It’s ironic that the talk this weekend is the opening of The Exorcist: Believer, when the really brilliant, nightmarish film about demonic possession is also premiering- When Evil Lurks by the Argentine director Demian Rugna.
Demian Rugna’s previous film- Terrified– was one of the scariest films I’ve seen in some time. Set on a street in Buenos Aries, a series of bizarre supernatural events occur in several houses on the block, and three psychic investigators are brought in. What was so nerve-frying was the idea of the evil slowly spreading and infecting everything in its path. The film worked on a simple but harrowing sense of nightmare logic.
When Evil Lurks is set in a remote rural countryside where two brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimi (Demian Salomon) hear gunshots in the dead of night at an adjoining property. They wander through the woods and find the bottom half of a body, cut in two, and end up at the shack-like home of a woman whose son is “rotten” (another term for possessed). His body is bloated, covered in oozing sores and he begs to die, but there are rules to these things. You cannot shoot a possessed person without risking blowback in hideous ways.
The brothers and a neighbor decide to load the corpulent, putrescent, possessed son onto the back of their truck intending to dump him off miles from where they live to stop the spread of the evil but things go spectacularly awry. Especially when Pedro drives into town in the early morning to take his children far away from the terror, which infuriates his ex-wife (who has a restraining order against him) and her new husband, not to mention exposing them to the demonic force which keeps attaching itself to more and more poor souls. Even down to a large pet dog.
They drive to the home of Mirtha (terrific Silvina Sabater) who has dealt with this kind of evil in the past but even she is unprepared for how far-reaching it has become. A sequence in a schoolhouse filled with demonic children is a dark highlight.
It truly is an effective, incredibly chilling film and the howl of despair at the end will haunt your dreams for days afterwards.
(In theaters October 6 and streaming on Shudder on October 27th).
Wow! I can’t wait! I loved Terrified!
More terrifying than Trump’s bald spot.