When Evil Lurks Ending Explained- Was Jair Possessed And Is This The End Of The World?

We have seen the mechanics of virus possession before. It Follows infected horny unfortunate teens with an ominous relentless monster, like crabs, during spring break. Denzel Washington’s underappreciated The Fallen needed only a quick brush of flesh to turn a good person murderous, and indy freak out Luz sealed fates with kisses. Shudder’s latest, When Evil Lurks, is an unholy, gory abomination that takes the general conceit and turns it up to eleven. It isn’t for the faint of heart, and it delivers a powerful punch of scares, squirm-worthy deaths, and taboos. Nothing and no one is safe. Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of When Evil Lurks: was Jair possessed? Is this the end of the world, and who won?

In a remote farming town in Argentina, brothers Pedro and Jimi are forced to deal with the possession of their neighbor’s son, Uriel, when the government refuses to get involved. The rules for possession and disposal of the possessed are simple. The possessed are called the Rotten and can infect people and animals through touch, sniff, and proximity. Only specialized people called Cleaners can eradicate the possessed safely, and the government has to dispatch them. You can never, ever, under any circumstances, kill the Rotten with a firearm. That will result in evil being set free and allowed to roam from person to person until no one is left. There are also rules about electricity, but those aren’t clearly defined.

Making things worse, the evil inside one person can influence everyone around them into setting it free via shotgun, handgun, or any other implement of destruction that frees it. As people get scared and desperate, they become more vulnerable to the whisperings of the demon in their minds until disaster strikes. Pedro and Jimi try to help their neighbor by driving their possessed son to a major city and a Cleaner, but a series of unfortunate incidents releases the evil who tears through the town. The brothers had the best of intentions but the worst execution. The demon expects this and manipulates situations to produce these results.

Unfortunately, everything the brothers try to do to help the town and later protect their family leads to bloodshed. Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks is no holds barred gore. Often considered off-limits, even children and dogs get slaughtered before the finale, which features an entire school of possessed children. Along the way, Pedro’s ex-wife is squished by a truck when her current husband runs her down, and her young daughter is chomped on by the family dog and dragged by her head through the streets of the neighborhood.

Pedro managed to grab his sons and his mother, and the group ran to Mirta’s house. This woman has intimate knowledge and experience with the Rotten. Things look like they might be turning around, but it is short-lived. Pedro’s ex-wife, who called and threatened to get them earlier in the film, nabs Santi and eats him in the woods, and Mirta is concerned that Jair, Pedro’s autistic son, has been possessed as well. She explained that contagion with autistic children works much slower because the evil can’t figure out how their minds work as easily. Her concerns turn out to be well-founded in the closing moments of the movie.

Mirta tells the brothers the only way to stop the evil from spreading is by finding the original Rotten. The neighbor’s massive son, whom they were trying to transport far away from town at the beginning of the movie, must be located and destroyed correctly to save everyone. Mirta suspects the body is in the school because evil is drawn to children, and she and Pedro begin the cleaning process. Unfortunately, all the children in the school are infected, and Pedro gets tricked into searching for an ax that doesn’t exist. When he leaves Mirta, the children attack and kill her, and the process isn’t completed. Uriel’s rotting body gives birth to a pure evil child. This child is essentially the Antichrist and the end of the world. Evil has triumphed over good.

Is Jair possessed?

Knowing he failed to save the town, most of his family, and the world, Pedro returns home and makes apple ice cream for Jair, and he gets one last nasty surprise. Jair coughs up a crucifix and a clump of hair belonging to his grandmother. At some point, while he was possessed, he killed and ate his grandmother. It is impossible to know if he was still possessed or not. When evil controlled him, he no longer had autistic symptoms. Mirta suspected he was corrupted and said so, but Pedro refused to believe it. Jair was nonverbal again by the end, which could indicate he was no longer possessed, but the evil could also be faking his symptoms to avoid detection.

Mirta said evil gets lost in autistic minds, and it is possible that the evil inside Jair either left after it completed its mission of killing and eating Pedro’s mother or it could have gotten lost inside his mind again and is dormant until it can control him. A third possibility is when Uriel gave birth to the evil child, all of the possessed ones reverted to their prior states to witness the end of the world.

Who killed the first cleaner at the beginning of When Evil Lurks?

In the barn, Jimi finds Uriel’s younger brother, who reveals that he killed the cleaner found in the woods at the beginning of When Evil Lurks. Evil had already started to spread and convinced him to kill the cleaner and feed the body to the pigs. He was also instructed to eat some of it as well. After his brother’s body went missing and his neighbors killed themselves, he ran and has been hiding in the barn ever since. Mirta had explained earlier that evil needed fear, and if you weren’t afraid, it couldn’t infect you. This is why Pedro and Jimi seemed to be immune. Ultimately, their bravery did no good, though, as the entire world was on the verge of being infected, and pure evil in human form was born.

It’s a grim ending akin to the hopelessness of The Mist. Despite their best efforts, there will be no happy ending for the brothers and the world as a whole. Pedro wasn’t always a great person. He tried to kill Jair because he couldn’t deal with his autism and all but abandoned both of his sons in the years after his wife wisely refused to let him see them. Ironically, he is the one who is left standing at the end and the only one who protects either of his children at all. One is dead, and Jair was infected at least at one time and may still be.

Contagious infection is horrifying because it is so dangerous. Those who are scared can be controlled through fear, as in Uriel’s brother killing the first cleaner, Ruiz shooting the goat, and Leo shooting the family dog. Others, like Pedro and Jimi’s mother, have lived with fear for so long that they are numb to it. This is also dangerous as they fail to see how much trouble they are in until it is too late. Evil comes in many forms.

It can be passive cruelty and racism. It can be the callous rejection of a neurotypically different child. Greed, lust, hubris, and fear all invade our minds on occasion—the evil in When Evil Lurks knows this and uses it against us. The film’s ending makes it clear we didn’t have a chance. It was inevitable that evil would be born and destroy the world, leaving only a scant few to witness the destruction because it is fun to watch their pain. By the time the film ends, there is no hope. All of the rules have been broken and are almost impossible to follow, and Pedro’s one surviving child has eaten his grandmother and may still be infected. Evil has been born, and there appears to be no way to stop the spread of the contaminant.