Cinema tends to be blamed for modern society’s desensitization to violence.

Cinephiles have likely witnessed almost every form of corporeal carnage, whether through fictional enactments or documentary footage. But exceptions to this theory exist, third rails of evil that even our goriest filmmakers generally avoid showing.

When Evil Lurks depicts one such rail: an act of physical violence against a child, on screen, in plain sight. It’s jarring to see such adolescent gore within a conventional horror set-up, and not as evidence of a historical tragedy.

Another third rail of on-screen violence: pet cruelty.