Argentinian director Demian Rugna follows up his shocking feature debut, 2017’s Terrified, with a film that could conceivably take place within the same universe. Rugna is fixated on the idea of evil, and where Terrified focuses on the insidious spread of evil within a single suburban community, When Evil Lurks expands the world further and brings a vivid visual depiction of evil as it spreads like a virus into the world at large.
In When Evil Lurks, as in Terrified (though the mechanism differs slightly), a small town comes to the realization that Evil, that’s capital-E Evil, has nested among them. Two brothers, one of whom is a separated father who desperately needs to save his children, come across the manifestation of evil in the form of a bloated, oozing man being kept alive by his mother. Soon, it becomes clear that the entity can ‘jump’ from person to person, not unlike the pathogens in The Sadness and the Evil Dead films. So too, like those films does the violence in Rugna’s film ramp up right away and continue to accelerate to increasingly brutal levels. There are moments, perhaps as frequently as every few minutes in When Evil Lurks, where you’ll think ‘they wouldn’t…would they?’ And then they do.
Other films might break up this pummeling of the hapless viewer with some levity. A one-liner, or perhaps a moment of hopefulness, but Rugna has little interest in placating a studio or compromising his vision (his vision being an audience cowering in their seats). The audience with whom I saw this at TIFF, a seasoned crowd of Midnight Madness movie freaks that have seen everything from Gozu (2003) to L’Interieur (2007) to Martyrs (2008) and all flavours of extreme horror in between, were audibly gasping at several scenes in When Evil Lurks. It’s not necessarily that Rugna’s kills are always blood-sprayingly gory (though most are), but the way they’re presented – sometimes out of left field, and other times lingering so long that you’re almost begging for the projector to give out – feels like an onslaught.
Hidden underneath the extreme, and extremely stomach-turning violence and gore of When Evil Lurks is a powerful message about corporate greed, and the thoughtlessness of industry as it wreaks havoc on the environment, bringing consequences to the most vulnerable of rural communities. While this idea could certainly be better-developed in Rugna’s script, which admirably tries to juggle a bunch of things at once, it provides a strong undercurrent to all the violence, and gives the film enough weight to be called a full-throated exploration of evil.
When Evil Lurks isn’t the kind of horror movie I can give my unqualified recommendation. Not because it isn’t superbly made (it is) or that it doesn’t provide some of the scariest moments in horror this year (it does), but because the violence and extreme nature of the film is possibly too much for most people. I don’t want to pathologize Rugna’s thoughts on children, but he doesn’t seem to like them very much. The combination of a line “Evil likes children, and children like evil” and the relish he seems to have for dispatching them both in this film and in Terrified contribute to that feeling that no one is safe. When Evil Lurks cultivates a feeling of a snowball rolling down a hill – unstoppable, inevitable, and indiscriminate in its wrath. The feeling that no one in the world of this film – children and animals included – are spared from being brutally torn asunder is both compelling and makes for one of the most harrowing horror experiences of the year, but not one to go into without a warning.
Demian Rugna’s When Evil Lurks comes to Shudder on October 26.
