In case you missed it while it was in theaters, Damian Mc Carthy’s supernatural horror story Oddity hits Shudder today, which gives you absolutely no reason not to watch one of the best and most terrifying horror films of the year now that you can do so from the comfort of your couch. If you still need convincing, however, FANGORIA is excited to present an exclusive clip from the film, featuring Carolyn Bracken absolutely stealing the whole dang show.
Bracken stars in the clip as Darcy, a blind woman visiting her late sister Dani’s husband (Gwilym Lee) at his rural home. She’s brought him a gift in the form of a six-foot tall wooden man frozen in an expression of shrieking horror — that’s one hell of a housewarming gift, if you ask us — but all she’s left with is Yana, the medical sales rep who he moved on with after the death of her sister. Yana clearly doesn’t like Darcy, who mindlessly picks at some snacks while explaining what she does for a living: reading objects for people, like a kind of metaphysical palm reader for the things that mattered most to the dead.
The wooden man looms ominously over the whole conversation, and Darcy is startlingly unbothered by it, unlike Yana, who casts sidelong glances at it whenever she can spare them. It doesn’t help that where they’re sitting is where Darcy’s sister was killed several years earlier, back when she and Tim were renovating the place. Either way, there’s tension enough to cut with a knife, even from the seemingly fake man at the end of the table.
Taking place almost entirely inside an isolated home in the Irish wilderness, the film is a terrifying meditation on what we’re willing to do to process our own grief, with Bracken taking on a dual role as twins Darcy and Dani. (Take it from this writer, a notorious stone-face who loudly shrieked several times upon seeing it in a darkened theater during its festival run.) Both written and directed by Mc Carthy, who previously wowed audiences with Caveat, it’s one of the best reviewed horror films of the year after screening at several festivals and arriving on the big screen where it belongs.
Oddity joins Shudder’s stellar lineup of 2024 releases, including In a Violent Nature, Azrael, and Late Night With the Devil, giving audiences an opportunity to see new kinds of terrifying stories on the big screen and in their homes. It also arrives just in time for their Season of Screams celebration, a three-month long event that also features the premieres of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula season six, V/H/S/Beyond, and more.
Oddity is available to stream on Shudder now. Check out the clip down below:
