Films of the Year, 2010: #6 The Last Exorcism

For me, horror films that use the handheld camera / "found footage" approach are in a lot of ways, just inherently scarier than those shot in a traditionally cinematic way. The more human perspective that you see everything from, the resultant lack of peripheral vision, combined with the omission of any sort of sensationalised lighting, to put it simply, just makes it all look more real. It's how you'd be seeing it if you were there.

This worked brilliantly in The Blair Witch Project in 1999, and it worked hugely well in The Last Exorcism, 11 years later. The suspense builds from the offset; the moment Reverend Cotton Marcus mentions exorcism, and that he's going out into rural Louisiana to investigate a specific case. This setting provides a great sense of isolation for events to take place in, and thus poses a greater potential threat for the characters. Impending doom settles over everything.

Even in the daytime scenes when nothing typically scary is happening, a feeling of unease still closes in, and there's a nice level of intrigue and mystery present, i.e. what exactly is going on in this house?

As with all good horror movies, The Last Exorcism also plays with sound to achieve fear in creepy ways - don't read the rest of this paragraph if you haven't seen the film. I don't know if this was the result of some dodgy sound equipment in the cinema, but when the voice of Abalam speaks through Nell, it sounded as though it had been played through a shoddy-quality tape recorder, and was really, really frightening. If that was indeed intentional. Another fantastically disturbing moment happens when the sound of a child crying is heard with in a room - upon opening the door, the Reverend and co. find nothing but a doll.

Like I said, all of this was made so much more atmospheric due to the handheld cameras, but the progression of the narrative in itself provided a hugely satisfying build-up in tension, and was accompanied by a cast of well-acted performances that increased authenticity. There have been a load of exorcism / religious horror films (and we've been seeing a resurgence of them recently), but I'd easily say that this stands as the very best in that subgenre. It's also one of the very best "found footage" films. Everything in The Last Exorcism equalled brilliant scares; the best horror film of 2010, and one of the most absorbing horrors that has come out in a long while.