention of fixing it up and flipping it for a profit. Eve is home alone one night when a family shows up on the doorstep; the father, Thomas, says that he used to live in the house and they ask to come in for a quick tour. Eve, being the people-pleaser that she is, can’t find it within herself to say no—a decision she quickly comes to regret. Once the family are inside, the night soon goes off the rails in a terrifying way that makes Eve question herself, the house, and eventually even reality itself. Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle (2025) May 23rd is a big day for statistics professor Vera. She’s celebrating the publication of her first book, but she’s also planning to tell her mom, with whom she has a difficult relationship, that not only is she bisexual, but she’s also engaged to Annie (meaning they aren’t just roommates…). And then everything goes wrong in the most improbably horrific ways possible—none of which I want to spoil—and around 8 million people end up dead. The disaster becomes known as the Low Probability Event and it launches Vera into a nihilistic depression. But she’s wrenched out of her wallowing by Layne, a government agent who needs her expertise because he has a hunch that the Low Probability Event—and the similar smaller disasters that have been popping up ever since—are tied to an unusual casino in Las Vegas. The gruesomely creative and comically unlikely horror scenarios in Lucky Day have the same delicious flavor of absurdity that is infused into the best Final Destination death scenes… but on a mass scale. And along with people dying in unique and unexpected ways, Lucky Day also delves into deeper, more serious subjects, including capitalistic greed and bi-erasure. This list has only covered a few of the SFF and horror books that feature reality bending, so if I’ve missed any of your favorites, feel free to leave them in the comments below.[end-mark] The post Five Twisty, Reality-Bending SFF Books  appeared first on Reactor.

Most Americans were glad to get another Tax Day behind them this month. It’s galling to hand over a third of everything you earned last year to government to waste, fraud, and abuse. Consider the raw numbers. Last year the federal government took just over $5 trillion. States and localities took another $2.5 trillion. Out of a total personal income of just $26 trillion, that’s one in three. For perspective, you work for the Feds Monday, you work for your state and locality Tuesday, and you don’t get to put anything in your pocket until hump day. For perspective, a third is roughly 20 times more than the British were trying to tax in the Boston Tea Party. Free at last. Notably, we don’t have tea parties anymore. Partly because they don’t make Americans like they used to, but also because that lost third is hidden: The devil’s brew of income tax withholding, employer taxes that come out of salaries, embedded taxes where the trucker bought diesel, Publix paid property tax, but it’s not listed on the bananas. So where did it go wrong, and how do we make it right? The original sin, of course, was the income tax, passed right before World War I. Indeed, it’s a big reason we had a world war—governments didn’t used to be able to afford them. It was originally billed as a tax on the rich, with a top rate of 7% starting around $15 million in today’s dollars. Perhaps you’ll recognize the sales pitch—billionaires will pay just a few percent, and all will be well. Of course, “tax the rich” was bait as it ratcheted up the rates and ratcheted down who pays, so today the income tax hits everybody over $15,000 and takes a quarter of everything we earn. This does not include the billions of hours Americans spend trying to figure out their taxes under threat of imprisonment if you get it wrong—which is, at least, slightly less painful than a root canal. So what would it take to get rid of federal income tax? It’s actually very easy—Congress could literally pass a bill tomorrow. After all, the 16th amendment allows an income tax; it does not require one. Congress won’t do it. It exists to pillage. But what would happen if the income tax were eliminated? The federal government would lose about $2.5 trillion of funding. They’d have to slash foreign aid, Treasury bailouts for bankers, welfare for the able-bodied, grants to left-wing rioters, overseas wars (one Iran per generation, pace yourself). Even the tax-funded gender reassignment surgeries for inmates and illegal aliens—they’ll have to get Guatemala to pay. In concrete terms, the federal government would shrink to half what it was between the 1920s and the 1950s, back before the welfare industrial complex and the fraud industrial complex it built. In return, you keep the nearly $1,500 a month the median family pays in taxes. But more important, every American would benefit from an enormous boost to economic growth and wages that could triple that to $4,500 a month per family. The reason is that, just like cigarette taxes reduce smoking, income taxes reduce income. They discourage work, entrepreneurship, job creation, and business expansion. And the more productive somebody is, the worse they’re hit. Why would a neurosurgeon work weekends, or a successful rib joint franchise for that matter, if most of it’s going to taxes? President Donald Trump has repeatedly endorsed repealing the entire income tax—the first President in history to do so. Polls show overwhelming support for abolishing the IRS and replacing it with a sales tax—including 70% of Republicans and most Democrats. Sadly, Congress has more fun pillaging the republic, even if their voters want to throw the entire tax code into Boston Harbor.

