Photo: Top scarer … Argentinian director Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks won the Sitges award for best feature. Photograph: Courtesy of Shudder and IFC Films
“At this year’s International Fantastic film festival of Catalonia, I got bitten all over. Not by vampires or werewolves, alas, but by mosquitoes, which took advantage of the unseasonably hot temperatures on Spain’s Costa del Garraf to transform my body into a throbbing, misshapen mass, rather like William Hurt in Altered States. Still, this helped me feel a kinship with the protagonists of this year’s exercises in body horror, many of them bearing the imprint of Shudder, a streaming service available in the UK, Ireland and Germany but not elsewhere in Europe. But it was one of their titles – Argentinian director Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks – that became the first Latin American movie in the festival’s 56-year history to win the Sitges award for best feature film.
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Also featured is an unnatural pregnancy, a theme taken to insane new heights in Paul Duane’s hallucinatory trip into Irish folk-horror, All You Need Is Death. While travelling around Ireland in search of rare ballads, a young couple stumbles across an ancient song containing dangerous properties, leading to a surreal outbreak of body horror and non-binary transformation. Duane, already an established documentarian, has made the sort of fiction debut that will haunt your nightmares.”
