With The Blair Witch Project, handheld cameras became a fascinating idea for filmmakers. They were inexpensive and allowed for an entirely different look than the larger-budget cameras; they gave a gritty realism to the piece. By casting unknowns in the core roles of a project and the use of clever marketing, a point-of-view horror film could become wildly successful just on its own sheer novelty.
Fast forward a few years, and the medium has begun to catch on. We've had hits and misses both; Rec, Quarantine, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, all of them were done with hand-held camcorders. Paranormal Activity broke records in theaters and received rave reviews from audiences and critics and was shot in one location, with two unknown actors, on a very basic camera. The appeal of this filmmaking, and what has to be embraced in order to make it work, is the idea that it's what you don't see that's truly terrifying. There is no sweeping pan shots of the location, no graceful aerials taken from helicopters. It is raw and close, it is in our face. It is 'real'.
Some films, of course, can't actually back up this promise. Cloverfield, in my opinion, became a much less effective movie the moment you actually saw the monster in its entirety. The glimpse of its tail from between two skyscrapers, shots like that were truly breathtaking; it's the fear of the unknown that we love.
And what can be more unknown to man in general than the workings of Heaven and Hell? Perhaps this is why exorcism films consistently hold their own in theaters; people are terrified of things they can't understand, and chief among those things is religion. It is all heresay and faith, and unable to be proven by science. Thus its effect varies from individual to individual; some may believe with all their hearts in demons and ghosts and angels, and some may not believe a whit. But the question isn't whether you believe in those things or not... it's the question of their reality. We cannot know if they're truthfully in existence or not, so we are tethered to our own belief system in the hopes that it will be enough to save us if the time comes.
Enter The Last Exorcism. Cotton Marcus was groomed for pastoral duty from the time he was a young child; his father was a fire-and-brimstone preacher in the South who built up a huge, loyal congregation of Holy Rollers. When the movie opens, Cotton is in his late thirties or so, with a beautiful wife and an ailing child to care for. He candidly tells the cameraman that he has been preaching without faith, that he has his congregation so cowed that he could walk into the chapel and speak about the healing powers of banana bread and be able to get away with it if he delivered it in the correct tone of voice. He is a shameless scam artist who performs exorcisms for hefty amounts of money; he pretends to clear someone from demonic possession by rigging their room with a series of hidden speakers for demon moans, tablets to make pans of tepid water turn boiling in seconds, fishing line to move photographs, rigs for the bedframes, electric thumbrings, and a cross that discharges a puff of gunpowder on command to look like it's smoking in his hand.
However, Cotton has decided that he is done with this line of work; he read an article in the newspaper about an exorcism done by amateurs that resulted in the death of a boy his son's age, and he refuses to be a part of that institution anymore. He hires a pair of documentary filmmakers to follow him as he chooses a case at random to be his 'last exorcism'; he will expose the church for the fraud that it is, and put to rest the stigma around private exorcisms.
The case he opens leads him to a small town in backwoods Louisiana, where a widowed farmer named Louis believes that his innocent teenage daughter Nell is possessed by a demon. Louis is a pious and well-meaning man who is overprotective of his daughter and drinks to cope with the sudden death of his beloved wife two years prior; his teenage son Caleb is bitter and angry, very stand-offish, and resents the presence of Cotton and his team greatly. We meet Nell, who is beautiful and utterly wholesome, charming and endearing right off the bat. She is the epitome of sweetness and innocence, completely enamored with the sound-girl's flashy red Doc Marten boots. It seems impossible that this girl could be in cohorts with an evil being inside of her.
Cotton walks the documentarians through his 'set-up', rigging Nell's bedroom with his special effects and going through the motions of a great laying-on of hands. Nell prays with him, sobbing and begging the demon to leave her; when it ends, Cotton collects a fat wad of cash from the father and vacates the premises. That night at the motel up the road, he is proud of a job well done, having exposed himself for a fraud; the camera crew insist they got excellent material from him. Cotton goes to lay down, and suddenly the camera cuts to the middle of the night, the camera crew running up to Cotton's room. There on the bed sits Nell, catatonic; when the sound-girl goes to hug her, Nell begins to lasciviously lick the woman's shoulder and kiss her neck seductively, then vomits uncontrollably. The crew rush her to the hospital for blood tests and try to reach her father on the phone, but he does not answer. In the morning, Louis arrives at the hospital to check Nell out, informing Cotton that he doesn't trust medical doctors after his wife's diagnosis and death, and he won't have her in a medical facility like that.
The film progresses with a lot of shock moments; there is precious little gore, but what there is is truly gruesome albeit brief. What you get more of than gore is genuine shock; I am hard to scare, yet I had goosebumps for several scenes in the film. The lead actress playing Nell, Ashley Bell, is double-jointed and quite flexible, and the film crew took extreme advantage of that by having Bell perform most of her own stunts without the use of CGI or makeup. She snaps her neck from side to side in ways that would make a chiropractor cringe; she scuttles along the floor like a beast or an insect, moves like a marionette having her strings jerked. And of course, the most disturbing scene is the poster image, when Bell bends her body backward nearly double and begins to taunt the priest, her neck snapping to the side to deliver grotesque teasing in a purring, seductive voice that is much clearer and therefore eerier than the distorted monstrous tones of Eileen Dietz in the original The Exorcist. There are plenty of twists in the film, red herrings thrown out to make the audience follow one train of thought before a wrench is tossed out to send us reeling back in another direction entirely. There is genuine foreboding and unease that builds throughout the film; the light humorous mood of the opening is discarded for sincere terror and suspense much like the opening of Rec/Quarantine. The acting is solid; all of the characters are portrayed believably and well, and are unfamiliar faces which keeps us in the realism of the film.
The only two complaints that I have about the film involve the last ten minutes, and the editing. The film is beautiful and highly effective visually, but it is meant to be 'found footage', in the same manner as The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield. Yet the film, at times, features subtitles explaining who the characters are (as if the first half of the film is already edited and ready for the documentary, while the rest is raw footage), or mood music--- Nell will do something terrifying and there will be a screeching violin sound or a bit of ambient sound effect to keep the audience jumping out of their seats. This polishing sort of cancels out the realism so beautifully portrayed through the rest of it.
The second complaint involving the ending seems to be one shared by many. Unlike most critics, I did enjoy the ending of the film; I felt like it was an alright ending, while it won't please everyone. It made sense, though it wasn't what I expected. It did feel slightly off in comparison to the rest of the film, but while we're suspending disbelief to begin with, if you continue to do so it should be quite bearable a leap for audiences to make.
All in all, the film is a good execution in suspense and unease; the performances more than anything else carry it. The film can be divided into three acts, and each is not cohesive to the next. The film is enjoyable for what it is, but it has trouble deciding what that is; moments are absolutely side-splittingly hilarious followed by creepy, eerie shots followed by confusing conspiracy theory conversations. A distracting subplot asks us if Nell is mentally ill or possessed by a demon, a question which isn't resolved until the last four minutes of the film. The script is schizophrenic, with little transition between the moods in various scenes; it can be hard to keep up with the emotional rollercoaster of the scenes, which probably led to a lot of the negative feedback the film is receiving from critics.
However, I did enjoy it. Fans of The Exorcism of Emily Rose and its ilk will be pleased, as this film follows that line very closely; just allow the film to be what it is without comparing it to what it's not.
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