By MICHAEL GINGOLD

The most seriously scary movie of the season arrives in theaters today (go here to find one near you) as Demián Rugna’s WHEN EVIL LURKS sees nationwide release from IFC Films and Shudder. The Argentinian writer/director behind the modern classic TERRIFIED, who was also on screens lately as part of the team behind SATANIC HISPANICS, talked to RUE MORGUE about his very different take on the possession picture.

WHEN EVIL LURKS, which will make its streaming debut on Shudder October 27, is set in a world where demonic infestations are commonplace, “churches are dead,” as one character puts it, and “cleaners” are tasked with casting out the evil. The specific nature of these possessions makes ending them an especially tricky business, and when rural brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimi (Demián Salomón) try to deal with such a situation themselves, they accidentally spark an escalating series of supernatural infections that has the duo desperately trying to protect their loved ones. WHEN EVIL LURKS finds Rugna unveiling a series of genuinely shocking setpieces amidst a relentless narrative with a unique approach to this subgenre.

What were the inspirations behind this story, and its world where possession is a frequent occurrence?

The inspiration was, first of all, I moved out of the city to a rural area, and when I drive to my home, I see houses all the time in the landscape, far away from the road. And I’m thinking, what would happen if something terrible occurred there, and nobody knew? Who is that family who lives in the middle of nowhere, and what if a demon went there? Nobody would know! That was the first step that inspired me to make this movie, the curiosity to find horror in a remote place.

And also, in my country we have a lot of plantations, and the owners use pesticides on everything, and the pesticides are killing the people who work in the fields. There are a lot of children with cancer in those places, and nobody knows. And while the owners of those plantations are wealthy, the workers are poor, and that inspired me to think, OK, if you have someone possessed by a demon, in one of these poor houses with the people who work the plantations, they wouldn’t dare to expose the owner, because they would lose everything. And now, in my film, it’s happening everywhere.

One of the things that makes WHEN EVIL LURKS unique is that you’ve removed religion from the equation. And there’s a scene in the first five minutes that subverts the standards of your typical exorcism movie. What was your approach to upsetting that subgenre?

I guess the first idea that came to me, and stuck through the whole movie, was to “kill” the religion. And then, what is going to happen with the demon when the possessed get killed? For me, the curiosity of how to solve the problem was the part that I knew I was going to explore through the entire movie. I hope the audience is wondering the whole time how it all works, to give them lots of questions, because if the audience has questions, it means they are involved with the story. If I answer everything all the time, I will push them out of the movie. The kind of possession I put in the script will give the audience that sense of curiosity I need them to have.

The movie is also about the breakdown of the family unit. Can you talk about that theme?

I’m opposed to seeing perfect families in movies; we are not perfect. For me, the big conflict in the movie is how Pedro, the main character, deals not only with the demons, but with himself and his family problems. The demons and possessions are a little more of a unique problem [laughs]. That gives the story more of a sense of reality, to give those kinds of issues to the protagonist. To me, in a horror movie, that’s essential; it needs to be real, and have that kind of veracity in the story, and that’s why I felt this kind of character drama would work here.

You also have some very graphic and startling effects scenes. How much of the effects were done practically, and how much was digital?

Well, I love to work with practical effects, but you also need to use VFX to enhance the physical effects in a way you cannot achieve on the set. I’d say it’s 80 percent practical effects, and 20 percent VFX. The thing is, though, there is no CGI in any part of the movie; there’s nothing that’s a 3D digital effect. It’s only simple layers, individual enhancements, nothing more than that.

Who created your makeup effects, and how did you work with them to come up with a unique look for the possessed individuals?

Those effects were done by Marcos Berta, an artist from Argentina. I love exorcism movies, and I’m always trying to find a way to achieve something fresh in the genre, so I thought, what happens if the possessions in WHEN EVIL LURKS are different from everything I’ve seen before, without the touch of religion? I decided to make it something visual more than verbal, more than dialogue. When you see a possession movie, you always see the possessed people talking [in deep voice] like this! I wanted to make something carnal, something visceral, so when you see it, you identify it immediately. You don’t need the possessed person talking to you; you see them and you realize, OK, this is a demon.

