The Last Exorcism comes tantalisingly close to being one of those rare, perfect horror movies, an intelligent blend of
The Exorcist and
The Blair Witch Project (
two of the most unnerving, pure horror movies ever made, in my opinion), until it derails into silliness for the final sequence.
I can understand and see what the filmmakers were trying to do in these closing scenes because, in all honesty, up until that point, no matter how good the film was, it wasn't really saying anything new, but it was such a sudden lurch in focus that it didn't quite work.
The film - shot on hand-held camera as a documentary - follows the charismatic and charming Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a former child minister grown into a performing preacher, disillusioned with the idea of exorcisms, who agrees to bring a film crew along on his last exorcism to expose the practice as fakery.
Rev. Marcus and the camera crew travel to an isolated farm in rural Louisiana, where widower Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) believes his teenage daughter, Nell (Ashley Bell), is possessed by a demon and is slaughtering his cattle at night.
For the first half-hour of this comparatively short (
83 minute) movie nothing out of the ordinary happens as we get to know Cotton, his family, his motivations and his beliefs and the groundwork is laid for future events. But after his 'phony' exorcism things start to get creepy and then escalate in wonderfully unpredictable ways as it becomes clear there is a real demon at work (
one disappointment is that the scene on the cover of the DVD doesn't appear anywhere in the movie!)
In this era of Grand Guignol torture-porn it makes a refreshing change to see a horror film that uses intelligence, magician's misdirection and subtly to unnerve it audience. I was completely taken in by the fact that I couldn't guess what was going to happen next during the core of the movie and believed in the actors one hundred per cent.
All the performances are spot-on, but particularly powerful are Patrick Fabian as the 'con man' forced to re-examine his cynicism and Ashley Bell as the unnerving innocent victim, twisting her demon-wracked body in all sorts of contortions (
without the aid of special effects, I am led to believe).
Compared to, say,
Cloverfield the shaking, hand-held camera isn't too intrusive and there are moments (
mainly when Nell steals the camera in the night) that the film couldn't have worked any other way.
This isn't a film that relies on sudden shocks to get it scares - although there are a couple - rather it relies on suggestion and psychological manipulation, dropping hints along the way as to what's really going on, although the chances are you won't piece everything together until the credits are rolling.
For the most part,
The Last Exorcism relies on subtle, edge-of-the-seat tension (
in the style of The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project, as I've already said, which is why it was a shame that the ending veered off into pseudo-Lovecraftian territory with a set-up that sadly reminded me of both
Hot Fuzz and
K-9 And Company: A Girl's Best Friend, neither of which exactly rank as the pinnacle of horror cinema.
Stylistically, the shaky-cam/faux documentary approach certainly carries the movie, adding an air of Truth that helped sell the discrete horror, but it also rather undermined the ending - not that we needed to see everything that was going on, but frankly it made the audience all the more aware of how ridiculous the scenario was and somehow managed to undo the carefully stitched verisimilitude that director Daniel Stamm had created.
It's as though the ending actually showed too much and was almost unnecessary, which is a massive shame because, although produced by
Eli Roth (
and it was his name used to, rather misleadingly, sell the film),
The Last Exorcism is the total antithesis of the gore-splattered horror - in the vein of
Saw and
Hostel - one usually associates with Roth's work.
