Shudder Secrets: When Evil Lurks: The Devil Comes to a Small Town

Writer/director Demián Rugna’s Terrified is one of the most memorable horror films of the last few years. The 2017 feature has some truly disturbing imagery, including the corpse boy and another sequence where an unseen force throws a woman around her bathroom, slamming her into walls. Though Terrified is set in Buenos Aires, it largely takes place in an apartment complex, where the evil spreads and haunts a group of tenants.

Rugna continues this idea of infectious evil in his latest feature, When Evil Lurks. While Terrified certainly contains plenty of grim moments, When Evil Lurks is a much nastier, more brutal movie. It’s unrelenting in its depiction of visceral violence. There’s really not a breather here. In continuing some of the ideas from his first film, Rugna also crafted a possession movie that feels fresh and subversive.

A Tale of Two Brothers Face to Face with Evil

When Evil Lurks stars Ezequiel Rodríguez as Pedro and Demián Salomón as Jimmy, two brothers. By the time the film starts, something has gone very, very wrong in a remote farming village. The brothers investigate what’s up with the cattle and soon discover a bloody torso in the woods. This leads them to a nearby farmhouse where they find a grotesque man rotted and bloated, but somehow, still alive and wheezing a few words. The brothers are convinced he’s possessed and perform a cleansing of the house. However, this goes horribly, horribly wrong, unleashing the force upon the village. It’s unclear how or why the man became possessed. It simply just is.

Immediately, Rugna subverts exorcism tropes. While some of the villagers certainly believe in the notion of good and evil, and while the woman housing the infected has crucifixes all over the home, there’s really no presence of religion in this film to counter the malignant force. There’s no priest, and prayers are foolish in the face of this unstoppable force.

Meanwhile, the brothers come across as bumbling dolts at times who only make matters worse with nearly all of their actions. Yes, they have the best interest of their village and community in mind, but their actions set off even worse reactions. This movie lacks heroes, and in that regard, it’s quite a bleak and grisly 90 minutes that barely pauses from the bloodshed.

Infectious Evil

Like Terrified, When Evil Lurks really plays with this idea of infectious evil. The townspeople turn on each other. They’re savage, committing one heinous act after another. No one is safe. This includes animals and children. To be totally clear, this film isn’t an easy watch. It’s like the director wondered how he could one-up the scenes in his first feature, especially the corpse boy. Well, he’s not afraid to really test the limits of violence against children and animals. Terrified had its share of unnerving scenes, but this more than doubles the count.

That said, none of this feels like mere shock value. Instead, it underscores the malevolence of the force that sweeps through the village. It possesses one person after the other, including children, making them do horrible things. No, it’s not easy to watch. The bloody torso scene in the woods will feel tame compared to what transpires later in the film.

What’s especially effective about this feature is the feeling that there’s no way to stop the evil. It’s going to spread. It’s going to grow. It’s an ever-present force that will likely creep outside of the rural village. Truly, this is an eerie and hellish vision that Rugna presents. When Evil Lurks, like Terrified, also works so well because it focuses on a small community. It feels both personal and frightening because of that.

When Evil Lurks is one heck of a follow-up to Terrified. It’s a downright ghastly vision of hell and one gnarly possession movie. The film hits theaters on Oct. 6 before arriving on Shudder Oct. 27.

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