Dripping with dread and chilling in its nihilistic infused horrors, When Evil Lurks proficiently and graphically presents a demonic possession movie told within a world removed from God’s grace.
“God is dead, and the times of churches ended quickly”. Where some films can be described as post-apocalyptic, the Demián Rugna directed When Evil Lurks is a horror movie set in a post-God world, a land of the damned upon which evil flourishes within a creation gone rotten.
It is here where we meet brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimi (Demián Salomon). When the pair investigate a disturbance not far from their farmland the night before, they are shocked to find that their nearest neighbour is harbouring a “possessed one”, a demonically possessed person who if mishandled or killed incorrectly will enter a human or animal within its vicinity. And much like a zombie outbreak, this evil spreads like a virus.
Such is the folly of man, the brothers are tasked to move the “possessed one” away from their village, a move that unleashes a chain reaction of violence and horror and dread, resulting in a horror movie that elevates the over-saturated demonic-possession sub-genre to gory, horrifically twisted heights.
Rugna pulls no punches in his depiction of the demonic at their most savage, with murder at its most vile their method of carnage and the consumption of souls their endgame. The shocking violence as portrayed in scenes of graphic body horror is coupled with a palpable dread that is almost overbearing in its weight, Rugna never allowing the tension to cease.
Amidst the grizzly bloodshed, Rugna expertly weaves in a collection of rules regarding the do’s and don’ts of how to interact with the “possessed ones”, eluding to (perhaps) a compelling backstory on how the world depicted in When Evil Lurks came to be a garden for the wicked to infest and flourish.
Then again, considering the increasing inhumanity in the real world – the result of rising secularism and a collective lack of faith in the divine – perhaps When Evil Lurks should be viewed as prophecy in the guise of terrific horror filmmaking.
