The Big Picture

“When Evil Lurks” is a gleefully mean-spirited horror film that pushes the genre into bold and bloody new directions. The film follows two brothers who accidentally unleash something sinister that upends their world. The writer-director, Demián Rugna, infuses black humor into his movies, using it as a punchline to relax and strike the audience, creating a unique viewing experience.

A gleefully mean-spirited horror ride to hell, writer-director Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks is the type of possession film that pushes the genre into bold and bloody new directions while tearing apart the bodies of its characters along the way. Specifically, it follows brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomón) who discover something sinister has taken up residence in their community. When they try to dispose of it, they accidentally unleash something that will upend the entire world as they know it. The film recently had its premiere as part of the midnight programming at the Toronto International Film Festival and is now getting a theatrical release starting October 6 followed by a streaming release on Shudder on October 27. Before this, we sat down with Rugna to talk horror, the impact Viggo Mortensen had on his film, and the status of his Terrified remake with Guillermo del Toro.

Image via IFC

COLLIDER: When I saw you at the TIFF screening, you did something very funny, which was that you almost apologized to the audience for the violence that they were about to experience. I wanted to start out there because there’s a real sense of humor to the film, and I’d listened to you talk about your black humor and how you really enjoy that dynamic. What was it that you, with this film, wanted to do with making people uncomfortable, but then also just almost laugh at the sheer unrelenting nature of it?

DEMIÁN RUGNA: I guess I have black humor all the time. Probably, it is the genesis for me to make horror movies because I need you scared to enjoy, to be afraid. When I build jumpscares, for me, it’s the same as I’m making a joke for a comedy. So, for me, the black humor is the first stone for my scripts. Even when I’m trying not to make humor in my movies, like Terrified or When Evil Lurks, the black humor came along. I can’t avoid it. It is a part of me, of my style. I tried, all the time, to give some shock to the audience and then obviously, some relax. I need to relax them to strike, to punch them again, and the humor is a good path to that.

I’ve done a lot of reading about the connection between horror and humor and your description of it as a punchline where there’s this setup and build and relax, and then you hit them again, and then you kind of gently build back up to it again, and you hit them again, and that’s this movie. It’s one setup leading into another. When you scripted this out, do you write scene by scene? Did you have this overall idea of what you wanted the story to be, or how did you kind of work it out?

RUGNA: I always write scene by scene. Even I try to avoid writing a big synopsis because I never have the entire script. I don’t know how my movie goes to the end. I start with the good ideas of probably a scene and I try to sit in my chair and write the dialogue as soon as possible. In the middle of the movie, I don’t know where I’m going with this script. Anyway, I’m not a guy who makes a lot of drafts in my movies. I grow three or four at max draft for each script. Obviously, I had the luck here that even the producer from Argentina trusted in me 100%. I gave them the script, and they read it and said, “Go.” They had just a couple of comments, but it’s 100% what I wanted to make. But no, I don’t know where I’m going when I write, but the problem is I need to write what I’m going to write. I need to be the writer for my movies. That is a lesson that I learned during the last few years.

Was there a scene that you enjoyed writing most or that you were picturing the impact it would have on the audience that you were most excited about? I think of the dog scene as the moment where everything really kicks off, but I was curious, what is the scene that you enjoyed writing the most, knowing what it would become?

RUGNA: [Laughs] Probably the travel, when the family is in the car. The grandmother is singing the song, and this is something that I love for the audience. I enjoy that because I thought when I wrote it, it could be funny in that moment after 20 minutes of violence. After 20 minutes of violence, I thought, “Okay, I need to relax with the character,” and it works, and I’m proud of that. I’m proud of that decision, obviously. The dog scene is more a goal as a director, not as a writer because as a writer is just a, “Okay, punch in your head,” and it’s gonna work if you use your source well. But I guess the dialogue inside the car is what, as a writer, I say, “Okay, it’s good.”

Image via IFC

No, that’s a very perfect scene of being funny and kind of relaxing, but still kind of scary, of talking about what’s coming next, it ends up setting up a lot of different things. You had mentioned Terrified, and it’s been six years, I think you had mentioned this during the TIFF screening. What was the experience since that to making this?

RUGNA: Well, Terrified was my fourth movie. It was the easiest movie that I made because, I don’t know why, but everything went well on Terrified during the shooting. But this one has four times the complexity of Terrified. It wasn’t the most difficult movie that I made, but it was too hard to shoot. The difference between both is in Terrified, I had control of everything. We shot in three or four locations with three or four characters. In production, it’s easy instead of When Evil Lurks because [on] When Evil Lurks we need to run away from the city shooting in landscape, daylight, exteriors all the time, animals, kids. I don’t know, I think waiting almost five years to shoot again. But for me, it happened to me before, between my third and my fourth, between my second and my third movie, five years of waiting. But I don’t know, I guess I just got experience. I guess I found the ways to be more patient with a lot of things [that] made me crazy instantaneously. But yeah, I guess Terrified was easy to shoot. This one was really, really intense.