You have a lot of violence involving children and animals, which is still a sensitive subject, even in horror.

Well, I took the chance to be free, because it’s not easy to make these kinds of movies. There’s no studio that’s going to allow me to make something like this, with this kind of violence with kids and…well, maybe with animals, but not with kids. But this is a small movie, it was done independently, and it gave me the chance as a director to really make something scary for the audience. It gave me the opportunity to be cruel; yes, I am cruel, but you’re watching a horror movie, after all, so when people sit down to watch it, I really want to give that to them.

There’s an old saying that filmmakers should never work with children or animals; did either of those pose problems during shooting?

Yes and no. Always with dogs and other animals, you have to have a lot of patience. But the big problem with the kids was the government regulations about how much you can work with them; we needed to use a lot of tricks to shoot the scenes that those regulations don’t allow us. You’re probably shooting 10 or 12 hours a day, and you only have the kids for three hours. For me, that was the most intense part of this production. I didn’t have the time to shoot with the kids that I needed, and that was a real problem. And the other thing is, if you have good casting, you’re going to find the young actors you need, but then kids are kids; they get bored easily, they get noisy. The parents are the key when you shoot with them; if the parents are smart, the children won’t be a problem.

Did any of the kids have fun, or get scared, working with the blood and makeup effects?

Yeah, they had a lot of fun. The whole time, though, we were trying to hide the creatures and the effects mockups of themselves. But you can’t hide those forever when you are shooting a movie; you cannot keep them behind the scenes all the time, when the kids are roaming around. I remember that one little girl was scared at first when she saw herself as an effects dummy, but after talking with her father, she ended up playing with it!

Was it easy to get WHEN EVIL LURKS financed and released in Argentina?

Not easy, no. Not this kind of movie. We found a co-financing partner, Shudder, because I have TERRIFIED on there, and they trusted me, but it’s not easy to make this kind of movie here. I needed to shoot it over 40 days, and at this time it’s almost impossible to do that in Argentina, to find the money for that kind of schedule. We are usual shooting around 20 days on each movie, but once we partnered with Shudder, they gave me the chance to film what I needed to film. It’s not easy, but there are more and more horror movies coming from my country, from Argentina and the rest of South America. So on one hand, it’s not easy to find the financing, but on the other, there are more and more filmmakers doing horror, and it’s probably going to be the number-one genre in Latin America in the coming years.

There does indeed seem to be an explosion of Latin American horror lately. What do you think Latin American filmmakers bring to the genre that you don’t see from other countries?

Honestly, the thing I feel we can share is our way of life and our way of feeling. When you make horror movies, the stories are often universal, so the good thing is that when Latin American filmmakers make them in our own countries, we share our culture. This is a new window for the world to see us, when we make horror movies in our backyards; I’m not sharing only the horror, I’m sharing my language and my streets and my people.

I can’t really name any elements that say, this is Latin American horror; the people making these films are really inspired by American movies. There’s of course going to be a lot of folklore and monsters from our country in them, but there are also horror movies in the States that use these kinds of myths, like La Llorona or the chupacabras. It’s becoming universal, so the elements that are different are our way of life, our culture, our language, and not specific elements. You can probably find those in German ultragore movies or Japanese ghost stories or Korean supernatural thrillers, but I guess we are not concerned with a specific subject. For me that’s better, because we have more opportunities to explore.

Coincidentally, WHEN EVIL LURKS is opening in the U.S. the same day as the new EXORCIST film. How do you feel about that?

Weird! THE EXORCIST has been my favorite horror film, all my life. We cannot compete with EXORCIST: BELIEVER, because we are a small release, and we don’t have the same publicity they do. But it is great just to know my movie is being released at the same time as this movie that I hope is going to be really good. Hopefully, horror fans will go to see both.