Nepo Babytollah, Maybe: We Will Never Surrender On Nukes, Ballistic Missiles

Catholics in the Crosshairs

Not the first piece of space junk that's ended up slamming into our natural satellite in the last few years.

Some call it Medusa Lake, but the name isn't really deserved – or at least, it isn't quite accurate.

Every so often, Comedy Central invites an outsider to The Daily Show to allow them to host one segment while they rant on a topic of their choosing in a segment they call “In My Opinion,” and Wednesday it was comedian Mo Amer’s turn. Amer chose to go after what he considered to be Islamophobia in right-wing America, but while he accused other people of using “lazy tropes” to justify bombing people, it was actually him who was lazily analyzing the situation. Amer began his conclusion by trying to argue that Muslims and Christians aren’t that different, “And that brings me to my final critique. Islamophobes, do your research! Because I have, and here it is. Muslims invented algebra, hospitals, universities, the camera, even algorithms, just to name a few! And if you right-wing Christians dislike Middle Eastern people and eating with your hands and teaching people about kindness, I have terrible news for you about Jesus.”   Mo Amer stopped by The Daily Show because Americans don't like Muslims or something, "So stop using lazy tropes to divide people so you can bomb other countries, creating even more refugees, making you more upset at Muslims in America being doctors or engineers, lawyers, or… pic.twitter.com/xyvKBZBuXy — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) April 30, 2026   He added, “He was Middle Eastern! From Palestine. Spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language. And handed people bread with his hands! And by the way, most Muslims aren't even Arab. And most Arab-Americans are actually Christians! And while we're at it—Muslims also believe in Jesus Christ, he's mentioned in the Quran, which has an entire chapter named after his mother, Mary, and we also believe in the virgin birth.” Jesus was from Judea, but Amer kept rolling, “So stop using lazy tropes to divide people so you can bomb other countries, creating even more refugees, making you more upset at Muslims in America being doctors or engineers, lawyers, or selling you street meat out of delicious halal carts!” Ironically, Amer’s point about most Muslims not being Arab actually undermines his point. If conservatives were the caricatures he is trying to portray, American foreign policy would look very different. Amer is of Palestinian ancestry but grew up in Kuwait until his family fled when Saddam Hussein invaded in 1990. It was the United States, led by a Republican president, that liberated Kuwait while Saddam’s only friend in the world at the time was Yasser Arafat. As a response, Kuwait expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians after war. So, who is using “lazy tropes” now? Here is a transcript for the April 29 show: Comedy Central The Daily Show 4/29/2026 11:21 PM ET MO AMER: And that brings me to my final critique. Islamophobes, do your research! Because I have, and here it is. Muslims invented algebra, hospitals, universities, the camera, even algorithms, just to name a few! And if you right-wing Christians dislike Middle Eastern people and eating with your hands and teaching people about kindness, I have terrible news for you about Jesus. He was Middle Eastern! From Palestine. Spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language. And handed people bread with his hands! And by the way, most Muslims aren't even Arab. And most Arab-Americans are actually Christians! And while we're at it—Muslims also believe in Jesus Christ, he's mentioned in the Quran, which has an entire chapter named after his mother, Mary, and we also believe in the virgin birth. So stop using lazy tropes to divide people so you can bomb other countries, creating even more refugees, making you more upset at Muslims in America being doctors or engineers, lawyers, or selling you street meat out of delicious halal carts!

