Editorials
Evil Takes Root: 5 Scariest Folklore Demons in Horror
Folklore is filled with horror. For centuries, stories of ancient demons and monstrous creatures lurk in the dark, waiting to punish misdeeds by the young and old alike. These myths and legends provide fertile ground for horror to explore. Evil Takes Root: The Curse of the Batibat, which is available now on both VOD and DVD, brings the lore of the Batibat to screen.
In Fillipino folklore, the Batibat is a vengeful female spirit that resides in trees deep within the forest. It enacts brutal revenge on those that dare to disturb its slumber. Evil Takes Root follows paranormal investigator Felix Fojas, who arrives in a Midwestern town to mourn the loss of his former lover. He discovers she fell prey to the Batibat, an ancient evil that followed her home from the Phillipines. Felix will have to fight the Batibat to save his lover’s daughter, Sarah, from its grip.
Evil Takes Root stars Nicholas Gonzalez (The Good Doctor) as Felix, Sean Carrigan (Ford vs Ferrari), Stevie Lynn Jones (Nancy Drew), and Ade McCormack (Castlevania). Chris W. Freeman directs. In celebration of the film’s release, we look back at the five scariest folklore demons in horror movies.
Bughuul – Sinister
Technically an original creation by co-writers Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, this folkloric demon does borrow heavily from Pagan deity Moloch. Described as Moloch’s brother, Bughuul is the devourer of children. He possesses their minds and forces them to murder their families, before consuming their souls. It’s a creepy enough backstory for an original demon, but this particular entity enjoys capturing his work on camera, making for terrifying mementos guaranteed to unnerve.
Pazuzu – The Exorcist
The king of all possession horror centers on young Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) after she dabbles with a Ouija board. The demon inhabiting her body is revealed to be Pazuzu, the king of the demons of the wind in ancient Mesopotamian religion. In the film, Pazuzu has a long-running feud with Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), though the demon pops up again in the maligned sequel. In mythology, the demon was known for bringing famine and swarms of locusts.
Moder (Jötunn) – The Ritual
In David Bruckner’s The Ritual, a group of friends reunite for a hiking trip deep in the woods but find themselves stalked by an evil creature instead. That creature is the Moder, revealed by menacing locals to be a member of the Jötunn, a bastard son of Norse god Loki. Jötunn’s tend to be nature spirits, like trolls, which is why this eerie beast inhabits the woods. The Moder’s appearance is unlike any other movie monster. Worshipped like a god, this folkloric entity is pretty imposing.
Krampus – Krampus
Mike Dougherty’s yuletide horror-comedy isn’t exactly nightmare fuel, but the eponymous demon disturbs nonetheless. The ancient demonic spirit punishes those who have lost the Christmas spirit, which is why the bickering Engel family become targets. In folklore, Krampus is described as half-goat, half-demon and is known to whip, steal, and take bad children to Hell. The polar opposite of jolly old Saint Nick. Krampus keeps the demon hidden behind a mask, which somehow makes it even scarier. It helps that the all-powerful beast has no shortage of minions at his disposal to unleash on his victims.
The Lamia – Drag Me to Hell
In Sam Raimi’s vicious horror-comedy, a loan officer evicts an old gypsy from her home and finds herself stricken with a curse in retaliation. Desperate to save her soul, she seeks help and learns that she’ll be tormented by the Lamia for three days before it takes her to hell. The Lamia, as evidenced in the film, is a powerful demon from Greek mythology. Often described similarly to Baba-Yaga, the Lamia is a child-eating demon. While the demon’s target is a fully grown adult, the opening sequence touches on the Lamia’s child-eating ways.
Evil Takes Root: The Curse of Batibat is available now on all VOD platforms and DVD.
In the film, “Paranormal investigator Felix Fojas arrives in a sleepy Midwest town to investigate the mysterious loss of his old lover, Amanda, and reconcile sins of the past. He discovers she fell victim to the Batibat, an ancient evil that followed her home from the Philippines. Now Felix must battle the forces of evil and unravel the mystery of the Batibat in order to save Amanda’s daughter, Sarah, from its hellish grip.”
Check out the trailer and DVD cover art.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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