I always tend to get a little giddy when someone approaches a well traveled horror subgenre in a way that ends up not only pumping new life into a scenario we’ve seen umpteen times before, but also proves to be gut twistingly unsettling to boot. It’s with this in mind that I present to you Demián (Terrified) Rugna’s vastly affecting When Evil Lurks, a movie about demonic possession that’s been released in a year when being inhabited by an evil force seemed to be subject of every other fright flick released.
However, while the lion’s share of these movies have tended to take a more predictable route (The Pope’s Exorcist, Exorcist: Believer), Rugna instead delivers something that feels quite unlike anything I’ve seen in quite a while.
Taking the creeping dread of the original Exorcist and infusing it with the relentless, backwoods unpredictability of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When Evil Lurks draws just as much of it horrors from the mistakes of humans and a lack of faith as it does from dripping pus and gaping axe wounds to the face.
After hearing gunshots late one night, brothers Pedro and Jaime head out to investigate only to find the lower half of a mutilated body in the woods. This may be something of an extreme discovery, but it leads to something infinitely more sinister when, upon finding a dilapidated shack containing a mother and her two sons, the brothers find that the elder of the children is not only possessed, but has ballooned to grotesque proportions as the pus-filled demonic entity is about on the verge of being born into our world.
However, what’s truly disturbing about this matter is that in this reality, demonic possession is a phenomenon so widely known, there’s actually authorities that can be called named “Cleaners” that can be called to safely dispose of these unholy hosts that are referred to as “Rottens”. After realizing that the body in the woods was the Cleaner sent to tackle the situation, Pedro and Jaime try to alert the local authorities only to receive scorn from the uninterested lawman, and so instead they take their concerns to Ruiz, the landowner who owns the property the shack is on who takes a far more direct approach to the problem.
Terrified that his livestock or his pregnant wife is at risk, with the help of brothers, storm the shack and opt to drag the bloated form onto the back of a truck and dump it a “safe” distance from a populated area – however, in this world without faith, demonic possession proves to be an incredibly tricky thing to negotiate without horrendous repercussions happening to the loved ones of all involved.
As Pedro desperately tries to convince his extremely hostile ex-wife to let him take his kids to safety, a tidal wave of horror is about wash over them that could bring about despair and carnage to everyone.
Defiantly cruel and utterly unnerving, When Evil Lurks may be one of the most refreshing and exhilarating genre experiences I’ve seen all year that takes in mounting dread, deft world building and genuinely shocking moments of violence to sobering effect. Thankfully hauling the possession movie out of children’s bedrooms and abandoned churches, Rugna introduces us to a world where faith has all but evaporated and instead evil can pop up in the most banal of places, with virtual nobodies finding themselves in the middle of a dire situation and then immediately making it worse. You see, even though everyone knows that demons exit and there’s even seven rules that help you from speading the evil (For example: shadows from electric lights attract evil and killing them by gun only spreads the danger of possesson), modern world problems and basic human apathy constantly butt up against demonic myth in order to make our already flawed protagonists arguably the worst people to be handling such a problem.
For example, gaps in the system have prevented the possessed host from be seen for nearly a year and Ruiz – fearful for his property – only makes things worse by electing to dump the swollen apparition instead of taking care of it via the proper channels. From there, human error only leads to yet more trauma and it’s here where When Evil Lurks really hits you where it haunts – where other horror movies use the inability of its main characters to make the right decisions to paper over plot cracks, Rugna gives us something more akin to the devastating lacks of judgment seen in the likes of Frank Darabont’s equally harrowing The Mist.
Some may dismiss the inability of the characters to put their raging emotions on the back burner and carefully sticking to the rules in favour of jumping in feet first as incredibly frustrating, but when you realise the inability of humans to follow such things as COVID protocol or safety information on the side of tide pod packaging, it all comes starkly into focus.
The cruel nature of the plot is not only carried nicely by the driving nature of the script and direction that slathers everything in claustrophobic dread despite the many wide open space the film employs, but the performances also help things immensely as the character’s emotional baggage constantly aids evil at every turn. However, while having the sense of lurking fear at every turn is horror film nirvana, Rugna also is savvy enough to know when to release it with bursts legitimately shocking violence that come out of nowhere.
Be it a stunning act of murder/suicide that’s committed with an axe, the extended, superlative set piece that erupts out of a legitimately distressing animal attack, or the harrowing end to the search of a missing child, When Evil Lurks never resists the opportunity to put a boot in your metaphorical ball sack whenever your guard is down the most.
One of the best horrors of the year? Undoubtedly. One of the most haunting frighteners of the decade so far? Certainly. And thanks to Rugna talent for mixing old school dread and startling, no-holds-barred violence (along with Evil Dead Rise and Exorcist: Believer, it’s been an incredibly rough year for any kid appearing even within one hundred yards of a fucking possession movie), When Evil Lurks fittingly crawls inside your consciousness and squats there for weeks.
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 
One comment