When Evil Lurks’ director explains what it’s really about

Demián Rugna’s terrifying possession movie When Evil Lurks — now available for streaming on Shudder — breaks the rules of the subgenre in all sorts of startling ways. For one thing, it isn’t a religious movie at all, even though most exorcism movies are. For another, the victims facing down a demon in his film aren’t struggling with faith, or with something they don’t understand. They all know the rules for dealing with the hideous, bloated creatures that result from demon possession — the encarnado, or as the English subtitles put it, “the rotten.” There’s even a little teaching song about the rotten, presented in the film as something akin to a children’s lullaby.

Why is this movie scary if we all know how to deal safely with demons? Because the rules — including “stay away from electricity and electrical appliances, demons can travel through them” and “only kill the possessed in certain specific ways” — take effort and self-control, and people are often greedy, lazy, or impulsive. “It’s too hard,” Rugna told Polygon at the 2023 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. “You need to comply with the rules because the demon wants to be with you, but it’s too hard for us to run away from cities, trying to avoid electricity, to avoid even thinking about the devil.”

If Evil Lurks is a tremendously frightening movie, in part because it’s as much about the power we give our personal demons as it is about any sort of supernatural force. The supernatural is not present in this film. The Exorcist and its many sequels and reboots, Rugna’s characters can’t expect any help from organized religion or from God. “I have no religion,” the director said. “And I hate religion as a business. I love religion when it is done for the sake of faith, or helping others. But not as a business.” Instead, the characters in If Evil LurksYou have to depend on your own discipline and courage. To put it mildly, this goes badly.

They’re also meant to rely on institutions put in place to help them. In the movie, we learn that there are systems set up by the government to manage the encarnado. However, these systems failed due to bureaucratic negligence and indifference. Rugna’s inspiration for the movie explains a lot about where that theme came from: As he told the Fantastic Fest audience in a Q&A after the movie’s premiere, he got the idea for If Evil Lurks He learned about his health problems from news reports that showed how pesticides used on farms in Argentina were causing major issues.

“The owners of those lands contaminate those fields with glyphosate to kill bugs — pesticide,” he said at the Q&A. “There’s a lot of people who work in those fields, and they get cancer. You’d probably see a little kid with cancer, because they are workers. They didn’t say anything — or if they say something, nobody knows.” He suggests that corporate apathy about the workers’ health, and the way the issue occured “out in the middle of nothing,” where it’s easy for profiteers and city-dwellers to ignore the impact of their choices, started him thinking about the idea of lurking evils given free rein to spread.

“The pesticide infected them,” Rugna told Polygon. “Kids were born with cancer. Sometimes you see something in the news, but then there’s nothing more to say, and you forget the image. They’re in the middle of nothing, the middle of poverty. They must do work for less than a couple dollars, and they’re all ill. After you turn off the television, you forget, but they are still there, they are still probably gonna die.”

He said it happens too often, that “people who work the land” get “abandoned” by the system. “When I decided to make a movie with some kind of exorcism, I thought, What happens when the priest is not available?The Exorcist films are all set in the big city house. But what if we’re in the middle of nothing, in a poor house, with poor people who nobody cares for? They are even being burned by the landowner. It happens in my own country all the time — not the demons, [but the rest].”

Rugna laughs at the notion that horror films should reflect the reality of the world. “You can see a movie just for fun,” he said. “Being entertaining is most important for me. If you have the chance to have reflection, that’s a double goal. But for me, it’s not fully necessary.”

He said the social inspirations just worked their way naturally into the writing because they’re part of his background. He didn’t set out to make a message movie, just one that would scare audiences. “I’ve noticed for myself in my movies, for a greater horror story, I want to make you suffer,” he said. “And the social element just comes along with my culture.”

Photo: Shudder/IFC Films

Ironically enough, despite a movie that was inspired by a bureaucratic disregard for the sufferings of children, one of its biggest constraints came from bureaucratic regulations on how to handle the child cast. If Evil Lurks It is atypically violent to its child characters with scenes that depict distress and even death. In response to an audience question at the Q&A about how he protected the child actors, Rugna grinned and explained how his production walked the actors’ parents through their safety plans.

“I’d need two hours to tell about the process of working with the parents,” he said. “It’s too funny, because we did take care with the parents — we thought, We want you to see the whole script.The parents’ reaction was frightening. […]Parents were too eager to have their children in our film. You can’t imagine. […] When the parents read the script, and we’re like, The kid’s gonna be bit by a dog and crushed with a car — ‘Oh, I love the script! Got it!’”

The government, however, was more restrictive. Rugna agreed. Among other things, in spite of the violence of the scenes involving children, they weren’t allowed to have artificial blood on the kids’ skin at any time. In another scene, a teenager wasn’t allowed to hold a gun during an emotional monologue. “All the time, it was horrible to work with the kids,” he said, laughing. “Not for the kids, for the rules.”

If Evil LurksYou can learn more about it here. Shudder streaming is now available.