When Evil Lurks is 2023’s scariest possession movie — no exorcisms required

polygon.com:

This review of When Evil Lurks comes from the film’s U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest 2023.

The huge wave of new possession/exorcism movies that ran from the mid-2000s through the 2010s just about exhausted the genre. There were so many movies featuring black-veined women doing improbable backbends and insect-crawling up walls and down staircases that the images stopped being shocking. To really unnerve audiences, a filmmaker would have to find a new approach. If the stunning horror movie When Evil Lurks, written and directed by Terrified filmmaker Demián Rugna, is any indication, maybe the best and most innovative approach is just to make a striking family drama, then see how the arrival of a demonic force raises the stakes.

Rugna brings plenty of innovations to the genre, starting with the idea that everyone in the film’s rural Argentinian farming community and the nearby modern town already knows the “seven rules” for dealing with possessing spirits. Everyone knows how implacable and powerful they are, too. When rural farmer Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and his brother Jimmy (Demián Salomón) realize a man in their region is an encarnado — a possessed, distorted creature described in the subtitles as “a rotten” — they fight, then flee, with disastrous consequences. Where so many possession stories operating in the shadow of The Exorcist are primarily religious stories, this one is more of a family story, about the farmer’s ex-wife, children, and mother, and his attempts to protect them as the encarnado’s contagion spreads, fouling everything it touches.

Strong performances, huge shocks, and a heavy sense of inevitability make this horror movie terrifying. Rugna offers up some tremendous foreshadowing designed to get