There are movies that make you feel bad and then there are immoral dives into hell on earth like Demián Rugna’s extraordinary gut-puncher When Evil Lurks. If you have a taste for nihilistic horror that sits low in the stomach, kicking and clawing its way up as if swallowed with barbed wire balls, this is the bleakness for you. In his immensely frightful debut Terrified, Rugna reconfigures demonic possession as a viral outbreak, sure proof he isn’t a one-trick horror director. When Evil Lurks is so malevolent, you will want to cleanse your television with holy water after the credits finish.
It all begins when brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomón) stumble across an infernal infestation in a neighboring farmhouse. There is no moment of preamble where someone accidentally finds a cursed object or reads Latin from a leatherbound script – Rugna throws us headlong into the meat of things to come as seen through an ugly bloated gentleman oozing out sewage-green liquids and having pulsating pustules. (Tagged rotten number one within this movie.) Later, Pedro and Jimmy leave their home behind them racing towards the city nearby to save Pedro’s kids among whom is his autistic son Jaime (played exceptionally well by Emilio Vodanovich) but they are too late about it because before they can get inside the house there is already blood on their hands. And this harshness extends unrepentantly on everybody: not even a single sympathy goes out to Pedro, Jimmy, or any member of their remaining family – evil lurks, someone must die.
Rugna pushes every limit of decency with an evil grin on his face. Old grannies full of wisdom, little sisters in pajamas, drooling dogs with more folds than those displayed at the bakery – none of them deserves Rugna’s monstrous villain. Some people may not be able to take the ruthlessly angry and sick acts that involve old women, little sisters in nightgowns, or slavering dogs (similar to things in The Sadness) with such violence, creative cruelty is rewarded here. Pedro and Jimmy are targeted there by the evil that operates like a slasher killer as it jumps from one host to another through blood-filled violence (double-barrel shotgun blasts, fast-moving cars, etc.).
When Evil Lurks isn’t fancy but this makes the hellacious wave of attacks all the more impressive. Rugna never looks away from graphic scenes portraying unspeakable acts of violence no matter how much you want him to do so. It becomes a domino effect in this story where innocent ones already have stick-with-you fates which hit harder than a Mack Truck doing 100 mph as cuts pour with rivers of blood from laughing mortals into the camera. In fact, Pedro doesn’t know if some demon might be using Jaime’s neurodivergence as a cover because devilish desires do not respect any boundaries; those kiddies who seem like Children of Corn are actually trying to divert Pedro’s attention from finding out who rotten is. The viral demon also has an influence on Evil Dead for he hides in human bodies thereby manipulating their actions and speech so that they can cause fear in other characters – these ones may not look like zombified deadites though their killing spree is just as crazy.
Rugna’s control over pictures that are painful to look at is like an art of cursed photography. Shattered bodies warped by falls from the second-floor windows and self-inflicted axe gashes are routine. The bloated, rotten sack-like figure – a water balloon full of mucus, pus, and evil bile – somewhat resembles Kevin Durand as the Blob in X-Men Origins: Wolverine only decomposed just seconds away from dying. As opposed to displaying the usual horror movie clichés Rugna’s exceptional special effects team aims to terrify their audience until they scream with fright which depending on one’s affection for sadistic horror movies might actually happen. Such would be the case in When Evil Lurks whose possession narrative is slathered in gore set on Doom’s “Nightmare” mode where Pedro and Jimmy should know better but instead opt for trying run away from some form of uncontainable super-evil that spreads its contagion like nothing else in this world.
In the words of The Offspring, “When Evil Lurks lets the bad times roll (oh-oh-oh-oh).” It’s all so sickly fun. After her mother lies prone and injured on the ground, corrupted daughters do a little jig altogether (“Evil likes children, and children like evil” is an A+ line). This process commences when ordinary suburbia turns into fertile soil for unwelcome hate while we’re still recovering from being shocked by previous acts of cruelty. Besides featuring instructions ignored by other panicked characters who end up complicating things even further, Rugna also incorporates folklore and mythology into this supernatural thriller’s rules about how demons should die (or more precisely how Jimmy and Pedro should kill them). Throughout you will find it sudden, viciously unpredictable; causing us to tiptoe around with bated breath until it ends. Following when there isn’t any need for abstractions or affectations to this day When Evil Lurks is a movie that also has the intensity of foaming in the mouth (beautifully shot by cinematographer Mariano Suárez).
Verdict
When Evil Lurks is one of the meanest, most sadistic, unrelenting depictions of evil you’ll see all year. It’s a series of haymakers from Rugna, charting the purest form of poisonous animosity right from the beginning till an end where there are no breaks. It shouldn’t feel good to feel bad but that’s what makes this film incredible. This is a capital “H” horror film where everything is at stake and pays off; it thrashes its audiences and still leaves them wanting more.
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