Over the past couple of years, there has been a slew of “Blair Witch”-style movies that appear to be reality. Movies like “Cloverfield” and “Paranormal Activity” market themselves as footage that was found at the scene of a crime or after a giant disaster.
Like “The Last Exorcism,” these “faux documentaries” are a genre of film in a league of their own, exposing moviegoers to a new style of creativity and a new type of terror.
In order to be even remotely convincing as real footage, the casts for these films have to be full of fresh faces. By having these new actors in films like this, the believability factor goes way up.
I heard of scads of people who actually thought “Paranormal Activity” was real. There will probably be a few out there who think “The Last Exorcism” is real. And that’s the main thing I enjoy about this genre of movies – even though you know it isn’t real, there’s just something so much more terrifying about these movies than any other type of horror movie out there.
The film focuses on a man named Rev. Cotton Marcus, a so-called “performer” and “healer” who, despite his eroding belief in God, is a very charismatic people-pleaser. He has gained fame among his congregation for being a confident and energetic presence since he started preaching as a young child.
He performed exorcisms when he was a young man, and, after seeing numerous instances of supposedly possessed children who died during exorcisms because of negligence, he lost his faith.
He decides he wants to expose exorcism for the fraud it really is and take a documentary crew with him on his journey. He has dozens of letters requesting his assistance, but he only chooses one. A man named Louis Sweetzer, who resides on a farm in the deep woods of Louisiana, thinks his daughter is possessed by a demon. Cotton halfheartedly reads the letter and decides to visit the Sweetzer farm.
Upon his arrival at the farm, it is clear the cameras are not welcome by the family. Cotton, being the smoothie that is, persuades the family to let the cameras into their home in order to film the exorcism.
The real star of the film is Ashley Bell, who plays Nell Sweetzer, the supposedly possessed 16-year-old girl. She is supposed to have slaughtered a handful of her father’s livestock, chickens and horses, yet she has no recollection of doing any of those things.
When Nell first appears on screen, she looks like an absolute angel. She clearly doesn’t have the build of someone who has been living in the deep swamp for her entire life. Her petite frame and perpetual grin appear child-like and innocent. She has the sweetest disposition, as shown by her reactions to Cotton’s praises and quips.
One thing I noticed from the get-go about Nell is she rarely blinks. Whether it’s supposed to be a characteristic of her supposed possession or one of her natural traits, her lack of blinking is supremely creepy. Her eyes are always wide open, as if they are abysmal black holes that could be hiding an awful secret. Like Dr. Loomis’ description of Michael Myers in “Halloween,” she has “the blackest eyes… the devil’s eyes.” The idea of not knowing if Nell was possessed by a demon or if she was a legitimate stone-cold psychopath was really creepy, yet somehow fun.
It’s clear the Sweetzers don’t get out much. Having raised his children alone in a staunch fundamentalist Christian household, Louis genuinely believes a demon is living inside his daughter. Being secluded in one of the most remote parts of the United States, the Sweetzer children have rarely, if ever, been exposed to any other way of life.
There are a few scenes in the middle and latter parts of the film that had me squinting my eyes. Not because of brightness, but a complete lack of light.
As a man, it’s hard to admit that, but the tension in “The Last Exorcism” was almost too much for me to handle. There are instances in all sorts of movies that feature the walking-through-a-house-in-pitch-blackness fear of the protagonist where you know something is about to jump out from the abyss and scare the daylights out of you.
This film delivers on the promise of scaring you, not by gore or loud, shrill music, but by the fear having no idea what is about to happen next.
There are many people in the world who hate that feeling, as they indeed have the right to. I mean you have to be a little bit crazy to want to go to a movie that’s guaranteed to make your chest hurt.
But when a movie causes me to feel like I’m literally about soil my britches, it has succeeded as a horror movie in my eyes. It was worth my six bucks and it gave me even more reasons not to trust people from the swamp.