Why let Halloween have all the fun when we can continue this Terror Train all year long!
When Evil Lurks (2023)
In this film we find brothers, Pedro and Jamie, on the hunt for a man possessed by an unborn demon.
I want to preface that the above is really all I want to reveal about the plot. I think diving further into the mythos of the world writer/director, Demián Rugna, has created sort of lifts a bit of the veil this film is disguised as. It’s amazingly a fun twist on the exorcism genre and it plays it off as a normal occurrence the fictionalized world may or may not already live with as a sense of normalcy.
Somethings I CAN tell you is that HOLY CANNOLI are there some absolute mouth gaping, hold your breath, squint your eyes moments. Moments that are so original it makes you wanna start clapping with applause for the mind that visualized them for the screen. The film keeps you on your toes from start to finish, waiting to see if one scene of brutality can top the next. This film isn’t quite the level of gore that, say, Terrifier 2 has created, but is equally as shocking in a more tasteful sense.
My only gripe about When Evil Lurks, is when our main characters don’t listen to the rules. We are presented with certain adherences throughout about what it takes to be a “cleaner” and yet our protagonists continue to disobey them. Whether this is a choice by the director or not seems frustrating when watching. You want to reach into the screen and slap Pedro constantly. However, there may be motives as to why he might be ignoring some of the most basic of tasks that are asked of him.
Regardless of such minor annoyances, the movie goes to such lengths to create a tense, memorable watch. Demián Rugna, coming straight from another amazing Shudder original, Terrified, is making a name in Argentinian horror and establishing fresh ideas that American audiences should be on the lookout for. It’s refreshing to see a foreign artist create something new, the way Guillermo Del Toro did through the 2000s. We, in the U.S., make films that take an exhaustingly overdone approach to genres, but, Rugna is reinventing ghost stories and possession films and absolutely scaring the skirts off us.