IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 27th October
Seen: 30th October
Horror is seemingly going through somewhat of a resurgence lately. A lot of people who are huge fans of the genre will agree that 2022 was something of a landmark year for horror, something I would agree with as the majority of my best of 2022 list consisted of entries in the Horror genre. 2023 might not have been up to that level in terms of consistency but when this year releases a great horror movie, it’s an absolute masterpiece. Obvious huge monster hits have been things like Talk To Me, Cocaine Bear, or Evil Dead Rise which have shown that this is an era of some truly amazing horror films and there’s probably a bunch more that are due out any day now that’ll be on any list of great horror films from this year but a recent release may have forced its way to the top of that list through sheer force of will… that film is When Evil Lurks and god damn, it’s an all-timer.
When Evil Lurks takes place in a small Argentinian town where a pair of brothers, Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomon) come upon a family with a secret hidden in one of their rooms… that secret being that the eldest brother has been infected and turned into a “Rotten”, basically someone possessed by a demon who wants to be born into a real human body. The Rotten is known for literally rotting people and possessing others who then turn into vicious killers. There are people who know how to kill these beings, those people known as Cleaners, but since they aren’t around Pedro, Jimmy, and the landowner Luiz (Luis Ziembrowsk) team up to remove the Rotten themselves. As expected, this goes horribly wrong, a whole bunch of people get shockingly murdered and the next hour and a half becomes a masterclass in how to disturb and terrify an audience.
When Evil Lurks is one of the ballsiest films that this reviewer has ever seen, it’s not afraid to break some serious unspoken rules of the genre if breaking those rules will lead to absolute sheer terror. If the film has a chance to do something terrifying, good taste be damned, it’s going to go there and do it with gusto in a way that’s admirable and will have you covering your mouth in genuine horror (no joke, that happened several times to me during this film). When Evil Lurks can’t be bothered to play around with kid gloves, this isn’t some family-friendly horror film unless your family name is Manson. It wants you to be absolutely disturbed by what you’re seeing and god damn it if it doesn’t pull that off in a way that feels like it’s done intelligently instead of just by some edge lord who just wants to gross you out (It’s a fine line, but it exists).
If one were to categorise what kind of horror movie When Evil Lurks fits in, it’s a cross between the most depraved Zombie movie you can think of and a possession flick on steroids. Both of these genres have been done so often in horror that very few new films can even find a way to stand out, it’s a little hard to shock everyone with a possession scene after we’ve all seen The Exorcist and know how this ends up… When Evil Lurks takes the two most overused genres in horror and blends them together in a way that feels fresh and shockingly original.
You really can’t predict where this thing is going or even who is going to make it out alive because this is the rare time that no one on screen is going to be safe from what’s to come. Main characters? Pfft, basically designed to be brutally terminated. Kids? Bonus 50 points every time one gets absolutely destroyed by a demonic creature? Dogs and goats? Buh-bye, nothing is sacred here and it makes everything so much tenser because no one has that special plot armor that a certain set of characters in horror movies tend to get. You never get to rest; every moment is pure nightmare fuel and it’s something that horror audiences will absolutely salivate over.
What really helps make the most shocking moments work is the amount of rich detail that is put into creating this world and these characters, everyone has an intense and powerful personal history that you can pick up within minutes of meeting them and they feel like real people who were just living normal lives until demonic forces fucked everything up. Every single character is brilliantly played, the actors put their absolute all into this and commit to making sure every action they take is explainable.
This is so powerful that in moments when characters are arguing so hard that they don’t notice possibly the most brutal moment in the entire film, it feels real for these characters to just keep arguing throughout it. It feels natural for them to make the wrong decisions, to turn down the paths that lead to destruction without making them turn into complete idiots like so many horror films have done in the past (fun game, watch a horror film and take a drink every time a person turns completely moronic mere minutes before dying… note, I am not responsible for the liver damage that will ensue from this)
It also really helps that When Evil Lurks looks goddamn incredible, beautifully stylistic shots enhance the horror so much that your mind will make some moments so much more horrific than they actually are. It knows when to linger and show every second of brutality (such as the scene that includes the shot featured on the poster) and knows when to throw something in the background that’s truly fucked up but hidden enough that you can’t quite make it out. It’s so clever and creepy and jaw-dropping that it’s impossible to look away as everything gets darker and darker.
When Evil Lurks is a gloriously dark twisted and original horror story that is determined to fuck with you in ways you didn’t think a film would even consider. It’s brutal, shocking and at times goes beyond the barriers of good taste but does it in a way that’s so well thought out that it works. It’s the kind of film that will make sure the horror audience makes a note of the director’s name so they can keep up with him because anything that this director touches is almost certain to be a work of disturbing art that will satisfy fans of thrills, chills and blood being spilled alike.
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