Samhain Project Season 3 Ends: When Evil Lurks, and The Dark & The Wicked

 I know it’s a week after November 1st, or Samhain, but life does dumb stuff and says dumb stuff, so I am late. 

From Time Magazine;

Samhain, the fire festival that marked the beginning of the dark half of the year, is situated between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice.

Encyclopedia Britannica notes that, during this festival, the world of the gods “was believed to be made visible to humankind,” leading to supernatural tricks and trouble; ghosts of the dead and spirits from the Otherworld were also thought to return to the earth during Samhain.

Being that the “barrier is thin” I will talk about films dealing with otherworldly forces trying to break through.  Frani and I watched two, actually. 

The Argentinian When Evil Lurks, and the indy, The Dark and the Wicked.  They both have similarities.  In both, evil is working its way through our cast members like a virus, but controlling them isn’t their ultimate goal. 

In When Evil Lurks, the evil wants to “birth itself” from a “possessed one” into physical form to do God knows what.  The damage it’s done while spreading like a satanic Covid on steroids is so bad, I shudder to think what could be worse. 

In The Dark & The Wicked, it’s been waiting for weeks to control a man’s dying body once he crosses the ethereal plain.  The family around is slow to pick up on that, and manipulated in terrifying ways. You’re on edge from the start. Creeping dread and a ghoulish score make sure that’s the case. 

I highly recommend both films.  They’re steeped in oppressive dread, and make your jaws drop to the floor in a number far exceeding your average horror film.  Yeah, these are perfect for Samhain, when that border between the living and dead is supposedly at its thinnest. 

But in these two films, what’s on the other side ain’t pretty. 

Like Mee-Maw says in The Dark & The Wicked, “Y’all should go.”.  And you should go with the first instincts of our main characters in When Evil Lurks, and just run. 

But these are horror movies, and no one ever does the smart thing.