For my annual Halloween horror pick, I am highlighting a contemporary film, one that is currently playing in theaters, and not a horror classic from the past. Cuando Acecha la Maldad (U.S. title, When Evil Lurks, 2023) is the sixth feature film for Argentine director Demian Rugna, which includes his 2011 movie Malditos Sean! (U.S. title, Cursed Bastards), co-written and directed with Fabian Forte. This is a movie about demonic possession but it has little in common with the most famous film in that horror subgenre, The Exorcist (1973), with one exception: we never learn how or why the evil entity goes about choosing the victim that launches the ensuring madness. The nightmare starts with a bang – literally – as two farmer brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimi (Demian Salomon) hear gunshots on their neighbor’s property. When they investigate the following day, they discover that a member of their neighbor’s family is a “rotten,” a possessed being, and no one knows how to deal with it. When the brothers ask wealthy landowner Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski) and his pregnant wife for help, they inadvertently set in motion a series of actions that not only release the evil spirit but help it spread like a virus.