But it sounds like every film is then a learning experience where whatever comes after this, I don’t know if you’re working on anything currently, but whatever comes after this, you then get to take everything you learnt from this and build it into the next one. Is there anything you’re working on next? I don’t think there’s a When Evil Lurks 2, but is there anything that kind of is similar to this in horror that you’re working on?

RUGNA: Yeah, for me in this moment of my career and my life, I guess I need to learn, I need to deal with probably different studios or different producers and trying to convince them I want to go by this way, what I’m trying to say. I lose patience easily when the movie is not the movie that I want to make, and probably if I make something similar, or When Evil Lurks 2, or whatever, if I have the control of that energy of the script, the control of everything, the content, for me, it’s easy because I love to make what I want to make. The problem with me is when I don’t like the script, or they do not allow me to make this.

I guess the next one…I don’t know what is really the next one, but I’m hoping and praying to have the same liberty and freedom to make what I want to make because I’m all the time trying to make a movie for horror fans. I am a horror fan. I want to make a movie with ghosts and killer children, kill everything [laughs] without anyone saying, “No, you cannot do it.” That’s…for the future.

Image via IFC

You say you’re a horror fan, were there any horror movies, maybe that didn’t inspire this, but that were kind of on your mind when you were making this, that you were like, “Oh, this is something I enjoyed watching in this movie, and now I want to do something similar?” Was there anything you were drawing from?

RUGNA: Yeah. There are three movies that inspired me. Evil Dead is one of them, another movie called The Wailing, a Korean movie, and the other movie is The Road, a Viggo Mortensen movie. I wanted to make a horror road movie, and that movie was so cruel and well-acted. The performance inspired me a lot for this movie. It was funny because in Toronto, I met Viggo Mortensen in the hotel. We were talking about soccer, and I forgot to say, “Hey, your movie inspired me for this movie.” It was funny. [Laughs]

What soccer team were you talking about? That’s very funny.

RUGNA: Well, he’s a big fan of a team called San Lorenzo in Argentina. I’m a big fan of the opposite team, and it was funny because I’ve been talking with him. He has perfect Spanish, so we talked in Spanish about soccer. But I forgot to say, “Hey man, your movie inspired me.” When I went to the hotel, I went in my room, I said, “I didn’t say it. I’m an asshole.” [Laughs]

Well, now you’ll have to come back to TIFF to talk to him again next year.

RUGNA: Yeah, I hope so.

The funniest thing is I was thinking about a lot of different things while watching your movie, but the curse and the family being central, I was thinking a lot about Guillermo del Toro, and then I learned that he’s going to produce a remake of Terrified. I don’t know if you have any involvement with that or if you know anything about that. You had said that you want to be involved in the process, what is the experience like of knowing another filmmaker is going to remake something that you wrote?

RUGNA: Well, the thing is, Guillermo bought the rights and they hired me as director. We’ve been working since 2018 with Satellite Pictures for a couple of years because they are developing with a writer. We’ve been working, we were about to get the green light, and then the pandemic came, and COVID destroyed all the plans. We needed to wait two years to see what happened, and in the middle, the deal with Guillermo and Satellite expired. He goes to Netflix, and everything, my plans, goes up. Anyway, there’s a new producer with the intention to make Terrified. I hope they’re gonna announce as soon as possible. I don’t know when, but not this time with Guillermo. It was bad luck for me, but the pandemic was the problem.

Well, I hope it still comes together. It sounds like there’s maybe still some life for it.

RUGNA: Yeah, he’s my hero, so I would love to work with him.

Image via IFC

I definitely want to make sure to still talk about this because, without giving anything away, the ending is really bleak. After everything, you think that in other movies like this where there’s a possession, you would maybe find some way to figure things out, but in this, it’s pretty hopeless. I was wondering about the ending itself and what you were hoping to convey with that kind of hopelessness and whether that was always your intention to end in that way.

RUGNA: I’ll be honest with you. When I write, I am God. I am who decides who lives, who wins. And this time, I thought, “Okay, probably evil always wins, and we are in the middle of the battle between good and evil.” I don’t know. The idea is, I like a horror movie that doesn’t have a happy ending. In the movie, I showed the path to kill the demon, and they tried, and I don’t want to spoil it, but they try, and always all the decisions were wrong from the characters until the end. It’s just sad. It’s a bad ending, but I like bad endings.

When Evil Lurks is now in theaters and streams on Shudder starting October 27.