There is not much more to the secluded Italian village of Remis, the setting for Paolo Strippoli ‘s crackling supernatural horror “ The Holy Boy ,” than the road that runs through it, a high school, a tavern and the low-roofed dwellings that house an unusually contented community. Remis is such a happy place, in fact, that the town motto is “Valley of Smiles.” But it’s also ordinary, dull even — the screenplay, co-written by Strippoli, Jacopo Del Giudice and Milo Tissone, so intelligently commingles the area’s uncanny energies with plausible reality, that you can’t be sure that, driving on a dark night, you might not make a wrong turn and end up in this fictional place. If that happens, maybe don’t dawdle.

Then again, perhaps you’d have no choice, like ex-champion judo star Sergio Ros

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