The Dark and the Wicked

• Bryan Bertino filmed on his own family's farm — his parents' property in Tolar, Texas, near Granbury in North Texas, the same rural region outside Fort Worth where he grew up.
• The film was originally slated to world-premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, but Tribeca was cancelled due to COVID-19; it instead had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on August 28, 2020, ahead of a November 6, 2020 theatrical/VOD release from RLJE Films.
• At the 2021 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, the film picked up nominations for Best Limited Release Film, Best Director (Bertino), Best Lead Performance (Marin Ireland), Best Supporting Performance (both Xander Berkeley and Julie Oliver-Touchstone), and Best Score (Tom Schraeder).
• Bertino has said his own rural Texas childhood — the same well of isolated, middle-of-nowhere dread that inspired his breakout film The Strangers — shaped the farmhouse setting and specific rural detail baked into the script.

The 'visitor' may not be a demon at all but the father himself—a man whose lifelong suppression of rage and faith created something parasitic that feeds on guilt. Every apparition is filtered through someone who failed him: the mother who couldn't protect him, the children who left, the nurse who stayed too long. The entity wears their faces because it IS their faces.

Louise and Michael are already dead from the opening frames, and the farm is a purgatory calibrated to their specific failures—their absence, their denial, their refusal to witness suffering. The film's loop-like structure, where help arrives too late or not at all, supports a reading where no one escapes because escape was never on the table.

The film is a companion piece to THE STRANGERS' home-invasion thesis, but inverted: here the invasion is spiritual, and the home doesn't get breached—it was always compromised. Bertino's recurring theme of domestic spaces as kill zones reaches its logical endpoint when the threat was never outside the walls to begin with.

Louise and Michael return to the family farm as their father lies dying, tethered to a medical apparatus in a house that's already been emptied by something older than grief. Their mother's suicide is only the first door that won't stay shut. Bertino strips rural isolation to the bone—a goat, a few outbuildings, a corridor of bedrooms that keep filling with visitors who shouldn't be there. The film argues that evil doesn't need to enter; it's been waiting in the wallpaper, patient as harvest, and it collects through the people you trust to hold your hand at the end.