The Dark and the Wicked (2020)
Directed by Bryan Bertino
No — The Dark and the Wicked is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Bryan Bertino's The Dark and the Wicked arrives as a slab of Southern Gothic dread, set on a Texas farm where a dying patriarch, a hanged mother, and a demon with a taste for psychological torture preside over a family reunion of the worst possible kind.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is uniformly white and drawn from the standard rural-Texas horror register; no casting choices appear designed to signal representation.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
Louise is a capable protagonist, but the film is a bleak possession narrative with no feminist thesis or commentary on gender.
Race is entirely absent as a subject; the film concerns a white family on an isolated farm.
No environmental or climate themes; the rural setting is atmospheric, not ecological.
No economic critique of capitalism or class commentary is present.
No body-positivity themes; the film's treatment of bodies is purely horrific.
No neurodivergent characters or themes; the film's psychological distress is supernatural in origin.
No historical subject matter to revise; the film is a contemporary supernatural horror.
The film is pure atmosphere and dread with no didactic messaging or moral instruction.
Why it received this score
Bryan Bertino's The Dark and the Wicked arrives as a slab of Southern Gothic dread, set on a Texas farm where a dying patriarch, a hanged mother, and a demon with a taste for psychological torture preside over a family reunion of the worst possible kind. We have seen this before. Bertino knows we have seen this before. The film proceeds anyway, with goats, knitting needles, a phantom priest, and a bonfire of carcasses, all rendered in a gloom so thick the sun seems to have filed a complaint. It is a well-made exercise in unhappiness.
What it does not do, and this is where the classification gets interesting, is reach for any of the cultural scaffolding that defines the current moment. The cast is white, rural, and Texan, which is to say the film is drawing a demographic rather than making an argument. Louise is a sturdy protagonist, capable and stubborn, but her struggle is with a demon, not a patriarchy. Race is absent as a subject. Class is absent. The environment is atmosphere, not advocacy. The bodies on screen are mutilated, not celebrated. The psychological torment is supernatural in origin, so no condition is diagnosed, normalized, or affirmed. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns. Nobody grows.
This is, in its grim way, almost restful. The film has no thesis to advance and no congregation to address. It simply wants to frighten us, and it does, with a patience that borders on cruelty. By the time the demon claims its final victim, we are left with the modest satisfaction of a horror film that knows exactly what it is and refuses to be anything else. The dread is real. The messaging is nonexistent. In a landscape of sermonizing, that qualifies as a small mercy. Score the thing as you like. It will not argue back.
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Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
On a secluded farm in a nondescript rural town, a man is slowly dying. His family gathers to mourn, and soon a darkness grows, marked by waking nightmares and a growing sense that something evil is taking over the family.
Questions about The Dark and the Wicked
Is The Dark and the Wicked woke?
No — The Dark and the Wicked is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Dark and the Wicked have any woke elements?
No. All 10 markers score zero.
How does The Dark and the Wicked compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #210 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.