REVIEW: ‘When Evil Lurks’ Is A Gruesome Shot in the Arm for Possession Horror
Argentine filmmaker Demián Rugna’s combines gruesome, Fulci-esque visuals and fine-tuned bleakness
by Josh Lewis
Part of Blood Knife’s TIFF 2023 coverage
(NOTE: Spoilers at the end. You’ve been warned!)
The churches have long been dead and there’s a rotten infestation at the “end of the world” in When Evil Lurks, the latest horror film from Argentine filmmaker Demián Rugna (Terrified), who is quickly becoming a name to look out for when it comes to demonic possession films. Unfortunately, it’s a mode of modern mainstream horror so overrepresented at multiplexes—and its cliches so well-ingested—that it’s genuinely difficult for a filmmaker to still shock audiences with it.
But starting with his 2017 film Terrified, Demián Rugna has been working on cracking that code. In that film, he took the basic geography of the paranormal investigation of a haunted Argentinian suburb and used it to connect various lean-and-mean Exorcist / J-horror-style setpieces like an overlapping anthology. Moving from the faint thumping a husband hears (which turns out to be his wife having her skull bashed in over and over by an invisible force), to a tall naked monster who lives under the bed seen via night vision camera, to the reanimated corpse of a dead boy hit by a truck coming back Pet Sematary-style, it’s handled with an Italian horror-inspired supernatural strangeness and commitment to gruesome practical gore make-up. (I would also recommend it to anyone who liked that broken neck POV shot from inside the car in Smile recently, considering it appears to have been stolen directly from Terrified.)
With When Evil Lurks, Rugna has taken the very best qualities he honed in Terrified—particularly that grim confusion and despair that comes with his characters being suddenly confronted with the perverse, bodily horror of their families being literally torn apart—and channelled them into a true, old school Euro-horror framework that recalls the surreal, tangible manifestation and descent into evil of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy (City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery) among others of that era.
Things start rather simply in a remote farming village where Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and his brother Jimmy (Demián Salomón) are investigating the torn-in-half corpse of a “cleaner,” a member of the rural community with the skills and tools to rid a “rotten” (or possessed) body of the demon inside, which is trying to give birth to itself. By following the gut-soaked path he was on, they discover that their neighbor’s son Uriel is in the last stages of this possession—which looks a lot like a diseased infection, complete with gooey green drool and boils on the verge of exploding all over a gluttonous form that recalls one of the more unforgettable images in David Fincher’s Se7en. With the cops unwilling to help beyond calling Public Health, and their neighbor Ruiz acting a bit too trigger-happy (a unique bit of lore established here is that Argentine possessions cannot only not be killed by guns, but that firearms are actually what trigger an even more rapid spread), they decide to arduously load the body into their truck and dump it as far beyond the outskirts of town as a tank of gas will take them.
When Evil Lurks is a feel-bad midnight movie of the highest order.
What transpires from there is a feel-bad midnight movie of the highest order; an escalating series of geographical shock-and-gore horror set-pieces that’s sure to satisfy the type of genre cinephile who will laugh at a brilliantly executed child-rag-doll dummy effect without sacrificing the haunted, miserable, dusty horror paperback atmosphere that it works so hard to instill. There are possessed goats/dogs, ancient fable-like axe murders, and shock vehicle carnage galore as Pedro attempts to simply move his children from their house in the suburbs to somewhere the infection can’t reach, recalling some of the desperate attempts by characters in Romero movies to avoid an apocalypse that is already under way and inevitable.
(That inevitability is key, and proves even more devastating than the vicious and textured practical gore of a Fulci movie—of which this movie has more than its fair share.)
This brand of Eurohorror is incredibly guilty and doom-ridden, as the monsters themselves prey on dread and fear that is simultaneously instilled in the audience—and if there’s anything Rugna gets right in When Evil Lurks, it’s that. Pedro and his brother spend the back half of the movie in a confused daze, making shocked, defeated expressions at each moment of awful, perverse destruction visited upon of their families and to which they are asked to bear horrible witness, all while remaining unable to even explain it to the various family and friends they recruit along the way. How does one describe driving along a dark stretch of highway lit only by flickering headlights and witnessing a mother eating her child’s brains like it was turkey stuffing? Or a classroom filled with children who have bashed their parents and teachers’ brains in with a hammer and buried them in the floorboards of the school? “Evil likes children, and children like evil,” another cleaner the recruit says at one point, evoking the specific despair of Chicho Ibáñez Serrador’s Spanish horror classic Who Can Kill A Child? (A film that contains one of the most grim, bloodthirsty shots I’ve ever seen in a movie: a long showdown shot of a father considering unloading a an automatic rifle into a crowd of children blocking his path, a disturbing impulse that the movie has taught you to share.)
A similar dynamic is built in When Evil Lurks when Pedro arrives at his “end of the world,” which ultimately is not a destroyed planet but the perversion of a school and the next generation that he has failed to prevent from being infected. He confronts the rotten corpse who has inflicted all this suffering on him and his family, and cathartically eviscerates it—only to realize too late that it quite literally staged this event for this outcome. It needed his despair to trigger its own release, and despite all his logistical efforts to prevent it he has ultimately only managed to expedite and oversee its grotesque birthing process. This is a fate he at first accepts with resigned weariness; but Rugna has one last gruesome image for us. That poignant note of disappointment in the face of the apocalypse is replaced with vomit and screaming and pure anguish—a feeling all the rotten, God-fearing Italian and Spanish masters of horror are very familiar with.
Josh Lewis is a freelance film critic with writing at The Film Stage and Cinema Scope, a former movie theater programmer, and host of the genre and exploitation double feature movie podcast SLEAZOIDS.
