‘When Evil Lurks’ Director Demián Rugna On Working With Goats And Killing Kids In His New Shocking Film [Fantastic Fest 2023]
Argentine director Demián Rugna knows how to scare audiences. And not just with jumpscares, but with deep, bone-chilling tension that stays with you long after the movie has ended. He proved that with his feature film debut Terrified and he’s done it again with his latest feature, When Evil Lurks. His latest film takes everything scary from Terrified and turns it up to 11.
In the world of When Evil Lurks, possession is a virus, a contagion that has infected the entire world. Small rural villages think they’re protected from it, but brothers Pedro and Jimmy discover an infected in their ranks. However, in an attempt to eradicate the problem, they trigger a series of increasingly violent and horrific events that threaten their very existence.
Dread Central spoke with Rugna at Fantastic Fest about pushing boundaries in horror, the trouble with working with goats, and more.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Dread Central: Where did the idea for When Evil Lurks come from?
Demián Rugna: Well, I moved to the country outside of the city first at all. I decided to make a new movie, extremely different from Terrified. I mean a lot of places, a lot of locations, a lot of characters, not closed in two houses. I had been looking for an idea to have some kind of broader movie of horror. And then there’s a problem in my country that there’s a lot of fields on plantations and you have a lot of contamination from the plantation. The owners of the land are powerful people, the workers who work in the fields are really poor people. The contamination is because of the pesticides. It brings to the population cancer. There are a lot of children with cancer in the interior of my country. So nobody knows because the press doesn’t cover it.
So the idea was, “OK, what if something bad happened with these poor people in the middle of nowhere?” Then, what about if there’s a demon and nobody knows or the people realize it too late? Obviously, I want to make an exorcism movie and I decided to mix the ideas to bring some fresh ideas to that [subgenre].
DC: Yeah. I love it as a disease rather than the typical demonic possession. And I love the world that you build around. It is so awesome. I wanted to hear more about how you built that world and how you figured out the seven rules and all of that. What that process was to just create such a fascinating world?
DR: I thought when you see an exorcist movie, you always see rules. The rules are Catholic church. I thought, okay, I need to kill the church, I need to kill the religion, I need to give to When Evil Lurks new rules. The rules are going to tell me the universe of this story. In the process of working on the script, I remember some notes from colleagues telling me, “OK, but you must show in the beginning little shorts with the explanation of these [rules] in the news, on the TV, or in the papers.” But, I decided to start the movie with the universe already rolling. Then I would have the entire movie to give more and more to the audience. I guess I killed the religion and I brought a new religion [and] we are trying to figure out what kind it this.
DC: So you love to kill kids in When Evil Lurks. Killing kids is so taboo in any movie. And I love that you say, I don’t care, we’re going to really just go for it. I wanted to know more about that decision and just really going for broke in terms of breaking these taboos we have in the genre and just being so mean, which I mean as a compliment.
DR: Well you’re watching a horror movie. I’m trying to give you a kick in your head. As the audience, you’re trying to dare me with, “OK, let’s see if the director is going to scare me or going to give me a bad trip.” I guess it’s a dialogue with the audience. I prefer to be honest and say, “OK, here’s a horror movie. Everything in my movies could happen.” And Shudder gives me the chance to be free. But this is the goal for this kind of movie with independent ideas supported by a company, like Shudder, that can reach a big audience. But not worldwide totally because I’m going to jail in India or China if they see what happened with the kids.
DC: I love your two main actors. They’re so incredible and the chemistry that they have as brothers is so devastating. So how did you find the two of them and cast them? One of them, Demián Salomón, was in your segment for Satanic Hispanics, too. And then the two of them together are just incredible.
DR: He did Terrified, too. He’s been my friend my whole life. I studied with him since I was six years old because we went to the same school. Both guys are great actors. As you said, the chemistry was incredible since the beginning. Demián was one of the people who recommended Ezequiel [Rodríguez] to me because they worked together before. And I’ve been looking for the main character for When Evil Lurks, and I couldn’t find him. That recommendation meant a lot to Ezequiel and now they’re close friends. I’m also close friends with both of them now. We wrote a script a couple of months ago together. They’re amazing actually. They deserve to be working in big movies because they’re incredible.
DC: What was it like working with the animals? There’s so much animal stuff in When Evil Lurks from goats and dogs, and they’re doing such specific things, especially goats. What was it like working with the animals? How challenging was that?
DR: First of all, it’s questions like how many goats do we need, what kind of dog do I want, what kind of dog is going to work with us? Because the dog [breed] that we used is a dog who is too hard to train. All the trainers said, “No, no, no, this dog, no, it doesn’t work. I cannot train this dog.” But I wanted that dog! It’s his face! But he’s lazy all the time. And you need a dog who wants to play all the time. There was a big casting of dogs.
Even the goat was horrible to work with them. We prepared the entire sequence and we only had one day to shoot it. Only one day all the gold sequence
And it was horrible. I had 100, 150 goats and that’s great. They came with the trainer, we did a couple of shots, and the goats just went in the other direction. I said, “What happened?” And the trainer said, “The goats are tired. They’re suspicious of us. We need to wait a couple of hours.” A couple of hours! I had only one day to shoot this. You cannot try and imagine how we did that scene. It was one of the worst days of my shooting career. Horrible.
DC: It was a really good scene, though. It looks great in the movie. As soon as all the goats started moving, I thought that must’ve been a nightmare to try to coordinate them all moving and then one of them stepping forward.
DR: It was a nightmare for me and for all the crew. It was too hard to make this movie. When we were shooting the scene, it was cloudy. We went to a field far away from the city for those goats. We shot until noon and then the clouds disappeared. And I didn’t have the crew for lighting. It was horrible because the goats were far away from us and the sun was suddenly shining like crazy. It was a mess. But it all worked out!
DC: My last question is not related to your movie though. What’s the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?
DR: The Exorcist
DC: Did that influence you a lot making When Evil Lurks?
DR: Yeah, probably-ish. I like the drama in that movie in the same way as the horror, I like the realism of that kind of story. I don’t know if it influenced me directly. The more direct influences of the movie are Evil Dead and The Road. But obviously, I have in my blood The Exorcist since when I was a child.
When Evil Lurks is out now in select theaters and comes to Shudder on October 27, 2023.
Categorized:Interviews