Christians were told in the first century that the world that hated and persecuted their Savior would similarly hate and persecute them. This divine counsel certainly holds up two millennia later.'The Biden administration was willing to tolerate Christians up to a point.'According to the watchdog group Open Doors, over 315 million Christians today face very high or extreme persecution, with thousands murdered yearly over their faith. While the top 10 worst countries for Christians are all in Africa, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, Christians are also routinely subjected to violent attacks, discrimination, and state suppression in purportedly civilized Western nations. In America, for instance, hostility toward Christians, their faith, and their institutions came to a head during the Biden administration, which not only turned a blind eye to a rash of anti-Christian attacks but adopted policies that formalized the underlying animus.Seeking to "end the anti-Christian weaponization of government and unlawful conduct targeting Christians" and rectify the wrongs committed by his predecessor's government, President Donald Trump established the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias last year.Camille Varone, senior counsel at the Justice Department, gave Allie Beth Stuckey, host of BlazeTV's "Relatable," an exclusive look this week at the culmination of the task force's efforts to date: a damning report detailing both the anti-Christian bias propagated by the federal government during the Biden administration and what the Trump administration has done and is doing to protect Americans' religious liberties."The Biden administration used transgenderism as an excuse, as a justification, for discriminating against Christian doctors, medical facilities, against churches, against Catholic schools, specifically," Stuckey said in summary. "And then, of course, there was the targeting of the pro-lifers. Even within the DOJ, there was an attitude of anti-Christian discrimination and the feeling that Christians really didn't count as a protected class, and that manifested itself in very real, illegal prejudice against Christians."RELATED: The anti-Christian myth of First Amendment 'neutrality' Samuel Corum/Getty Images"What we found is that across the board, the Biden administration was willing to tolerate Christians up to a point, and that was when they held their views privately or in the four walls of their churches," Varone told Stuckey. "When Christians were trying to live out their faith — to see where the Bible, where religious tradition should inform how they actually, you know, went to school, went to work — that's where they ran into policy issues."Varone — drawing from the findings of the 200-page written report, which is accompanied by over 300 pages of receipts plus thousands of footnotes — highlighted in her conversation with Stuckey numerous anti-Christian governmental abuses and policies advanced under President Joe Biden, who professes to be Catholic, including how Biden'sDOJ pursued aggressive prosecutions against nonviolent, pro-life Christian demonstrators under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act while taking a markedly less enthusiastic approach to holding leftists, such as members of Jane's Revenge, responsible for attacks against pregnancy resource centers;Internal Revenue Service apparently targeted churches and Christian organizations whose religious values aligned with conservative political views but did not similarly hound churches where progressive views and Democratic causes were championed; administration, working off a liberal reading of the Supreme Court's ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, sought to mandate the adoption of its views on sexual preferences and gender ideology; andadministration ran roughshod over "sincere religious objections" to the COVID-19 vaccines.The report also details how Biden's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission implemented a rule requiring employers — including Christian organizations — to accommodate workers' efforts to abort their unborn children; FBI investigated, surveilled, and stigmatized law-abiding traditional Catholics, in part due to bogus claims from the scandal-plagued Southern Poverty Law Center; andDepartment of Health and Human Services attempted to bar Christian providers and would-be parents who hold biblical and scientifically grounded views about sex and marriage from the foster-care system.The task force reached the conclusion that "in its zealous pursuit of its preferred policies and constituents, the Biden administration engaged in anti-Christian bias, seeking to limit Christians’ ability to act in concert with their sincerely held beliefs in their homes, in the workplace, and in the public square. At times, it went still further, leading Christians to reportedly choose between their beliefs and compliance with federal law."Stuckey asserted that "this should really disturb everyone" regardless of whether they're a Christian.Varone agreed, reiterating, "What we found here really should disturb everyone who holds religious beliefs because if the government can do that against a majority group, nobody's rights are safe under that kind of system.""No American should live in fear that the federal government will punish them for their faith," acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, chair of the task force, said in a statement."As our report lays out, the Biden administration’s actions devastated the lives of many Christian Americans," continued Blanche. "That devastation ended with President Trump. The Department of Justice will continue to expose bad actors who targeted Christians and work tirelessly to restore religious liberty for all Americans of faith."Stuckey expressed gratitude that people are being "aware that things like this are happening," in part because it "encourages us to know our constitutional rights, and that can only be a win."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

AOC Goes Straight Fatal-Attraction NUTS When Lee Zeldin Says He's Done With Her Lying Green Energy SCAM