My belief in a supernatural world has diminished as I've gotten older, but there's still a Catholic school portion of my brain that's somewhat terrified of all things Satanic.
Yet what I found more terrifying about The Last Exorcism -- the latest in fake-documentary horror, and probably the best thing the sub-genre has produced -- were all the nightmares visited -- or that appeared to have been visited -- upon poor Nell by the real world.
In fact, the movie's abrupt, bizarre conclusion -- the source of anger among moviegoers who'd apparently have liked a less ambiguous ending -- would have been even more frightening and effective had it not tipped to the supernatural side of the scale.
But that's one of my only complaints about the movie. (I'll post the other one below* to avoid spoilers. So be warned, they're on the next page.)
Like I said above, it's easily the best of the fake-documentary horror movies I've seen. (The two that come closest are The Blair Witch Project, which started it all, and the Spanish movie Rec, which purports to be footage caught by a news crew of a zombie-like outbreak. It was remade in America as Quarantine, which wasn't bad, but lacked the old world, supernatural spin Rec put on the source of its zombie plague.)
What puts Last Exorcism at the top of the fake-docu-horror pile is that it creates actual characters, and boasts an engaging lead performance by Patrick Fabian (a character actor who deserves more, and better work after this) as Cotton Marcus, the preacher-turned-exorcism-debunker who's suffering a crisis of faith. If the movie had taken a different route, and made Cotton a devout exorcist showing off his craft, it would've felt cheap and schlocky. But by giving Marcus a compelling backstory, director Daniel Stamm and writers Hugh Botko and Andrew Gurland make him far more interesting, a man more concerned about saving Nell's life than her soul.
Few other movies like this can be said to have done the same. They seem so focused on creating a feel of realism that their characters eventually devolve into sweaty, angry two-dimentional beings. By never explicitly saying "this is found footage," The Last Exorcism is able to give us a richer movie, even if does look a lot like a documentary.
Tom Coombe
* Here's my other complaint: I know the movie never gives us any sort of "this is the footage that survived" endnote, but part of me still wondered: if the cameraman and producer -- and presumably, Cotton -- were both killed at the end, and by people who would NOT want the tape to get out there, how did the movie wind up with things like music and subtitles?
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