TITLE: The Last Exorcism
STARRING: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr, Louis Herthum, Caleb Landry Jones
DIRECTOR: Daniel Stamm
STUDIO: Lionsgate
RATING: PG-13
RUN TIME: 100 min
RELEASE DATE: August 27

By Seth Miller
Staff Writer, Part-Time Ninja

There is a disturbing trend in the horror movie genre now; the shift from traditional filmmaking and crafted scares to the fake documentary style horror movie.  The biggest examples of this are The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. For the studios making these films, they can make an okay horror movie for a lot less money and make a profit; they have no reason to stop making these films and will probably continue releasing them until we reach the inevitable seventh sequel to Paranormal Activity.

These types of movies make money but they lack substance and the scares rely on fact that the audience is forced to view the movie in a limited perspective. That’s what I thought I would expect when I went to see The Last Exorcism, but I left surprised at how well it turned out.

Photo from rottentomatoes.com.

What really stands out in this movie is that the story is actually pretty good.  The movie follows Rev. Cotton Marcus (Fabian), a Southern preacher who performs exorcisms and views his role as a reverend as an act to get people’s money.  After his son nearly dies during birth and hearing about deaths resulting from exorcisms, he loses his faith in God and decides to give up his life as a reverend but not before taking a documentary film crew with him to show how he and others fake exorcisms to get people’s money. He thinks he’ll perform a routine exorcism on Nell (Brown) to satisfy her father’s (Herthum) religious views. But the situation changes as it seems Nell really is possessed. Marcus’ beliefs are challenged while trying to figure out if Nell has been driven crazy by her family or possessed by a demon.

This is a pretty good story for this type of horror movie and it is one of the film’s strengths. The story is done well enough to add to the overall creepiness of the movie and that makes the scares more effective than just having a having a bunch of shaky camera footage where something pops out every 10 minutes to scream boo at the audience. Another strength in this movie is the way the tone is able to shift in the middle; it’s still a horror movie but for the first 20 to 25 minutes it comes off slightly humorous in a strange way before shifting effortlessly into a horror movie.

The main actors in this movie play their roles well and elevate the film above other horror movies that have come out this year. Fabian is great as a reverend that has conned people with their religion and enjoys it because he doesn’t share their beliefs. He just uses them to make money for his family; someone who is trying to give it all up but is having his beliefs about God tested by what could be an actual possession. Bell also does a great job as Nell; one second she is an innocent girl who seems a little too sheltered, the next she is twisting her body in ways that seem inhuman and scaring the crap out of everyone in the movie.

Photo from rottentomatoes.com.

What this film does not deal with well are the moments between the action. There are moments in the film after Nell does something crazy that seem to drag for longer than necessary and this takes a bit of the momentum away.  Also, some of the audience may not like how this movie ends and I thought that there were parts of it that didn’t completely mesh with what had been shown earlier. But this doesn’t ruin the movie, which turns out to be pretty good and is better than most of the other horror films that use this fake documentary style because it has an actual story driving the movie forward and making the scares more powerful. It’s a nice film that surprised me and a good way to start off the fall movie season

RATING: 8/10