When Evil Lurks’ director says his staggering horror movie is really about pesticide

Demián Rugna possessed a terrible movie When Evil Lurks — now available on streaming horror — breaks the rules of the subgenre in all sorts of unusual ways. For one thing, it is not a religious film at all; even though they are mostly exorcism movies. Other victims watching the movie demon are not struggling with faith or do not understand reality. They all know the rules for dealing with the hideous, bloated creatures that result from demonic possession incarnateor, as the English put it, rotten. There is also a little song teaching about rotting, in a movie that is related to the sleep of children.

So if everyone knows how to safely deal with demons, why is the movie so scary? Because the rules – including “stay away from electricity and electrical appliances, demons can walk through them” and “only kill the possessed in certain ways” – take effort and self-control, and people are often greedy, lazy, or impulsive. “It’s too hard,” Rugna told Polygon 2023 at the Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. “It is necessary to obey the orders because the devil wants to be with you, but it is too difficult for us to run away from the states, to avoid electricity, not to even think about the devil.”

When Evil Lurks It’s a very scary movie, in part because it’s as much about the power we give to our personal demons as any supernatural power. Unlike in films like Exorcist and its many sequels and reboots, known as Ragna, cannot hope for any help from organized religion or from God. “I have no religion,” said the author. “And I deny that I hate religion. I love Religion Faith: or helping people. But not the business.” For the characters in When Evil Lurks they rely on each other, and by their own strength and discipline. That’s bad, to put it mildly.

They also wanted to help set up institutions. At the beginning of the film, it becomes clear that the government has systems in place to deal with the incarnate, and those systems have completely failed due to bureaucratic indifference and cowardice. Rugna’s inspiration for the movie explains a lot about where this theme came from: When he told a fantastic audience at the Q&A after the premiere of the movie, he got the idea for When Evil Lurks from a series of news stories about farm pesticides in his native Argentina because of widespread health problems.

“Landlords are contaminating the same fields with glyphosate to kill bugs – a pesticide,” he said in a Q&A. “There are a lot of people who work in these fields, and they get cancer. Maybe you would like to see a little kid with cancer, because they are workers. They don’t say anything, or if they do, nobody knows. It hints at the corporate adage about the safety of the workers and the way out “in the middle of nowhere” to be where it is easy to ignore the impact of elections on profits and urban dwellers, he began to think about the idea.

“The pesticides infected them,” Rugna told Polygon. “Kids are born with cancer. Sometimes you see something on the news, but then there’s nothing to say, and you forget the picture. In the middle there are none, the middle poverty. They have to work for less than two dollars, and they’re all bad. Once you turn off the TV, you forget, but they are still there, they are probably still dying.”

He has often said that it is done so that “the people who work the land” are abandoned by the system. “When I decided to make a film with some exorcism, I thought, OK, but what happens if the people can’t get to the Priest? All the Exorcist movies take place in the city, in a big house. But what if we are in the middle of nowhere, in a poor house, in need, no care? Even the owner of the land wants to remove his houses. It happens in my country all the time, not demons, but the rest.

All that said, when Rugna emphasizes how important realism in acting, relationships, and filmmaking has been to him, he mocks the idea of ​​realism as a reflection of the important things in horror. “You see the movie just for fun,” he said. “Delight is most important to me. If you have the ability to reflect, it is a double goal. But for me it is not absolutely necessary.

Social inspirations, he said, just naturally made their way into writing because it is part of his subject. He didn’t set out to make a news movie, just one that would scare the audience. “I noticed in my movies, because I want to make a bigger horror story for you to suffer,” he said. “And the social element just happens with my culture.”

Photo: Horreo/IFC Films

Ironically for the film, it was inspired by bureaucratic indifference to the suffering of the children, although one of the biggest limitations on the film was the official regulations on how it could handle its child cast. When Evil Lurks his characters are unusually cruel to the kid, with graphic scenes of the boy’s distress, mutilation and death. When asked by the audience in the Q&A how the child actors were protected, Rugna smiled and explained how the performance of the parents of the actors walked through their safety plans.

“I would like to talk for two hours about the process of working with parents,” he said. “It’s too funny that we cared about our parents – we thought; OK, we want to share the whole script. We were terrified of the parents’ reaction. (…) Parents are too excited to put their kids in a movie. You can’t think. (…) When parents read letters and we are like; The kid got a bit run over by the dog and the car — ‘Oh, I love writing! got it!'”

But the empire is much more limiting, called Rugna. Among other things, despite the power of the scenes involving the children, it was not allowed to have artificial blood on the skin of the children at any time. In another scene, the teenager was not allowed to hold the gun during the emotional monologue. “Every time, working with the kids was horrible,” he said with a laugh. “Not for the kids, for the rules.”

When Evil Lurks it is pouring out in horror now.