Here’s a horror film that would have worked, paradoxically, without the horror; it’s disturbing enough on its own. The Last Exorcism borrows from the now-venerable horror trope of the faux-documentary, like The Blair Witch Project, [REC], or Paranormal Activity (that’s a link to an old blog entry), but the shocks (at least in the beginning) are hardly the point. The Reverend Cotton Marcus is an evangelical preacher of some repute who, as he reveals candidly to the camera, is essentially a Louisiana con man who gives a susceptible audience what they want. He conducts exorcisms with his own jury-rigged special effects, and is paid for his acting efforts (though he confesses, in an aside, that he wished he had health insurance). Tired of his deceptions, he decides to perform his last exorcism for a documentary and expose his own fraudulent acts in the process. Predictably, Rev. Marcus gets more than he bargained for, when the exorcism he performs turns out to be more, shall we say, hellish than he expected.
What I didn’t predict, though, was the skillful way in which its main characters are indelibly portrayed. It’s worth noting that Daniel Stamm, the director, originally wanted the film’s title to be Cotton (the studio rejected it for being unmarketable), because, in the end, it’s primarily a character study, dramatizing its erstwhile titular character’s struggle about faith. (The film is anchored by an utterly convincing dramatic performance by Patrick Fabian, who plays the charming and cocksure Marcus.) It’s unfortunate, then, that The Last Exorcism degenerates halfway into the requisite torso-twisting and things jumping out at the camera, when it could have delved further into – and made the film far richer – Marcus’s confrontation with his own beliefs. Stamm could have learned from another cinematic predecessor: William Friedkin’s groundbreaking film, after all, wasn’t called The Devil, but The Exorcist.
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